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	<title>Screen Machine &#187; Down the hi-tech rabbit hole of Avatar</title>
	<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv</link>
	<description>Long live the new flesh</description>
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		<title>Down the hi-tech rabbit hole of Avatar</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
If Avatar is an environmentalist fable, then it is a failure. And if you want to read it as such &#8211; a liberal allegory pleading for humans to respect nature and the indigenous peoples who live in a symbiotic relationship with it &#8211; then, sure, I can see how Avatar is a &#8220;bad&#8221; film. I can see how the journey of protagonist Jake Sully is a narrative badly cribbed from Dances With Wolves. I can see how the representation of the alien race (the Na&#8217;vi) is a condescending, exoticist amalgamation of Sioux, African and South American tribal signifiers. I can see how the film&#8217;s villains, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), are a painfully obvious and reductionist representation of America&#8217;s military-industrial complex. I can acknowledge all that.

But what if Avatar isn&#8217;t an environmentalist fable at all, but is in fact its exact opposite &#8211; a celebration of technology? Then the film becomes immediately more intriguing. Consider the film&#8217;s conceit of &#8220;avatar&#8221; bodies: The character of Jake Sully undergoes a mutation in subjectivity (human-Navi) by immersing himself in alien culture, but this transformation/immersion is only possible via the mediation of technology, that is, the complex system that allows Sully&#8217;s mind to inhabit the body of a Na&#8217;vi-human hybrid.

Then consider the cinema audience watching Avatar who finds themselves in exactly the same position as Sully. On one plane the audience is inert, passive, enclosed in a dark space just as Sully&#8217;s is. On another plane, the audience is&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2010/01/13/down-the-hi-tech-rabbit-hole-of-avatar/</link>
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