I finished the last decade and began this one watching two movies that address the underlying mood of pessimism that I sense growing all around me in these days at the end of Empire. Is it the end, or is pessimism just the product of a generation getting old and more paranoid? Time will tell. 

The two movies are Avatar and The Road. Both address death projected on a planetary scale, but each one takes a radically different tack toward the possibility of healing and maybe moving beyond our worst impulses. 

Avatar is a war movie. The story is a carefully constructed parable of contradictions. On the surface we see the power and inherent intelligence of nature arrayed against the forces of technology. Both sides of the equation are depicted with visionary clarity. Using the device of the main character having his consciousness 'projected' into the cloned body of an alien species, we are taken with him into a 3D world of amazing detail and coherence, where everything lives in balance and symbiosis with everything else on earth, sky and sea. The sentient beings of this world are part of the seamless web of life and a vast consciousness born out of the complexity of the natural world itself.  

Against this is depicted a more familiar world of human motivations, one that has been almost completely overtaken by the ethic of acquisition, augmented by a hubris engendered by technological superiority. In this world we encounter all of the familiar signs and symbols of the corporate culture wrapped in an impenetrable cocoon of military might. The dominant ethic is devoid of values outside of greed and self-protection. Here we're presented with an archetypal allegory of colonialism in all of its glory and horror, combining images out of our historical past, our militaristic present and a projected science fiction future.

In between these two implacable forces stand a group of scientists, placed by the Corporation and given the duplicitous task of befriending and 'educating' the natives so that they will accept and adapt to the values of the dominant culture and in the end willingly choose to abandon their own. This is the role traditionally played by a colonial priesthood or the government educator or, in our society the creators of the spectacle, those propagandists, advertisers and film makers whose function is to promote and reinforce the values of consumer culture. 

In the end the movie capitulates to an essentially technological solution to the tragic conundrum, based on an argument that the only way to face down armageddon is to beat the forces of destruction at their own game. There is one telling line of dialogue that marks the turning of the path, when the female character Nayteri tells the soldier/avatar Jake that the Goddess doesn't "take sides" but preserves "the balance." Herein is the briefest of glimpse into alternative possibilities, quickly rendered moot when the two tribes go to war. Aided by the altruistic impulses of the scientist 'mediators' and the military prowess of disaffected soldiers, the tribe of the planetary 'Goddess' drives the 'alien' invaders out of the forest and 'back to their dying world.' For we who are conditioned to seeing the world in terms of dueling forces of good and evil the outcome is emotionally quite satisfying, if not historically realistic. One must remember that the battle of the Little Big Horn left Custer and his men dead but led to vicious reprisals that advanced the decimation of native cultures and the plunder of the natural world.  

'Avatar' does what movies do best, drawing us into a dream and evoking an emotional response, and it does it on a level of technological manipulation beyond anything a movie has attempted before. When seen on the archetypal level it offers a brilliant visual depiction of the stark opposition between the two forces, techne and nature, that battle within our own being. It suggests that in the end nature will have the final say. On a practical level it offers little little beyond our traditional ways of dealing with the divide. As I said, this is ultimately a war movie. We pick our side and feel good when the home team wins. Within the technological wonder at the heart of Avatar are the very contradictions that haunt our advancement into the digital age. Can the solution to our disaffection from nature be merely to construct a better/cleaner technology? When we can build worlds out of pixels, how does our participation in virtuality translate into realistic participation in the world of the flesh? 

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Unlike 'Avatar', 'The Road', based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, depicts a world where technology has completely failed, taking with it in its demise most of the natural world. Here is the terminal failure of technological civilization. Instead of offering a fix to the human dilemma, The Road strips away everything that separates us from our essential nature, looking for the essential element that makes us human and may offer our only successful path through the shoals we face. 

When I read the book I visualized it in dark watercolors of greys and browns and fading blues with an occasional fleck of dying red. The movie stays faithful to the book and to a similar color scheme. A man and a boy trek across a cold and ruined landscape toward a dead ocean, encountering all manner of human creatures caught in desperate struggles for survival. No other life has survived (although the glimpse of a single living insect gives us some small hope). There is only the human animal scratching for existence in the final remains of a world that was. 

The movie is about choice. What is the human choice, that leads us toward life and toward possible salvation? The man tells the boy that "We're the good guys," and that "We carry the fire," and the child believes him, and eventually reveals to him the true value of that fire, which is compassion, that which distinguishes us from the beasts. Along the road there is only one lesson to be learned, and to turn away is to descend into depravity and horror. 

The key to our survival is not in finding a better mousetrap. There will never be a technological 'fix' for the situations that bring on human conflict. Our blindness comes in the face of the illusion of absence. Surrounding ourselves with layers that separate us from the world outside and from those around us we accumulate more that is artificial, isolating and even destructive of the life we share with each other. The solution to this will never be war, because in that scenario only the strongest survives and gentleness is gradually selected against. The battle between techne and nature is really the battle in our souls between the illusion of control and surrender to a greater whole, the complexity of which will always be beyond our grasp.  

In 'The Road' everything upon which we rely and behind which we hide from ourselves is taken away. There is only life to hang onto. In the end there is only a little reason to hope, and that hope is that human's can learn to see the world through new eyes and perhaps the nature that we have abandoned will return to give life to us once again.