The Morals of World-Building (or, Sarah Didn’t Like Avatar)

(But first, let me strongly recommend Leonard Mlodinow’s book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Awesome.)

Before I start these rambling musings inspired by James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, I should give you two warnings.

First, this is not a review of Avatar. It’s an opinion essay that uses the movie as an example to illustrate a point. To find out whether Avatar is the kind of movie you’d like to see, you’d be better off checking out the review section of your local paper or Roger Ebert’s website or someone else’s blog.

Second, somewhat related, I’m not trying to judge anyone for liking or disliking Avatar. It had pretty nifty special effects – if you like those and don’t mind some other drawbacks, then you should check it out. And if you think you might enjoy it, you might not want to read what follows, at least until after you watch it and form your own opinions.

Right. So why didn’t I like Avatar?

To answer that, I’m going to talk about something that seems completely unrelated. If you’ve read some of the my other blog entries, you’re probably aware that I’m interested as writer and reader in the problems of how moral propositions are embedded in stories and what the ethics of being a storyteller are. Today, I want to focus  on the writers’ side of things – specifically, on fantasy and science-fiction writers’ side of things – and ask: what are the ethics of world-building?

This is a tough question, because reasonably well-told stories often convince us to take the world in which they’re set for granted. We evaluate a story’s morals in the context of its fictional universe, the same way we automatically pretend that the characters are not just words on a page (or actors playing scenes on a set) but the observable output of real, sentient minds.

In other words, in a story like that of Avatar – human ex-Marine Jake Sully finds himself helping the Na’vi people, indigenous aliens of an idyllic Earth-like planet, defend their home against the greedy human mining corporation that wants to destroy it – when someone says, “I have a problem with the morals of this story”, often our first response is, “What do you mean? Do you want the film to be on the evil mining corporation’s side instead of the good guys’?”

Similarly, “I wish one of the Na’vi, rather than Sully, had been the one to think up the final plan against the mining company” often gets a response like “But they can’t do that – Sully is the main character” or “But it wouldn’t make sense, because the Na’vi don’t understand technology”.

These complaints seem valid because the ethical problems with movies like Avatar aren’t usually within their plotlines alone. If you’re a human marine, and you find yourself in a situation like Jake Sully’s, where the only choice is to join up with the evil mining company or lead the Na’vi in a guerilla war, then the right thing to do is lead the Na’vi. The ethical problem is in the way the world of the film is constructed to admit only these two choices and only this type of story. My deal isn’t with the actions of the hero – it’s with the of courses built into the story.

What do I mean by an “of course“? An of course is an aspect of the fictional world that the story encourages its audience to take for granted when in reality it is a choice – whether considered or not – of the storytellers.

Of course indigenous people are noble savages who are naturally in tune with nature and who literally commune with the trees. Of course their lifestyle, hairstyle, accents, etc. are reminiscent of the various attributes white culture associates with First Nations and African peoples. Of course everyone in their society is a true believer in their deity, and of course their deity sort of actually exists (because otherwise, of course, it wouldn’t be that wrong of the humans to disrespect it). Of course the Na’vi lived a perfect life with no deep internal conflicts or harmful practices until the colonizers came. And of course not a single one of them sympathizes with human culture the way Sully sympathizes with theirs.

Of course “technology” is machines and guns and exoskeletons. Of course “technology” and “nature” are incompatible opposites, and any victory for one means a defeat for the other. Of course technology exists on a spectrum, where bows and arrows are at the primitive end and  machine guns are at the high-tech end, and anything closer to the high-tech end is objectively better and more powerful than anything closer to the primitive end. Of course it is possible to do away completely with high-tech gadgets and their impact once they’ve been introduced.

Of course the hero should be a white male who’s one of the colonizers and not a Na’vi. Of course he can and should quickly and easily learn everything there is to know about Na’vi culture within three months, and, by the end of that period, be better than the Na’vi themselves at helping their cause and deciding what’s important to them. Of course he’s the only one who can get the tribes to rally for the cause.

But once you begin to look at all these elements as choices rather than givens, it becomes painfully clear that this story could have gone very differently – and that many aspects of the world of the Na’vi are actually the result of unpleasant, unexamined assumptions about various aspects of the real world, like race, colonization, cultural superiority, and gender. When you pinpoint the “of course“s, dozens of whole new stories open up.

For instance, take just “Of course the hero should be a white male who’s one of the colonizers and not a Na’vi”. What if Jake Sully had been a Watson-type character, the Everyman eyes through which we got to see the alien Na’vi protagonist operate? What if there had been two main characters with alternating viewpoints, one human and one a Na’vi? What if this story were told entirely from the Na’vi point of view? What if Jake Sully had been Jacqueline Sully? What if he or she was of African or Indian or First Nations or Arab or Hispanic or Eastern Asian descent? How would being from, say, a culture that had its own history of being colonized change his or her point of view?

There are stories incorporating one or more of those choices that are every bit as exciting and engrossing as Jake Sully, white male ex-Marine and saviour of indigenous peoples. And, more importantly, many of these equally exciting stories have contrasting themes to actual-non-imaginary Avatar – they can treat “aliens” like the Na’vi as real complex individuals, avoid victimizing or caricaturing them, and underline the fact that the colonized have their own stories that are just as valid as those of the colonizers – and even “good” colonizers are still colonizers.

Hidden choices like the ones I mentioned above affect all kinds of fiction, not just sci-fi and fantasy (why is House white? Why is Sherlock Holmes a man? Why is Dexter’s sociopathya product of childhood trauma and not just part of his personality?), but it’s in speculative fiction that they really stand out. In some ways, I think, writers like me who are interested in this genre have both an easier task and a harder one.

Watching our “of course“s is easier because they’re laid out there for all the world to see, obvious in a way the “of course“s in, say, a romance or straight drama are not. In real-world fiction, it’s harder to notice ideas that line up with one’s own views that one takes for granted; in speculative fiction, all the real-world camouflage is gone. And while it might never occur to me to examine my views on, say, the behind-the-scenes drama at the White House, because that’s a real thing that I think I “know” about objectively, I can’t help but be aware that the only “facts” about the land of Lalaloo where dragons rule over unicorns are the ones I make up.

And, naturally, that’s why it’s more difficult as well: because absolutely everything in fantasy and science-fiction can be made up from scratch. There are thousands of “of course“s waiting to happen, an infinite number of ways things could be different, and I don’t have to work too hard to make any of them happen. Or, as the case may be, to keep any of them from happening.

Oh, and, in case you’re wondering, here’s what I did think of Avatar, which I saw in IMAX 3D with my cousins (thank you, guys!) the day after Boxing Day. I enjoyed the overall experience, even though I didn’t much care for the movie itself. I was seeing it for the second time, anyway. The first time, it was much less pretty, had fewer guns and more songs, and was called Disney’s Pocahontas. *ba-dum ching!*