Avatar Is About Our Broken Wholes

The movie, Avatar, is a significant film. It is the most expensive movie ever made and one of the most beautiful and attractive films produced. Technological breakthroughs were required to make the stunning picture.
Avatar strikes a chord with us. We are attracted to this fantastic world. Not only for its surreal beauty and creativity but also because this world provides something else: It is a Memory. Avatar is both new to us but at the same time, it is not new at all. Avatar echoes something that we all miss, something we all have experienced. It is deja vu of sorts, we have been here before but we do not know when, where or how.Avatar is a psychologically significant film for it comes at a time when the Human race, we must admit, is at a low point. And the film reminds us when we once were higher beings. We once were Avatars but have long since forgotten who we are. We have become lost in the modern world in the amnesia caused by all of our distractions.

Our response to Avatar is quite deep, it is hardwired it seems, though some will not admit this. Avatar is about “wholes”, it is about social wholes and mental wholes that have long since perished in our history. In the modern world we feel this loss of a whole in our personal lives.

Our brains are designed to operate as wholes. In the modern age, we only use certain selected mental regions and neglect much of the rest of our neurological equipment. But we have a dim memory of another kind of psyche that art retrieves for us for a few shining moments.

At the same time, our cultures are disintegrated. We are alienated or at war with others though we have been conditioned for millennia to live as wholes, to have relationships with people, to be a part of a close community. The social whole is also a vague memory.

Avatar reminds us of our loss of connection, the loss of direct connection not mitigated through middlemen or bureaucracies or pure logic or science. The physiology, our basic psychology, and our hardware wants wholes and connection. Unfortunately, the world provides only bits and pieces and disconnection and chaos. So we do not operate at full capacity and we miss this. Mental tools are unemployed, sub-minds are bored, discs are empty, and the vacuum calls out to be filled with activity and association and goals. We feel this and we miss this and we pine for this, but we don’t understand what this phenomenon is. Because we have no curriculum that teaches us what we have lost.
Many of us act poorly. We may fall into obsessive behavior and repeat some little thing over and over to find joy and security because all we have is little things and no whole. Others may just accept that life is empty and lonely. Still others will fill the vacuum with “ME”. The compensations are manifold because we have no whole, no connection, no joint goals, no variety and diversity.
Avatar points to a seminal event in Human history, the dissolution of the original tribal village, the break up of the great unity. In the 5,000 years since the break up of the communal origin, many wholes have fragmented.