Shock and Awe: Terror, Technology, and the Sublime Nature of Cameron’s Avatar

Abstract

In 2009, the film Avatar became the highest grossing film of all time, its success partly deriving from an intensive marketing campaign centered on recent technological innovations that enabled its director, James Cameron, to conjure a beguiling visual imagery that had been previously unachievable on screen. Currently still topping box-office charts, Avatar’s otherworldly depiction of life on the fictionalized planet of Pandora includes scenes of seemingly impossible floating mountains, vast, surreal landscapes, and a luminescent strangeness of flora and fauna. Closely connected to these natural forms are allegorical depictions of terror, while a sublime aesthetic also dominates the film’s technological spectacles. Indeed, the destruction of nature by military technology indicates the cultural gulf between the US army and Pandora’s indigenous population, the Na’vi. The attempted domination of the Na’vi, seen by some scholars as analogous to the treatment and representation of Native Americans, inevitably conjures parallels with the war on terror. The film’s allusions to 9/11 and the war on terror, particularly the Iraq War, cannot be in doubt, since in discussion about Avatar, Cameron commented, “We went down a path that cost several hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. I don’t think the American people even know why it was done. So it’s all about opening your eyes” (in Hoyle, 2009). The juxtaposition of technology and nature thus not only provides examples of sublime spectacle as commentaries on current environmental crises but also renders the entire narrative indistinguishable from its 9/11 contexts.