Our Avatars, in the Material World
Reactions to Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) range from religious devotion to cynical sneers. I watched it at a cinema in Bali, one of the most popular tourist and ‘nomad’ destinations in the world. It is a delightful destination, with waterfalls, beaches and sacred places, despite the ever-increasing onslaught of Sky People (myself included).
The natives, as they generally are in such places, are brown, not blue. They tend to dress modestly, conservatively, whereas the Sky People go around in feathers and crochet bikinis, on X-Maxx scooters rather than dragons. As a non-native brown person, I am something of an anomaly. I offer some anomalous views…
Be they digital nomads, spiritual seekers, economic migrants or refugees from Eastern Europe, most of the visitors here are white. They enjoy favourable currency exchange rates, the tropical climate, the tolerant culture and luxuries less affordable back home. Who can blame them?
Moving into the wooden house where I am currently installed, I asked the owners about noise pollution. Two and half years in Peru, which has a different culture when it comes to noise, frayed my nerves.
Sometimes, said the owners, you hear the music from the temple out the back. Gamelan? I lit up. I love gamelan. Gamelan? said the owners. What is that? Each to their own but I was surprised that, after two years here, anyone would be unaware of this famous element of Balinese culture.
Later, at a restaurant, I was appalled at the children’s attitude towards the local staff, whose diligent and graceful service didn’t warrant a single please or thank you. Sure, they’re just kids, but, like war in Europe, isn’t colonial entitlement out of date?
Take Veronika Loginova, the Russian Instagram influencer who faces a 6 year jail sentence and/or a hefty fine after posting images of herself posing naked on the 1000 year old Kayu Puteh sacred tree near Seminyak.
While she now posts images of herself, suitably clothed, prostrated before the shrine, by way of apology, she has — or western media has, it’s hard to say—also launched an appeal against Indonesian state censorship. It reminds her of the situation back home in Russia, where Instagram is banned. Six years is tough, especially for an 18 year old girl.
Is this patriarchal suppression of pussy power? Or is she simply the bikini strap that broke the elephant’s back? If nothing else, you gotta hand it to Spirit for sense humour. Loginova: login over?
It’s not just Bali, of course. Take the “dancing gypsy angel” who posted an Instagram reel of herself dancing around the Temple of Luxor in Egypt to the backing track of the athan, the muslim call to prayer, broadcast from a nearby mosque.
Are such acts courageous? Do they stand on the shoulders of Pussy Riot, who put Russian chauvinism in the headlines a decade ago?
And it’s hardly just women. We can hardly mention Instagram and influence without mentioning the kick-boxing, cigar-smoking, Bugatti-driving Andrew Tate. The most influential person in history, to take the new, social media meaning of influential, has 2.9m Twitter followers, the majority of them young, involuntarily celibate men, to whom he offers the red pill.
Tate decrees that real men wear the trousers. They own dogs, not cats. They have guns, of both the arm muscle and armament kind. They defend their women and children — presumably from the predations of other men. While women should wear their ‘body count’ (number of previous sexual partners) on their foreheads, real men ‘bring the machete’ to any bitch who accuses them of cheating. Even if they are.
Having conquered the incel world with Hustler University, a $50 a month red pill mix of pushups and crypto trading — described by wokie YouTube debunker CoffeeZilla as a cult, leave it and you’re fucked—Tate infamously became a muslim, which urgently warrants an article all of its own.
Everything Tate does is infamous. At first sight, he provokes revulsion in skinny brokies like me. Get beyond that and he is a fascinating character. In fact, he’s my #1 tip for the Antichrist, should that archetype ever be unveiled as an actual individual.
As Tate says, it’s an attention economy. The best way to get attention? ‘You want controversy. You want a war.’ You want a Bugatti? Escape the Matrix and smoke cigars in a Dubai villa.
Perhaps the key here is the subtitle in the tweet back there.
They will leave you behind, unless you join them.
They includes Elon Musk, who recently reinstated Tate’s twitter account, after he was dropped from the pre Musk platform for airing views widely condemned as misogynistic. Musk, of course, is another influencer. Most recently, he gained attention with his Mars programme. Don’t look up!
You might hope for more restraint from suit-and-tie guru Jordan Petersen, recently resurrected from crufixion by militant trans mob and subsequent self-documented addiction to antidepressants, to freshly advocate that ‘men should be dangerous.’ If you do click the link, you may be surprised to discover the number of women leaving adoring comments.
What the fuck is going on?
Capitalism, in a word. Opportunism, in another.
Or latter day hysteria in the face of the crumbling of homo sapiens?
Cigars. Bugattis. Dubai villas. Flights to Mars. The dominant paradigm of the internet is a whopping great multilevel marketing scheme. A Ponzi scheme. A house of cards.
It takes hard work, consistency, creative flair, technical know-how and ruthless self-confidence to become a creator.
Fear not, you have only to fire up your favourite social media app and take your pick from the onslaught of click funnels guaranteeing your money back if you don’t double, triple or ten-times, a hundred-times your following and therefore income. Three steps to financial freedom. Five steps to more high net-worth coaching clients than you can handle.
Or else you’re a brokie, a wagie, a cat-lover, a loser. According to Tate, he has God on his side. God was angry at Tate’s cancellation. It was, like the deep state, haram.
Back to Avatar, Way of Water, where our Atlantean gods and goddesses connect their dreadlocks to Source and command the forces of nature against the Sky People. The role of the father, intones the narration, is to protect his family. Jake Sully, wheelchair-bound protagonist of the first movie, now a fully embodied Na’vi, does a fine job of it. It’s Adam and Eve stuff, the pitch unqueered by wokeist concerns.
Antagonism comes in the form of Five-Eyed machinery. Cameron rests on his Aliens laurels in the depiction of American and Australian submarine and exoskeleton crews. White man’s magic versus the blue woman’s sorcery. We can expect an English-accent on the end of level baddies at the end of the series.
Avatar, The Way of Water reverses the drama of Star Wars and Top Gun. The Sky People drop their bombs into the sea but the tables have turned. Maverick is a whale. To be fair, the whaling scene is a wrenching and depiction of the real thing. Shame on Norway and Japan. I punched the air when the whaler got whacked.
But the point is this.
The real, latter day Antagonist is far more subtle. As Agent Smith in Matrix warns, there is nowhere we can go that he can’t follow. Out of the Matrix? A Dubai villa? Mars? There is no escaping our old self.
Cameron flirts with Rumble-style conspiracy metaphors, when he reveals the holy grail of the Sky People: Amrita, a death-defying elixir extracted from the brains of the whale creatures. A single brain’s worth fetches $80m dollars — a Dubai mansion, more or less.
Avatar, The Way of Water, cost $2bn to make. That’s 25 whales, by the movie’s reckoning. No wonder Cameron is thanking us for watching.
Meanwhile, I’m keeping an eye out for Russian influencers with blue tails.
