True Blue: Glimpsing the Na’vi

I finally saw Avatar. While I did not love it, I will admit I cannot stop thinking about it. The notion of the avatar itself is my favorite part of this film.

What is an avatar? In internet land, we know it to be a being we select or create to represent ourselves. But the word has much older roots than late 20th-Century computer-generated entity making. The word avatar is ancient, from Sanskrit avatāra, meaning ‘a passing down’. In Hindu mythology, it refers to a deity who descends to Earth in a shape recognizable to humans. Usually, as in many ancient religions, powerful deities/gods/God have long-sent avatars down to us to engage with us, teach us a lesson, and either help us change or preserve our course.

Avatar employs both the contemporary and ancient meanings of the word. The contemporary treatment is obvious, a basic premise of the film that someday might very well be reality: Science advances to the point where science-makers can align one’s human consciousness, personality, and will to the body of a manufactured being—an avatar--and transport that created one into another world to accomplish a mission. In this film, it is mankind sending its own avatars outward rather than deities sending its avatars ‘downward’ to man.

While the contemporary depiction of the avatar in the film is clear, Avatar also treats the ancient notion of the avatar, and this is nothing short of lovely. It is precisely this ancient treatment of the avatar that continues to occupy my imagination.

As I mentioned, the word avatar comes from India’s ancient and spiritual language, Sanskrit. So who were the avatars of ancient India, and what can a glimpse at an ancient avatar tell us about this film? As a yogi and an artist who has always loved India, I am deeply fond of many ancient Hindu deities and of one avatar in particular. It is this avatar, in fact, who appears en masse in the film, much to my delight.

Vishnu is a great and powerful Hindu god. He is the second member of Hinduism’s great trilogy (“trimurti”), the others being Brahma (creator) and Shiva (destroyer). Vishnu manifests himself several times on Earth in the form of avatars. Known as ‘the preserver’, Vishnu sends us one of the most recognizable avatars in all of world mythology: Krishna. The film Avatar seems to me to be a film about Krishna.

Krishna is depicted variously in the many Hindu tales. Sometimes a child, often a prankster, almost always a flute-playing wooer of lovely women, and categorically a protector of cows and of sacred words, Krishna totes the human spiritual and well-being line. He also serves as wise counsel on the topic of war to the soldier Arjuna, bereft on the battlefield in The Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu scripture. Krishna is what humans could be: worshipful, fun-loving, strong, wise, peaceful, and kind. But what is most fascinating is that, in fact, Krishna is something that humans can’t really be. Krishna is BLUE.

He has a human shape and behaves like a human, but he has, simply, deep blue skin. (‘Krishna’ literally means ‘the dark one.’) Krishna, the Vishnu avatar, is both human and a step beyond human. He is not orange or brown or black or yellow or any color even slightly resembling the colors of our world’s many races. Blue humans are cold, sick, or dead. Krishna is nothing but filled with life. As an avatar, he completely embraces all things, including blueness, and thus pays homage to the entire life cycle. Krishna’s blueness, therefore, invites humans to celebrate rather than fear the cooler, darker side of blue. Krishna brings blue to life.

So what better color for our Na’vi to be than blue? By manifesting them as blue, James Cameron has flipped the Krishna myth and the act of avatar-creation on its head to offer us a valuable statement of the contemporary human mindset.

Being charged with blueness and a Krishna-nature, Cameron’s spectacular Na’vi re-tell the tale of the pastoral, of nature respect, and of life as organic, artistic expression. Compared with many of the humans in this film, the Na’vi themselves are almost, in fact, godlike. Certainly, they are close to and regularly commune with their gods. This film provides contemporary audiences with the chance to see mighty blue people living in perfect peace, at one with glorious nature, and in perpetual states of environmentally stable beauty that Krishna would have approved of and enjoyed.

In addition, Cameron has made the avatar creator not a deity but a human, more in keeping with our contemporary notion of the avatar, and the message is much grimmer than what the land filled with Krishna-like beings offers.

Man’s avatars in this film are at first completely alien to Na’vi ways. Deities, on the other hand, are never aliens. (That’s what makes them deities. They are privy to all we do.) Thus, deities’ avatars are filled with know-how and wisdom to act as the effective go-between in the lands of heavenliness and earthliness, but man-created avatars are mere puppets, tools, says this film, and must learn from those they are visiting. In this case, human-created avatars are fairly powerless, mere extensions of human ego, while the Na’vi are enlightened spirits living ego-free and in that regard more resemble the ancient avatar.

The happy ending of this film is not a color transformation but a spiritual one: The blue avatars in our film decide to learn to be true blue, true avatars, and truly good despite their incredibly flawed creators, man.

The Krishna-Na’vi association and the focus on human as avatar-maker in Avatar sends a message that humans, as much as we have power, must use it to help others, not hurt them. The film seems to offer a message of the importance of treating all beings well. In that, this film is yogic.

In a future blog, I will look more closely at the spiritual and militaristic themes in Avatar.