Oh ord-Lay ive-us-Gay our essings-Blay

(Why do I keep writing about films? The world will never know.)

The movie Avatar* takes us on an intergalactic colonial quest to the forest moon, Pandora, of a distant planet (which, although it resembles Uranus or a blue-tinged Yavin IV [of Star Wars fame], is in fact named "Polyphemus." This goes unmentioned in the film). The audience-surrogate and main character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a paraplegic who infiltrates the alien society in the form of one of the titular Avatars - an alien-human hybrid without a consciousness or soul of its own, which he controls via a mental bridging device.

In one of Jake's first interactions with a native (Neytiri, Zoe Saldana), he watches as she stabs a knife through the chest of a wounded jackal-analogue and says words over the corpse. He - and we, through his eyes - assume that Neytiri has said a prayer for the animal's soul (which we later discover to be for good cause; all of Pandora is, literally, wired together - and the natives' god is a manifestation of the sum totality of the planet's electromagnetic and metaphysical energy).

Here I come at odds with myself. Everything I've learned and know about studying history, cultures, humans (or fictional aliens) is screaming that I-Jake-we can't take Neytiri's physical actions (stabbing with a knife, saying words) as immediate evidence that she is praying for the animal's soul. We don't know that! And we can't seek better understanding of one another unless we accept that cultural subjectivity (this is Sociology 101, and basic, I know - but the point stands).

As a movie-goer, however, I accept the action as such, and am later rewarded for doing so (because that assumption, in Cameron's universe, is correct). This is little different from the basic adage for writers: "show, don't tell." (And all of its variations: Twain's "...bring on the fat lady and make her sing," Woolf's "It is plain enough to those who have done a reader's part..." Lukeman's "A guy shouldn't have to say, 'Ow, I'm bleeding,'" etc. etc.)

I think this internal conflict is the same as that which we can chart between "academia" and "the real world." For example:

-An attack on the "useless" jargon and opaque prose of academics, which later becomes
-A mocking contest on "Bad Writing", meriting
-A belated response from one of the upper windows among the parapets of the cliched Ivory Tower.

At my entry level position, in the guest lodgings among the servants' quarters in the basement of the Tower, I can see that we must bridge this disconnect. I'm just not sure how yet.

-Drunk

*2009, 20th Century Fox. Directed and written by James Cameron.