In the film Avatar, the audience may be responding less to special effects or political messages and more to the dramatization of the following uncanny phenomenon:
1. The inhabitation of a different form-of-being accompanied by the immediate rejection of any preliminary advice or testing concerning the operation of this form; aching to run wild.
2. The accompanying understanding that when one inhabits an avatar, one is, then, burdened with responsibility because – as it turns out – one simultaneously inhabits a broader spiritual network of avatars – each of which exists through both their “avatar bodies” as well as this network.
One is not free, but rather cast from one political context to another. A tension here is that, while the film makes this phenomenon into the stuff of science-fiction myth (like a wise old man’s warning about a world wherein this experience could occur, but, thankfully, hasn’t yet), the drama of Avatar is a very actually-occurring phenomenon requiring a thorough exploration of the ripples it sends through daily experience.
Avatar is the daily grind of logging-on-to the Web, negotiating the management of one’s virtual persona as well as this persona’s relation to the databased network. The problem with the idea of dramatizing these phenomena as if they were an actual part of “real life,” though, is that the pictures one has in their minds of “realism” doesn’t include the Internet or virtual experiences.
“Real life” is the alcoholic mother, the lonely small-town basketball coach, not the Internet avatar.
In the history of literature, though, certain authors have developed a “third way” in-between what looks to the viewer like a work of “realism” and what looks to the viewer like a work of “science-fiction”.
Crash by J.G. Ballard, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, and VALIS by Philip K. Dick; they double as a form of literary stream-of-consciousness sci-fi and sharp-eyed, stick-to-the-facts reportage of the contemporary scene; and as the reader shuttles between these understandings of the work, the understandings themselves may blur as mutated pictures of what one means when they say “realism” or “science-fiction” emerge.