Avatar Sex

Meredith Woerner at io9 brings up the prickly situation of sex in Avatar. As most of us guessed, Na’vi sex happens, at least in part, with their mind-link cords:

If [no genitalia are involved], then we’d have to assume that Na’vi mating only includes the hair tail syncing system. Which puts us in a bit of a dirty little conundrum. If syncing up basically means “the most amazing orgasm” ever, um, what does it mean when the Na’vi are syncing up to the rest of the Pandorian wildlife? Can the animals really consent, or even understand what’s going on here?

Now that is a weird question. As I mentioned earlier, Cameron’s biosphere on Pandora is far more interesting than anything in the film’s plot. I must admit, when I initially read the headline about “Avatar” and “bestiality,” I thought Woerner was implying that having sex with the Na’vi was akin to having sex with an animal. That, thankfully, is not her point. Instead, what she is asking is: if Na’vi-Na’vi link equals sex, then Na’vi-Pandorean critter link would also, weirdly, equal sex, which, in turn, would equal bestiality. By Woerner’s logic, the movie should have been NC-17 because just watching Jake Sully learn to ride the horse would be way beyond MPAA standards of decency.

Of course, Woerner is just exploring the possibilities, so let’s take her lead and run with the idea of Na’vi sex. The question of consent is the most important one here, as that’s what makes a behavior unethical. Let’s assume that Na’vi sex is genital free and only involves the mind-link, so every animal-Na’vi interaction is potentially a sex act. A worrying set-up, since we see a lot of linkage throughout the film.

In a worst case scenario, the more mentally powerful (intelligent, advanced, evolved, etc.) creature controls the situation and every mental-link would be somehow sexual. Thus, every interaction that isn’t between two fully matured Na’vi adults, say, between a Na’vi adult and a Pandoran banshee, is rape. It is rape because consent is impossible, due to the imbalance of both power and intelligence. In this worst-case scenario, Jake Sully effectively raped most of the flora and fauna he encountered on Pandora via his avatar. Re-read that sentence, ladies and gentlemen, and remember this is what happens to your brain if you read too much Foucault.

That scenario, however, doesn’t quite make sense.Through Jake’s trials and tribulations, we see that learning to deal with the mind-link is not easy and, even with the plants of Pandora, requires significant effort to make effective. Furthermore, the link is shown to work in both directions, effectively uniting the two creatures. Jake can “feel” the emotions and sensations of the creature. It brings into question the whole idea of sex for the Na’vi. With a pure mental link, one that flows in both directions, the fundamental barrier between two entities is broken. By linking together, the two entities must, in a sense, decide to give the other pleasure. A bond can be made, but it need not be pleasurable, or pleasurable in the way sex is. When I pet my border collie, that isn’t sexual, but she seems to take pleasure in it. The mind-link, like physical contact, probably requires a lot more than just the basic connection for it to be a) pleasurable and b) sexual.

Based on my arbitrary, totally unverifiable speculation, it would seem that the way the Na’vi link to each other and to the wildlife of Pandora makes it possible for two different species that cannot communicate via language to have consensual sex.

The weirdest point is that, because the pleasure isn’t physical, one can presume that the intensity of the experience comes from a mutual desire to interact in a pleasurable  way (is it even sex?). By extension, the quality of the mind linked would determine the quality of the sex. Therefore, not only would rape be a technical impossibility due to the nature of the bond, there would be no point in having sex-like mind-linking with a non-humanoid entity.

So, I think, if I’m getting this right, Meredith Woerner does not have to worry about the alien bestiality that is ostensibly implicit in Avatar. Probably.

The Overmind of Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar really is as good and as awful as everyone says it is. The visuals are eye-melting and captivating. The plot is hackneyed. Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz, and George Dvorsky cover nearly every point worth covering and strike the perfect tones in their review/critiques. All three, however, left out one problem with the film that drove me crazy: the sentient ecology of Pandora. Spoilers follow.

Both Dvorsky and Anders briefly mention this curious aspect of the Pandora ecology:

Dvorsky – Okay, some credit where credit is due. Given that the story is, whether I liked it or not, a Gaianist treatise, I did appreciate how Cameron achieved the sense of interconnectedness between the characters and Pandora. The ability of the Na’vi to link with other animals in a symbiotic fusion was very cool, as was the ability to upload conscious thought through the very fabric of the planet.

Anders – The Na’Vi are animalistic and in tune with nature, and they’re good-hearted in direct proportion to their simplicity. They worship a mystical world-mind and its messengers, magic happy tree spirits that connect them to their ancestors — through their magical native-people hair. (Their tree/ancestor religion turns out to have a scientific basis, to be fair.)

Early on in the very long Avatar, we are given clues that everything on Pandora is literally connected. All the animals possess neural connection jacks (appendages that end in tiny, tentacle-like exposed nerve endings) that allow Na’vi to mentally command their mounts, effectively domesticating a creature in a matter of seconds. The plant life is shown to have similar properties, both by the actions of the Na’vi (who connect their exposed dendrites to dangling vines) and by the observations of human scientists. The human scientists, lead by Dr. Grace “Sigourney Weaver” Augustine, suspect that all the plant life on Pandora is connected the way neurons in the brain are connected, with certain trees acting as ganglion or memory banks. Over the course of the film, we are confronted with the possibility that the flora is involved in a kind of biological cloud-computing.

If the system were merely passive, something the Na’vi were taking advantage of, Cameron’s neglect his own ecological neurology concept would be forgivable. But it isn’t. Pandora is possessed by a spirit, Eywa, that exists within this planetary network. Grace, before her death, acknowledges the reality of Eywa. Furthermore, Eywa demonstrates some form of active decision making, in that she must be asked to defend herself at the behest of the Na’vi and then answers that request in the form of total ecological rebellion against the human incursion. So not only is Pandora a planet-wide neural network, it is also, apparently sentient.

This thing is called a "Hammerhead Titanothere"

And yet the biggest payoffs we get from a sentient planet in the film are hammer-headed rhinos bashing through exo-suits (an admittedly awesome payoff) and a mind-transfer from paraplegic human body to lithe, Na’vi body for Jake Sully. I am aware of how cool those two things are, but when they are done by a sentient planet with an external, independent (?) biosphere, one begins to realize things are able to get way more awesome than hammer-headed forest rhinos fighting robots (I can’t believe I wrote that).

Imagine the following: halfway through Avatar, Dr. Grace Augustine and her forgettable team of boffin-stereotypes discover that just as the plants on Pandora exhibit features similar to a nervous system, the animal life exhibit features similar to an immune system. Perhaps they discover that, in one of the Pandoran creatures, the immune system works not by identifying and destroying the invading disease, like a human’s; instead a Pandoran immune system captures and reprograms individual disease agents and turns them into double-agents. Just a few double agents weaken the disease sufficiently to allow the immune system to obliterate it. No antibodies, but a few conversion agents get the job done. Instead of a disease giving a creature an auto-immune disorder, the creature’s immune system gives the disease an auto-pathogenic disorder. Extrapolate that to the Na’vi and their benevolent acceptance of just a few humans into the fold. What if Jake Sully’s entire magical conversion experience was really an immune response from Pandora itself?

And that’s only one crazy idea I came up with just now. How a sentient ecological system would respond to an invading species or what kind of thoughts it would think are questions that I wanted Avatar to ask, but it didn’t. My only consolation is that James Cameron is definitely going to make a sequel and when he made a sequel to Terminator, it was better than the original in almost every way. Keep your fingers crossed for Avatar 2: The Eye of Eywa.