Mark Shea on Avatar

Does quickly, clearly, and well, what I was fumbling around trying to do:

Bennett...quite properly understands that for all Cameron’s ham-fistedness, there remain deeply embedded in Avatar some profoundly Catholic themes which we reject and sneer at only to our impoverishment. A character named Jake Sully (Jacob=Deceiver) who is “sullied” by sin and saddled by what St. Paul calls “this body of death” (Rom 7:24) is, through the ministrations of a character named “Grace Augustine”, reborn into a glorified new body. He is confronted with his own capacity for evil, undergoes death to his old self, learns to embrace self-sacrificial love, and becomes a member of a new family, a priest-king who comes to live in harmony with his neighbor and with a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Where have we heard these themes before? And why are they so popular?

We’ve heard them from the gospel. They are popular because they pluck strings at the deepest levels of our being. Tolkien plucked at these strings with his tree-loving heros who rely on the grace of the Valar to overcome the power of the Ring with self-sacrifice. C.S. Lewis does something similar in his Space Trilogy when his simple hrossa natives on Mars are seen being pointlessly slaughtered by the evil European materialist Weston whose plans to rape the Martian landscape are indistinguishable from the mining corporation that is raping Pandora. In all such stories is a profoundly Christian theme: burning shame for the loss of Eden and longing for the redemptive power of Christ. We need not fear that theme in stories any more than we need fear it in Genesis 3.