James Cameron’s Avatar invents a new vocabulary of futuristic technology and alien biology. The mixture of imagery, special effects and action is fantastic and convincing. But seamlessly woven into the mesh of that world is something much simpler and even more inspiring: the notion that a change of context can morph simple human to genius.
Avatar’s hero, Jake Sully, is introduced as a 2nd-rate replacement for his brilliant, schooled brother who has recently been killed. Jake is an ex-Marine paralyzed from the waste down. Both physically compromised and mentally weak, he is barely more than a bedazzled mute presented with a seemingly unfortunate assignment: to engage with “combatant aliens” in a hostile world. Without much too lose and no apparent ambitions, he accepts. Upon entering the planetscape of Pandora as a biological alien Avatar, Jake’s motor-coordination and personality instantly emerge. The story doesn’t alter anything notable about the hero’s personality, just his body and environment. Everything down to his speech patterns remain the same. He simply becomes himself to his fullest in the culture he was always meant to exist, the species he was meant to become, the female he was meant to be with. The story is a coming-of-age. A withered man shrunken as tiny as a child gets transplanted to an artificial body that ushers his growth to become real. His character blossoms to its fullest potential within an environment he is perfectly suited to thrive.
Amidst today’s 6 billion living humans, the sinking realization of having never achieved one’s ultimate potential in an oppressive world is practically universal. If Avatar is right, we are all geniuses waiting for the correct sequence of events to align and change our environment finally to become ourselves. Context is the window to our genius.
