So I finally went to see avatar (this post does not contain spoilers). I’ve actually seen this movie before, many years ago, only then it was called Ferngully and the music was much better.

It was an interesting flick if you could get past the unoriginal plot and the glaring irony of a major corporation producing a movie where the idea of a major corporation is evil. But past all that, there’s something else which began to sink in as I peered through my 3D glasses: the missing villains.

Films about evil corporations are a dime a dozen, but they always present the story in such a linear way leaving out the link that makes it make sense.They present the story as if the evil corporation sprouted out of nothing and began raping the environment because it has a “raping the environment” fetish. This is just silly. The corporation in Avatar was after a substance called “unobtainium,” but said substance wouldn’t be valuable at all if there wasn’t a buyer. Yet they didn’t cover the buyers at all. This is, of course, a calculated move by the creators of these stories because we, the consumers who finance the extravagant American lifestyle, are the buyers of the unobtainium.

I kept trying to figure out why a corporation would produce such a villain in a movie but then I realized the intent– to create an alternate reality in which there is no buyer, or the buyer is totally guiltless, so as to produce the possibility of being a guiltless buyer in the real world. American consumers carry a great deal of guilt, and this is evidenced by our willingness to buy products that someone tells us are good for the environment in some way, even though we’re not willing to research these claims to make sure they’re true. Deep down most of us don’t want to know the truth because we’ve chosen to buy into the possibility that we could be guiltless, even though we know we can’t. This possibility allows us to keep taking thoughtlessly from the world around us in a socially acceptable way. In movies, the people are killed or sickened or mistreated by the corporation, but movies never explain the existence of the corporation. In real life, the people are the buyers who create the beast and the beast rewards their greed by destroying them.

So what? What can we do about it? It’s true that manufacturers often manufacture demand, but mostly we go along with it because we’re a bunch of hedonists. Stop buying into it. Hopefully this change will become easier when we lift the veil and realize how every time we buy something we don’t need we throw another axe at the great deku tree.