What Avatar and Atlas Shrugged have in common

This week, James Cameron’s sci-fi epic “Avatar” was nominated for a best-picture Oscar.

Avatar is a visually spectacular film, but a lot of critics — especially conservative ones — have blasted its plot and message.

Here’s John Podhoretz, writing in the Weekly Standard.

“The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism-kind of.”

Even the Vatican weighed in, giving a thumbs-down to the pagan spiritualism practiced by the blue-skinned Na’vi.

Conservatives (and Christian traditionalists are right to wrestle with Avatar. It may be the most aggressively political blockbuster in Hollywood history.

Indeed, Cameron’s creation has more in common with “Atlas Shrugged” than “Star Wars”.

What do I mean?

Like Atlas Shrugged, Avatar lays out a coherent and serious political message, wrapped in the hugely manipulative guise of a potboiler.

Both have cardboard heroes and cardboard villains. Neither have particularly original stories, but they sell their worldview brilliantly.

Like Any Rand, James Cameron treats some of the most pressing issues of our day.

But they don’t wrestle with the complexities of the issues. They offer simple, concise answers.

In Rand’s novel, long celebrated as a kind of conservative manifesto, pure unfettered capitalism is unerringly moral, a creative force that can only be sullied by evil government bureaucrats and lazy shirkers.

Dagny Taggart, her hero, is brave and sexy. In fact, there’s a lot of fairly steamy sex, with some soft-core rough stuff thrown in.

This isn’t “A Contract With America.” It’s a potboiler, a page-turner, and brilliant propaganda.

Same goes for Avatar. Cameron, an Obama-era progressive, is making some very specific points:

-Mercenaries are bad. A lot of critics (including Podhoretz) have gotten this wrong. The soldiers in Avatar aren’t “American” soldiers, they’re Blackwater-style corporate soldiers-for-hire. At a political moment when the US is outsourcing more and more of its national security — and when corporations are running more and more American prisons — it’s compellingly topical.

-Exploitation for energy is a reality. In the age of post-peak oil, Cameron is laying out a picture of what we’re likely to agree to as a society to grab our own version of ‘unobtainium.’ His message is clear: If we have to bulldoze native tribes to get our fix of energy, that’s what we’ll do.

-There is morality in nature. Christians are right to be uncomfortable with Cameron’s argument. He’s tapping into a growing post-traditional movement in the US, offering a Rousseauian vision of a society living in synch with its environment.

-Corporations are bad. They do amoral things because they have an inherent collective purpose (profit) but no inherent collective morality.

But here’s the interesting part.

Unlike most recent filmmakers, Cameron’s not just exploring these ideas. He’s making a positive declaration.

This isn’t art — with all the nuance, ambiguity and depth that that entails. It’s propaganda.

Cameron’s Neytiri resembles Dagny Taggart in all but her skin color and big yellow eyes. She’s brave, determined and (yes) sexy.

Because Avatar is really really well made propaganda, it will likely be far more influential than, say, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

I’m guessing that it the film will outlive Star Wars as a cultural force. Will it outlive Atlas Shrugged?

No. But I’m guessing the two works will sit on the same shelf together, as classics of popular American polemic.