Final Fantasy Nation, Part 2 of 2 (Get ready, it's long)

A movie that I recently saw, Chumscrubber(watch for the review later this week), is framed at both the beginning and end with sequences involving the building of a suburban neighborhood through the cell-shading technology of a video game world. The main character of this digitized suburbia is a headless man who totes his own noggin as he walks aimlessly about.

“Who am I?” he asks in the movie’s final line, “I am the Chumscrubber.”

Though the movie is decently complex enough for that line to carry several meanings, one of them must be a suggestion that gentrified America is a fake land, as unsubstantial as the walls that hold up a home in The Sims. To take the suggestion even further, we are as video game characters, walking through a 2-D world that we’ve somehow convinced ourselves is reality.
This got me thinking about the importance of video games and digital culture in defining who we are as a people. And that, of course led me to Avatar– a piece of digital media that has unified nearly everyone in the country in the last several months.

That’s not to say that everyone has unanimously liked the movie. Many, myself included, thought it was a piece of shit (if the most beautiful piece of shit ever put on screen). But the fact that we’ve all seen it brings us together, giving almost everyone in the country a conversation piece that they can use when speaking even with a perfect stranger.

Though, of course, the incredible visuals and gazillion-dollar marketing campaign must be most responsible for creating the global Avatarphenomenon, there must be something about the story itself that also makes the film at least watchable to everyone in the country (or the world for that matter). It’s my belief that that something is what famed scholar and story collector Joseph Campbell calls the monomyth. In his book, Hero of a Thousand Faces, Campbell analyzes every culture throughout history and comes up with a unifying “hero’s journey” that informs the heroic myths of each and every culture in the world. Though Campbell breaks down the hero’s journey into various distinct steps (which, if we wanted, we could certainly apply to Avatar), it basically boils down to this: Every great heroic story in human mythology is a reaffirmation of the contiguous circle of life: Life, Death, Rebirth. A character destroys his old self only to be reborn wiser and stronger than before.

Odysseus creating the Trojan Horse is Life; him being lost at sea is Death; him returning to his wife, wiser and more noble, was Rebirth.

Or take Tommy Boy. Chris Farley destroys his old selfish, slacker, alcohol-addled self and becomes a mature, street smart CEO.

It doesn’t take much to see how Avatar follows the same path. A disabled soldier starts off as a grunt for an evil world-killing military; he loses his old self as he bonds with the nature-oriented Na’vi (which I think is Spanish for Lanky Blue Person); he ends up a noble, courageous leader. And, he can walk again.

Ok, so I get why everyone can identify with Avatar. There’s just one problem. We’ve heard this same story told before (Fern Gully), and told better (Dances With Wolves). James Cameron (and many critics) would say, “Well, sure, but nobody has ever really let you become a part of this monomyth like Avatardoes. When you put on those 3-D glasses, you enter into the story in a way that has never happened before.”

But is that really true?

I call your attention to the great Final Fantasy VII – as I’ve said before, perhaps the best RPG ever made. Though Avatar was the culmination of a decade of work, FFVII (and, really, the rest of the Final Fantasy series) was treading the same waters a few years before production on Avatar even began (it came out in 1998). It would take too long to go into the intricacies of the game’s plot, but here’s a general overview:

You play as Cloud Strife, an ex-soldier with a troubled past, who teams up with a band of rebels trying to stop the evil Shinra Corporation from mining Mako energy, the precious lifeblood of the planet (Hmm… this Mako energy sounds a lot like Unobtainium. Which do you think is the better name?). Over the course of the game, Cloud moves from a Han Solo-like rogue to a rebellion-leading environmentalist. There’s a climactic battle at the end in which the naturalist good guys beat the technologically superior baddies, and (get this) the final fight takes place mano-a-mano between Cloud and Shinra’s hired gun, the legendary Sephiroth.



Oooh, what an intimidating name! Sephiroth. Gives me shivers just saying it. Much more frightening than Avatar arch-boss Colonel Miles Quaritch, who serves literally the exact same function.




So you can probably see it: Avataris just like the skeleton of the story of FFVII. And all that stuff about “Seeing through the eyes of another” or “Becoming part of the monomyth” by putting on those ridiculous-looking glasses? Well, what could bring you into the myth more than actually playing as the lead character? And, of course, the word "avatar" is itself a gaming term referring to the character that you become.

In fact, FFVII has it over Avatar in nearly every aspect. Its story is much longer and richer – like watching a whole season of The Wire over the movie Training Day. It avoids falling into the trap of painting the naturalistic denizens of the planet as primitive beasts (Ha ha, look at those stupid Blue People shooting bows and arrows at the metal spaceship), thereby watering down the power of a nature-oriented lifestyle. And it’s far less predictable too – don’t bother leveling up Cloud’s love interest, Aeris, she won’t last long. Can you imagine James Cameron being ballsy enough to kill off Neytiri halfway through?

But most important: Final Fantasy VII allows far more room for the human imagination to take hold. Unlike modern FF games, the characters of FFVII were still unvoiced, communicating through dialogue boxes that you had to internally put sound to. As I said earlier, its cinematic sequences were state-of-the-art at the time, but they still lasted for only thirty to forty-five seconds at their longest. Only a few key plot points were actually communicated through movie sequences, and since these sequences featured no talking, all back story had to be gleaned from read dialogue between characters which ranged from major and to eminently dismissible.

This is one of the most incredible elements of the storytelling of Final Fantasy VII, again trouncing Avatar in terms of technique. If you wanted to know why the Na’vi are so attached to their land, you had to rely on a few blatantly expository lines to tell you. “Those trees hold all of the memories of the Na’vi ancestors and if they’re destroyed, then the memories disappear.” That’s not a direct quote, but the actual line was no less straightforward. Compare that to the journey you get to take in FFVII, coming to understand the Mako energy of the planet through stories told to Cloud by elders, through missions you go on that launch you directly into the planet’s core, even through random nuggets of information gleaned by optionally talking to random people on the street.

That’s what makes Final Fantasy so fun. You have the option of following the story laid out for you, or you can go even deeper down the rabbit hole, talking to every single person you see, taking on every side mission available, even choosing to find all of the optional characters (yes, you heard me right. The makers of FFVII created two playable characters [each complete with their own in-depth back story] that you don’t even need to find to complete the game). And since it is a video game, you are in control of everything that happens. Saving the planet is a conscious choice you must make, not just a passive action that you get to watch unfold without lifting a finger.

Why is allowing for imagination so important in the first place? Because no matter how powerful computers become, no matter how realistic Pandora can be made to look, our minds can always create something more realistic and impressive all on its own. Think that the Na’vi’s giant treehouse was huge? You can always make it bigger in your head. (Whoa! I just did. Would you look at that?)

And furthermore, we are all different in the way that we consume information. Some people like to concentrate on the big picture, and some enjoy the little details. Having the option to customize – if not the general story, then at least the level of depth you look into individual aspects of that story – makes it easier to connect to the monomyth overall.

Ok, ok. Sure. But what does this have to do with America?

Well, America is a nation that was never really connected to its land. Unlike Native Americans, the vast majority of U.S. citizens have no roots that link back to a time when we depended on the generosity of the planet itself for survival. By the time we arrived here, we had already sufficiently learned how to tame the wild and thereby assured our superiority as the Master Species on the planet. And as the masters, we had no need to connect to the land.

But perhaps this isn’t such a good thing. Perhaps this has left us out of touch with the circle of life on which Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is based. In The Hero of a Thousand Faces, he conjectures that perhaps the reason that we are so dependent on drugs and psychotherapy for balance is because we no longer have the assurance of our connection to the ever-flowing cycle of life, death, and rebirth that was provided by the shamans and storytellers of ancient days. Instead of living on an endless sphere, as the natural world exists, like the Chumscrubber we walk about on a constructed plane. 2-D instead of 3-D. The societal rules that we’ve set up are like the walls of the computer screen… flat and concrete, rather than rounded and never-ending. And when we die in this world, where do we go? Our disconnection with the earth makes imagining our return to it, and subsequently, our discovery of eternal existence through the perpetual circle of life, nearly impossible.

Does taking a trip to Pandora cure us of the alienation we feel for a primal connection to the land? Or does digitizing the most idyllic imagining of a life-bearing planet only weaken our link to the one that we live on right now? If we can make an even more beautiful Earth out of zeros and ones, what incentive do we have to harmonize with our current terra firma (Version 1.0 if you will)?

It’s all very disconcerting. But I think that we should remind ourselves that the natural power of our imaginations far outweighs even the most powerful supercomputers. We don’t need Pandora in order to imagine nature at its most pristine. Though this may be real life, our minds are always aglow with fantastic new possibilities. We are always living in a final fantasy.