<아바타>를 통해 본 자연종교와 청교도 정신의 융합

Abstract

The film Avatar (2009), written and directed by James Cameron, is an American epic science fiction. It functions to make us see two meanings in American culture and literature. First, culture in a form of nature will disappear someday by mechanical civilization in high-technology bringing about a clash among cultures and civilizations on Earth. Second, human race will try to survive its future life in quandary brought from such uncontrollable high-tech development by utilizing different organisms into which they may infuse their own knowledge and mental faculties. Therefore, the film anticipates that such a human dream may turn true someday in the future through different organisms in space, for fear of ecosystem in nature to be put into environmental crisis and finally to disappear on Earth in the near future. The avatar in the film is an alien with a human mind; thus it is the adventure story of an ex-Marine, Jake Sully, who, in the end, finds himself in an exotic life on the alien planet called Pandora over space far from the Earth. Avatar turns out to be a product long made throughout the historical conflict between the worship of great nature rooted in Indian culture and the Protestant belief rooted in English culture. The conflict is believed to have become a syndrome to see how Puritan spirits and virtues, such as purity and self-restraint, work even in the most recent story of Avatar. We can see the conflict in literary history from Freneau's poem "On the Nature of Religion", Melville's experiment of human evil in Moby-Dick, Crane's view of human beings as not free in nature and culture, Hawthorne's reexamination of Puritan virtues against human natural inclination, Miller's play The Crucible still putting Puritanism at stake even in modern American society and culture, and many similar SF stories. The protagonists, the biologist Dr. Grace symbolizing an American naturalist and Jake representing high-tech civilization in mechanical technology, persuade us to preserve nature and life as we can in terms of Puritan virtues.