I wrote this for the Alternative Law Journal some time ago:
As I was watching the film Avatar and the cinemagoers around me were cheering on the Na’vi heroes in their fight against human invaders, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of us would actually want to live alongside such an uncompromising society. Why is the audience intended to admire the Na’vi’s complete self-satisfaction and unwillingness to deal with humans despite the fact that it is Na’vi isolationism and idealism as much as human avarice which drive the two groups into conflict?
Thinking about it I realised it is hardly an isolated case. In our stories we love idealistic heroes to fight for what they believe in against all odds. But if we were to encounter such uncompromising characters in our families or offices they would strike us as unreasonable lunatics. I am reminded of what Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen, was reported to have thought we would call an archetypical, vengeance-fuelled vigilante like Batman in the real world: ‘in short, a nutcase’.
Why is it that rather than celebrate the values of conflict resolution, tolerance and deal-making, which make our advanced societies function so effectively, our favourite stories continue to be about zero-sum conflicts that are impossible to resolve peaceably? From afar, the kind of conflict found in Avatar seems noble. We can easily imagine one side to be all good and the other all bad. There is no need to dwell on the suffering of those extras who die in battle or the problems that go unsolved back on Earth for want of ‘unobtainium’. A quick cut to the next scene is always just seconds away! But in real life, conflict is painful and messy and something we work hard to avoid.
In fact we are so used to finding compromises in our everyday lives that to make his conflict story hang together, writer and director James Cameron is forced to pile absurdity upon absurdity: an intelligent species totally disinterested in trade with aliens and the magical technology they bring; a business that sees fighting interstellar war as a cheaper way to access ‘unobtainium’ than a peace treaty; a race of people willing to reveal all their secrets to conspicuous spies, but unwilling to negotiate or make concessions to humans even in the face of a catastrophic defeat. The crazy plot twists used to make compromise impossible result in a world unlike anything on Earth and as a result the movie is unable to teach us anything useful about how we ought to live.
Finally, we are led to a deus ex machina moment in which the megafauna of Pandora rise up to repel the human colonisers. To my knowledge, a revolt of Gaia is beyond the powers of the hunter gatherer tribes today struggling to coexist with industrial society, so I’m not sure what they can hope to take away from Avatar. The apparent moral of Avatar, ‘fight hard if you’re in the right and Gaia will provide’, is one only someone very isolated from the real challenges of hunter gatherers could put forward. Why does popular fiction so often favour staunch idealism over the central wisdom embodied in modern political systems and their laws: ‘dealism’? We could tell stories of the countless political compromises reached through well-functioning democratic institutions. We could tell the stories of all the terrible wars that never happened because of careful diplomacy. We could tell the story of the merchant who buys low and sells high, leaving everyone they deal with a little better off. These are the everyday tales which make modern society so great to live in. But will any such movie gross a billion dollars in the near future? I suspect not.
An Australian movie with a very similar plot to Avatar is The Castle, in which the Kerrigan family fights the compulsory acquisition of their home for the expansion of Melbourne Airport. Audiences were predictably united in their support for the charming Kerrigan family in their struggle against big business. In real life, I suspect the public would be strongly divided on the fairness of the acquisition, especially if sticking up for the Kerrigan family meant airport delays and fewer discount airlines. We would want to find a deal which left both the Kerrigans better off and allowed for a larger airport by offering them more and more compensation until they voluntarily moved.
Why split our values like this, some for our stories and others for our own lives? I suspect the answer lies in what we subconsciously want our taste in fiction to say about us. Celebrating the Na’vi allows us to signal how much we value loyalty and justice. Denigrating Melbourne Airport allows us to show our suspicion of greedy and powerful people. In real life, when defending our stated values requires that we make serious sacrifices whether or not we are likely to win, we sensibly value the opportunity to compromise. But when a fictional character will do all the fighting for you, why compromise on anything? Though popular fiction will never say it, we know the best fight is not that won by the righteous but the one nobody needed fight in the first place.
Hi! I am a young Australian man ostensibly interested in the truth and maximising the total number of preferences that are ever satisfied, weighted by their intensity. I also enjoy reading and writing about the topics listed above. If you share my interests, friend me on 
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March 11, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Tafacory
Very well written Robert. I really enjoyed reading this. Only recently have I come to reject the all or nothing approach to life. You’re right, we have the ability to promote peace and compromise and progress rather than being stuck with a single mind set no matter how noble we may think it is.
March 11, 2012 at 3:18 pm
danske
Good read. I thought this was pretty interesting:
March 11, 2012 at 7:27 pm
The appeal of fictional conflict | Meteuphoric
[...] Wiblin asks why stories celebrate conflict rather than compromise: As I was watching the film Avatar and the [...]
March 12, 2012 at 6:17 am
Sage
The signalling explanation doesn’t convince me. I think it’s simply morality porn: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/beware-morality-porn.html
March 12, 2012 at 6:24 am
Adrian Ratnapala
Perhaps this is a nitpick, but *the Castle* is not quite the same story.
In that tale, the airport developers could have used an alternative site, but chose not to because compulsarily acquiring peoples houses was cheaper than doing engineering works at the abandonned quary. This too is an artificial plot twist, but one which *created* an opportunity to avoid conflict. Viewers react against the villains who did not take this opportunity.
All that said, the main reason choose sides in the The Castle, is that they find the Kerrigans likeable. Whereas many rather dislike the Na’vi. At least I did.
March 12, 2012 at 3:00 pm
teageegeepea
Nick Rowe has an unusual take on Avatar here.
March 22, 2012 at 6:24 am
Sasha
Interesting (especially to me as a fan of improv, which has loads of literature about how to create conflict on stage, but not much about why it has such appeal). I wonder if you’re looking at it backwards, though.
Stories – especially of the popcorn variety – tend to take place in settings that are noticably abnormal in some number of specific ways. They might be set a long time away (in either direction), for example, or have people acting at significant odds with the behaviour we see around us.
This seems likely enough just to be a result of wanting to see something different from our everyday life if we’re going to go out of our way for a passive experience. So (if you think this is a meaningful theory) one form of abnormality which popcorn media often draw on is moral abnormality.
In one guise this is the selfless hero, but even that wouldn’t make for much of a story if he just sat in an office all day, selflessly working harder than everyone else and holding open the occasional door.
To start with, you need (or at least, it gives you an instant popcorn recipe to have) someone who’s wildly abnormal in the other direction; someone who comes along and fucks up the status quo for some reason that goes slightly beyond self-interest (after all, if self-interest were enough motivation for a capable person to screw up the status quo, it wouldn’t be the status quo for long); someone who’s basically acting so evilly it’s arguably (or perhaps obviously) irrational.
If this is all plausible, it seems like your question is almost answered already – we can’t compromise with them, because a) they’re irrationally evil, so they’ll just ditch your compromise even when it’s in their interest not to – unless it’s heavily skewed towards them in the first place, and b) it would leave a pretty bad taste in most of our mouths if the story was ‘You have a reasonable amenable situation, them some guy comes along and try to dick it up. Eventually we settle on a compromise that leaves the situation worse than it was beforehand, and everyone lives moderately miserably ever after’.
This train of thought offers an explanation the Nazi story’s enduring popularity – Hitler wasn’t just mean, he was mean beyond the barriers of self-interest, invading people (literally) right left and centre while other battles were still unfinished, and putting heavy resources into full-scale genocide when he could have been putting them into building more tanks. Plus the story finished with a lack of compromise and a ‘happy ending’.
Lesser dictators are usually much less successful at publicly screwing themselves over…