A Dharmic Critique of the Movies Dune, Avatar and Don't Look Up

In this time between worlds and time between stories, we stand poised between a potential dystopia and an unimaginably beautiful future. Only a new Story of Value as a context for our diversity can change the vector of history towards a possible utopia. Movies are often the channel through which the voice of culture discloses itself. Hidden in the public texts of culture is a movement towards a new human and a new humanity. Reading the hidden text of She—woven into the fabric of our public stories—is a key part of this new Story of Value. This volume explores three recent movies: Dune, Don’t Look Up, and Avatar. In Dune we explore the necessity and dangers of charismatic spiritual and political leadership as well as the need for—and potential horror of—a new Messianic religion. The move is both a clarion call and a cautionary tale as we are in desperate need of Homo sapiens to triumph as Homo amor, the fulfilment of Homo sapiens. Don’t Look Up vividly critiques our current society, including our dysfunctional media landscape—what Marc Gafni calls our broken information ecology. In order to survive and in order to address the meta-crisis, we must not be afraid to “look up”—as they spectacularly fail to do in the film. In Avatar we depict the first expressions of Homo amor, the new human and the new humanity. Avatar reaches for the heavens in cosmocentric and even intergalactic levels of intimacy and consciousness. In our capacity to love beyond egocentric and ethnocentric boundaries, we directly participate in the evolution of love. Cinema (and culture in general) has a beautiful and necessary role in transmitting and expressing this new story—both in what it portrays, and especially in the ways that it falls short. In these movies, we can hear the hidden whispers of culture showing us the ways that we are not living into the new Story of Value, rooted in First Principles that our civilization so desperately needs.

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