The perils of utopian nature cults.
By Govindini Murty. I recently came across the trailer for Happiness Runs, a new indie film that exposes the darker side of liberal nature-worshipping utopias. Based on the real-life experiences of writer/ director Adam Sherman who grew up on a utopian hippie commune in Vermont, Happiness Runs tells the story of a young man who tries to free himself and the girl he loves from a commune that has gone terribly wrong.
The commune is funded by his liberal, delusional mother (played by Andie MacDowell) and is controlled by a creepy New Age guru (played by Rutger Hauer) who brainwashes the young women of the commune into giving him their possessions, their minds, and their bodies. The commune’s teenagers, given no guidance by their parents, run amok with violence, drugs, and promiscuous sexuality – which only leads to further emotional damage. Happiness Runs is a repudiation of the entire ’60s counterculture lifestyle.
I’m not here to offer a review of Happiness Runs – for a review of Happiness Runs you can check out Libertas contributor Joe Bendel’s review (entitled “Hippies Smell”) and also the New York Times review here. (Amusingly, the New York Times complains, “This strident exposé [Happiness Runs] may gladden the hearts of some anti-’60s conservatives.”). However, I would like to comment on some of the themes of the film, because it’s not often that you get an indie feature that offers such a critical view of socialist utopias.
Happiness Runs appears to be the anti-Avatar – in other words, a film that shows what it’s actually like to live in an artificially-constructed, faux-primitivist society run by a tyrannical egomaniac in the middle of nowhere. The parents sleep around and ignore their children, the children take drugs and engage in random acts of violence and emotionless sex, and all the riches of human civilization – knowledge, education, art, literature, religion, law, and morality – are abandoned. Without human civilization, the young, the weak, and the defenseless are left vulnerable to the rapacious forces of nature – here exemplified by Rutger Hauer’s predatory New Age guru – and shattered lives (and broken hearts) are the result.
Delusions of a nature-based paradise in "Avatar."
By contrast, in Avatar James Cameron depicts a tribal, alien world that appears to be an untroubled paradise. Of course, the reality of actual tribal societies is significantly different – but one must remember that the alien society on Pandora is not reality, but the fevered, three-dimensional construct of James Cameron’s mind. Like the charlatan guru who rules over the utopian commune in Happiness Runs, Cameron is the unseen tyrant who rules over the utopian community that he has digitally created on Pandora. And just as the unfortunate members of Happiness Runs‘ commune are not allowed any independent lives free from the control of their cult leader, the faux alien tribal peoples of Pandora are not allowed any realistic existence of their own free from the ideological agenda of James Cameron.
For what real tribal society has ever acted or looked like the perfect society of the Na’vi on Pandora? I’m probably one of the few film commentators out there who has actually lived amongst tribal societies – my mother is a cultural anthropologist and I spent part of my childhood and teen years amongst the tribal peoples of North-East India and Borneo – and I can tell you, they’re nothing like what is depicted in Avatar. Wonderful as these tribal societies are in many ways, they still contain within them inequality, conflict, and pain – all things that are missing from the fantasy utopian society of the Na’vi on Pandora.
The 'native' look in Western male fantasy: corn rows.
Unlike Happiness Runs writer/director Adam Sherman, who actually grew up in a hippie commune, Cameron has never lived in any such ‘utopian’ tribal society – either the Western hippie-fake kind, or the real non-Western tribal kind. Instead, Cameron creates his anti-Western propaganda from the comfort of a multi-million dollar mansion in Malibu on the outskirts of hyper-urbanized L.A. Cameron’s faux-alien society has no connection to any tribal society that exists in the real world, but is instead his decadent liberal-male fantasy of what he would prefer an alien tribal society to look like … complete with bikini-clad babes with cornrows (think Bo Derek in 10) who can’t resist falling in love with the Western male outsider who rescues them from the enemy they can’t defeat on their own. It goes without saying that this is a completely condescending and stereotypical vision of real tribal peoples around the world.
In contrast to Avatar, Happiness Runs is a small film without lavish sets or special effects, but at least it has the honesty to depict the reality of nature-worshipping utopias. As the film shows, the abandoning of human civilization does not lead to happy, liberated people – but to people who are now prey to the amoral, predatory forces of nature. For in the state of nature life is fragile and brief, and even the smallest scratch can end a life. As Pascal writes in his Pensees:
“A reed only is man, the frailest in the world, but a reed that thinks. Unnecessary that the universe arm itself to destroy him: a breath of air, a drop of water are enough to kill him. Yet, if the All should crush him, man would still be nobler than that which destroys him: for he knows that he dies, and he knows that the universe is stronger than he; but the universe knows nothing of it.”
James Cameron reverses these humanistic sentiments entirely. In his vision of reality, it is man who is insensate and does not know anything of the universe around him (except for those few enlightened humans who take the side of the aliens) and it is the universe – as represented by the alien Na’vi people and their mystical world-spirit – that possesses any sentience or moral conscience.
Broken hearts in utopia: "Happiness Runs."
In Happiness Runs, the young hero wants to save his human love by taking her out of the nature-cult utopia into the greater good of human society. In Avatar, Cameron’s hero does the reverse: he turns on humanity and sheds his human body in order to enter an alien body and live in the nature-cult utopia. This is the film’s happy ending: the denial of humanity. For as Cameron states at the end of Avatar: humans are the real alien invaders. It is this cruel and anti-human attitude that would do so much real-world damage to our culture in the ’60s and ’70s – and that films like Happiness Runs bravely seek to expose.
Update: Happiness Runs was briefly in theaters these past two weekends in L.A., but now seems to be playing in select other cities. Check your local listings to see if it is in your area. If the film arrives on Amazon video download or Netflix on demand, we will definitely let you know. Below is the trailer.
