Culture manifests through works of literature, such as films, which are produced and consumed by a culture. The success of a film then within its local market would suggest a critical appeal stemming not only from its being an aesthetic product, but a cultural product, reflecting elements of the culture, such as religion and gender, within which it was produced, and so appealing to that culture. Both James Cameron’s Avatar[1] (2009) and Hiyao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke[2] (1999, hereafter Mononoke) were the highest-grossing films within their respective local markets, America and Japan respectively, in the year of their release. As gender and spirituality are inherently imbricated within the social fabric of culture, the effectiveness of feminist representation in Avatar and Mononoke can be attributed to their respective culture’s religious lens: Abrahamic religion of Western culture and Shintoism of Eastern culture. Thus, this paper seeks to locate the influences and resonances of each culture’s dominant religious philosophy in the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of feminist representation in Avatar and Mononoke in three aspects: the female’s elevation to the status of godhood, the female’s appropriation of male symbols of power, and the nature of the female’s heroic act. Against the background of popular feminist rhetoric which vilifies religion as a patriarchal institution, this paper also seeks to explore and expose – if but only cursorily – the potentialities within religion for effective feminist representation as a more productive recourse to seek than reflexively rejecting all religion as patriarchal.

 

In both films, a female figure is elevated to the status of godhood. In accordance with monotheistic Abrahamic religion, Avatar’s Eywa is the single deity who presides over Pandora. Eywa is styled as the supernatural, deified Mother of Pandora, effectively taking a position parallel to that of the Abrahamic God as the supernatural, deified Father of all the earth. This effectively defies patriarchal norms by breaking the male monopoly of divinity in monotheistic Abrahamic religion, supplanting the male God ‘He’ with a female Goddess ‘She’. Eywa therefore presents an alternative feminist vision of godhood as the mother of all life that exists on Pandora, the “All-Mother” (Cameron 2009, 2:13:54).

 

Her maternal position is established through her generative power of birthing. For Jake Sully to truly become “one of the [Na’vi]” (Cameron 2009, 2:14:14) he must be reborn by “pass[ing] through Eywa” (2:13:38). The language used to frame this ritual Mo’at conducts at the Tree of Souls, which the Na’vi believe to be the most sacred site where one may contact and commune with the divine Eywa, to transfer Jake’s consciousness permanently into his Avatar body (2:50:51) recalls the language of baptism in Abrahamic religion: to be reborn spiritually into a new life by passing through baptismal waters, and so become part of the community of believers. Here, instead of baptismal waters, Eywa extends umbilical projections from the Tree of Souls to touch Jake and his Avatar, reminiscent of the generative womb. Then, to ‘pass through Eywa’ is as for a child to pass through the mother’s birth canal at the miraculous moment of childbirth. Jake even says of the occasion that it is “[his] birthday, after all” (2:50:11). The conception of God as male and the baptismal process are thus reclaimed through Eywa as a feminist re-envisioning of godhood and her generative power of birthing.

 

However, even then, Eywa is not truly equivalent to God; she only approximates the divine position of God for she is ultimately not omnipotent – as God is conceived to be. As Dr. Grace Augustine lay dying at the Tree of Souls, Mo’at conducts another such ritual to transfer Grace’s consciousness into her Avatar. Mo’at states that Eywa, “the Great Mother, may choose to save all that she is…” (Cameron 2009, 2:13:26, emphasis mine), suggesting that Eywa’s power may transcend even death itself. However, the ritual fails not due to Eywa’s choice, but Eywa’s lack of choice as “[Grace’s] wounds were too great.” (2:15:33) for Eywa to overcome. Notably, Grace’s wound was inflicted by Colonel Quaritch, the epitomic figure embodying militant patriarchy. This suggests that, despite being a deity, Eywa still has limits imposed upon her – and these limits are delineated by patriarchy. The All-Mother’s choice is unable to overcome the patriarchal wounding of Grace, and so is limited by the inscription of patriarchal power – in this case, the marking of the female body with physical wounds – upon the female. Even when the female is elevated to the status of godhood, she is not imbued unequivocally with the omnipotence of such a status; her potential remains culled by patriarchy. This therefore undermines the effectiveness of the feminist representation of female divinity in Avatar.

 

 

On the other hand, Shintoism – an “early animistic worship of natural phenomena”[3] (Kayano 2009, 31) – is expressed in Mononoke through a whole host of beast-gods who reside in the diegetic mystical forest: Moro, the female wolf-god who presides over the Wolf Clan, as well as Nago and Lord Okkoto, two male boar-gods who each lead their own Boar Clan. These beast-gods represent the kami, who are godlike, “noble, sacred spirits” (33) in the Shinto worldview. Unlike Abrahamic religion, Shintoism is not monotheistic: “in the spirituality of nature, all creatures can be kami; there is no single god … [and] the nature of kami varies ... [with e]ach kami ha[ving] its own authority” (34). The female’s elevation to the status of godhood is thus seen in Moro’s position as a fellow beast-god presiding over her own Clan alongside her male counterparts.

 

Furthermore, Moro is presented as having not only power enough to match the male beast-gods, but even to surpass them for where the male beast-gods fail, she prevails. When iron bearings shot as bullets from militaristic guns and cannons get lodged within the flesh of Nago and Okkoto, this causes them more anguish than they can bear. Weak in mind and will, both male boar-gods succumb to the pain and, consumed by the pain, they turn into raging demons. Moro, however, is shown to have enough power of mind and will to transcend such physical, bodily pain; the female is therefore not presented to be inextricably tied to her body and excesses of bodily sensation such as pain. Moro asserts that because Nago fled in fear, “the darkness took him, but [she] remain[s] for [she] contemplates [her] death” even though “[she] too carr[ies] within [her] breast a poisoned human bullet” (Miyazaki 1999, 1:09:09, emphasis mine). By the power of her mind, she contemplates, becoming conscious of her impending death, and rationalises that there is nothing to fear in the face of such certainty. She thus transcends such mortal and bodily pain by the power of her mind. In so doing, she enacts a powerful and effective form of feminist resistance against succumbing to a symbol of penetrating male power, the bullet of a militaristic gun. The typified gender divide between male and female along the lines of mind and body respectively is not only subverted, but inverted; the disenfranchising trope of the female as slavish victim to her own body and bodily processes is not reified in Mononoke.

 

Moro even transcends both the body and death: even after her death, her head is able to dislodge from her dead body to wreak vengeance upon the film’s antagonist, Lady Eboshi, as Moro’s disembodied head bites off Eboshi’s right hand. As such, the Shinto inclination to present a host of gods instead of a single god has yielded a more effective feminist representation of female divinity: the female shows herself to be superior in comparison to her male counterparts by transcending the bodily, the body, and death.

 

The other aspects in which the influences and resonances of Abrahamic religion and Shintoism manifest in Avatar and Mononoke respectively are the female’s appropriation of male symbols of power in her mode of action and the nature of the female’s heroic act. Avatar’s Neytiri only overcomes the militant patriarch, Quaritch, with her father’s Ceremonial Bow. Quaritch’s death by the Ceremonial Bow, as a symbol of the patriarch, suggests that only another instrument of patriarchal power is symbolically powerful enough to depose of another figure of patriarchal authority. This is problematic as it undercuts any reading of this scene as “an instance of the female overcoming male dominance” and “where a female triumphs over male power”[4] (Eggleston 2011, 49). In having to appropriate male symbols of power to subvert patriarchal authority, the female ultimately still subjects herself to accepting patriarchal power structures in which maleness is encoded with power, while femaleness is encoded with weakness.

 

Notably, it is not the gift of the Thanator, a ferocious apex predator, from Eywa, the All-Mother, that secures Neytiri the victory and Quaritch’s death. Neytiri’s Thanator, conversely a symbol of a gift from the maternal, in fact, dies in the fight against Quaritch within just five lunges (Cameron 2009, 2:40:30-2:41:02). It is then clearly not the case that “the final confrontation between … Quaritch, in his alien-killing cyborgian outfit, and Neytiri on her leopard-like mount, is one between equally matched pieces of machinery”[5] (Morton 2014, 216). Problematically, femaleness continues to be presented as dispossessed of power. Even when the female displays power, there is no one to bear witness to her power: Neytiri’s heroic feat of killing the militant patriarch was performed in obscurity, in a secluded forest clearing apart from everyone else.

 

These aspects of feminist representation are not presented to be problematic within Avatar’s diegetic world because such a representation draws on a cultural script within Abrahamic religion and Western culture: The Biblical narrative of Jael. Jael was the wife of a nomad who quietly killed Sisera, an army commander – and therefore also a militant patriarch – in the privacy and seclusion of her tent by “sen[ding] ... her right hand to the workmen's mallet”[6] (Judges 5:26, emphasis mine). Jael’s narrative established a scriptural mode of female action in which the domination of the male by the female could only be achieved with the female’s appropriation of male power and within a private, secluded setting. This narrative has been taken as a precedent to form the basis of a cultural script which has been adopted by, and so is commonly re-enacted in, later Western culture and literature.

 

However, in Mononoke, Eboshi’s appropriation of male symbols of power is problematised even within the diegetic world. Eboshi harnesses the power of masculine war technologies – militaristic guns and cannons – to destroy the forest and overcome militant patriarchs, male samurai lords. She is then both somatically and symbolically punished for this mode of action when Moro’s bites off her right hand. She had sinned by her right hand, with which she pulled the trigger of her guns in order to destroy life and the forest, thus her punishment castrated her of any further ability to apply her hands to such uses ever again. This “reflect[s] theological and cultural traditions” of Shintoism, which holds “alternative moral perspectives”[7] (Thevenin 2013, 159) on environmentalism. War technologies are inimical to the harmony and balance of the natural world “where kami reside” (Kayano 2009, 34) due to the disruption and ravage they unleash upon the land. As such, the use of these masculine war technologies by Eboshi is problematised and presented as punishable in the Shinto worldview.

         

In Mononoke, the nature of the female’s heroic act is not conducted in isolation but in communion with the male protagonist: San, an orphan girl who grows up as a wolf in Moro’s Wolf Clan, saves the forest alongside Ashitaka, the male protagonist, by returning the Great Forest Spirit’s severed head to its body, thereby restoring peace and life to the land. Their position of standing side by side while holding up the severed head together as an offering to the Spirit recalls Shinto rituals in which offerings are made to seek divine protection against “ancient laws and curses”[8] (Kim & Michelle 2008, 56). The role of the female “Shinto maidens called miko” (Kayano 2009, 47) is an indispensable part of these rituals. The ritual must be conducted in the presence of a miko for Shintoism believes the female to be in more intimate contact with the divine, and so only females can act as intermediaries between the physical and spiritual realms, even if a male Shinto priest is present to conduct the ritual. Therefore, Mononoke articulates a stronger feminist vision: the male and female are equal partners who work together to accomplish the climactic heroic act.

 

In conclusion, the preliminary analysis above yields that Mononoke’s Eastern Shinto underpinnings have facilitated a more effective feminist representation than the tenets of Western Abrahamic religion have in Avatar upon comparing the films’ representations of female divinity, the mode of female action, and the nature of the female’s heroic act. A point that must be made here is that no religion is in and of itself inherently patriarchal or sexist. It might, for instance, profit one to realise that in the creation of Eve in Abrahamic religion from Adam’s rib (Genesis 2), the Hebrew word translated into English as ‘rib’ is “tsela”[9] (Towns 2012, 85). Elsewhere in the Bible (Exodus 25, 27 and 35; 2 Samuel 16), tsela and its variants (tselo, tselot, etc.) are instead translated as ‘side’. This suggests that Eve was to rule by Adam’s side in parity, having received the same dominion he was given over all living creatures. She was not made his superior; the likes of which may be observable in religious narratives such as the birth of Athena as a fully formed adult woman clad in armour from her father Zeus’ brain in Ancient Greek mythology. Neither was Eve made Adam’s inferior; the likes of which may be observable in religious narratives such as the Japanese creation myth in which the divine couple, Izanagi and Izanami, meet to solemnise and consummate their marriage, but Izanami, a female, speaks before the male Izanagi – an impropriety so severe that the gods curse their unborn children with deformity and non-divine status. Furthermore, following the aforementioned Biblical episode in Judges 4, Jael and Deborah – both women – are honoured in a song in the following chapter, Judges 5, for their roles in the battle. Meanwhile, the cowardly male general Barak receives no such honour in the Scriptures.

 

In Buddhism, the female deity Prajnaparamita is revered as embodying “the text of the wisdom sutras”: she is the perfect “embodiment of transcendent wisdom”[10] (Haas 2013, 11). Scriptural authority then is gendered as female. The goddess is even regarded as the “mother of all buddhas” for “the ‘Awakened Ones’ [the buddhas] are [thought to be] born from wisdom”, and so must have been begotten of transcendent wisdom incarnate herself. In the cosmology of Hinduism, everything in existence – indeed, the universe itself and all within it – is thought to be a result of an outpouring of “divine feminine energy” from Shakthi, the “Divine Mother”[11] (Kolluru 2011) who is worshipped as the Supreme Being. The force behind creation in this worldview is thus gendered as female. These clearly inconvenience any simplistic reading of religion as intrinsically patriarchal. A better reconciliation can be sought in acknowledging that, just as the filmic texts analysed above have shown themselves to be the imperfect work of imperfect human hands striving imperfectly to render perfection in this imperfect world, so too are patriarchal religious institutions. It is a task seemingly beyond – and perhaps is beyond – all human capacity, but this is precisely what makes striving toward it all the more worthwhile for its accomplishment would be divine.

 

 

Bibliography

 

2009. Avatar. Directed by James Cameron. Produced by Twentieth Century Fox .

 

Eggleston, Seth C. 2011. "Portrayals of Masculinity in Avatar." (University of Central Missouri) 49.

 

Haas, Michaela, and Dakini Power. 2013. "Twelve Extraordinary Women Shaping the Transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in the West." (Shambhala Publications) 11.

 

Kayano, Terumi. 2009. "The World of Spirituality: Princess Mononoke Interpreted through Shinto." (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing).

 

Kim, Eunjung, and Michelle Jarman. 2008. "Modernity's Rescue Mission: Postcolonial Transactions of Disability." Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Etudes Cinématographiques 17 (1): 52.

 

Kolluru, Sai. 2011. "Shakti: The Divine Element of the Feminine." (State of Formation, Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership, Hebrew College and Boston University School of Theology). http://www.stateofformation.org/2011/09/shakti-the-divine-element-of-the-feminine/.

 

1999. Princess Mononoke. Directed by Hiyao Miyazaki. Produced by Studio Ghibli.

 

Morton, Timothy. 2014. "Pandora's Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought." Edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim S. Robinson. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press) 206-225.

 

2012. The Bible, English Standard Version. London: Collins.

 

Thevenin, Benjamin. 2013. "Princess Monoke and Beyond: New Nature Narratives for Children." Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 4 (2): 147-170.

 

Towns, Elmer. 2012. "Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions." (Thomas Nelson Publishing) 85.

 

Endnotes

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[1] Avatar. Directed by James Cameron. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2009.

[2] Princess Mononoke. Directed by Hiyao Miyazaki. Tokyo: Studio Ghibli, 1999.

[3] Kayano, Terumi. The World of Spirituality: Princess Mononoke Interpreted through Shinto, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2009.

[4] Seth C. Eggleston, “Portrayals of Masculinity in Avatar.” (PhD diss., University of Central Missouri, 2011), 49.

[5] Morton, Timothy. 2014. “Pandora's Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought.” In Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan, Kim S. Robinson, 206-225. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.

[6] The Bible. English Standard Version (London: Collins, 2012).

[7] Benjamin Thevenin, “Princess Mononoke and Beyond: New Nature Narratives for Children.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, vol. 4, no. 2 (2013): 147-170.

[8] Eunjung Kim and Michelle Jarman, “Modernity's Rescue Mission: Postcolonial Transactions of Disability,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Etudes Cinématographiques, vol. 17, no. 1 (2008): 52.

[9] Elmer Towns, Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2012), 85.

[10]  Michaela Haas, Dakini Power: Twelve Extraordinary Women Shaping the Transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in the West (Colorado: Shambhala Publications, 2013), 11.

[11] Sai Kolluru, “Shakti: The Divine Element of the Feminine,” State of Formation, Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership, Hebrew College and Boston University School of Theology, last modified September 30, 2011, http://www.stateofformation.org/2011/09/shakti-the-divine-element-of-the-feminine/.