Avatars and Shamans: Blue and Emerald Forests

Many years ago I went out with some friends to see a double feature: Silverado and something called The Emerald Forest.  I had primarily come to see Silverado—critics had touted it as the first great western in a long, mostly western-less period of filmmaking, and I loved westerns.   However, by the time I exited the theater, I had dismissed Silverado.  Instead, The Emerald Forest (1985), directed by John Boorman and written by Rosco Pallenberg, had enchanted me with powerful, haunting new images and thoughts.  In fact, within the film’s 114 minutes, I had undergone a fundamental change in my world view and my core values.  To this day I marvel at how much my mind set was altered simply through experiencing The Emerald Forest.

Recently I watched Emerald Forest again, for the first time in probably fifteen years.  Immediately the music pulled me in.  I remembered then that I had bought the soundtrack soon after that night at the theater, and for a while I had listened to it almost daily.  I would go hiking with that music, running with it in my headphones, and I would sometimes bring it out to the beach with me at night, just to feel the emotions and re-imagine the insights of the film.  How had I forgotten that music?  It had slowly faded away when I stopped listening to my vinyl and cassette tapes.  Now, within the first few minutes of watching the film again, I resolved to go out and buy the music once more.  I wanted to remember what I had forgotten about this film.

Based in part on a true incident, the story begins as an American engineer (Powers Boothe) is charged with building a dam in the Amazon that will permanently flood out thousands of miles of unexplored, undeveloped rainforest, along with the primitive peoples who live there.  One day he is picnicking with his seven year old son near the forest’s edge when a tribe of stone age natives who call themselves the Invisible People see the boy and kidnap him, raising him as one of their own, even though he is white, one of the “Termite People”, so called because they eat up all the wood of the forest.

Over ten years the father searches for his son, and when he finds him, learns that his son is truly lost to him.  Tommy (played by the director’s son, Charlie Boorman), or Tomme, as he is now called, has taken a wife, and become a man, even though at seventeen in the Termite world, the Dead World (where all trees are felled and earth is stripped bare), Tomme would be merely a teenager, with years of growth ahead of him before maturity.

Boothe tries to convince Tomme to return to his rightful world, and his real family.  The father, it was clear to me at the beginning of the film, was absolutely in the right.  His son would be missing out on the great potential his life in civilization could bring to him.  If he stayed in the forest, he would be doomed to a primitive, substandard existence, a life both “brutish and short”.

But by the end of the film, I saw everything differently. As The Emerald Forest ended, I saw that Tomme’s life in the emerald forest was full—he had realized his potential there.  His life hadn’t been stolen from him by his kidnappers; his life with the Invisible People was a gift.  

Slowly, as the story unfolded, scene by scene, I would recognize, in the openness and innocence of the native peoples’ worldview, a kind of wisdom I received from the film that has stayed with me all this time, and has shaped my longings and feelings about wilderness and our connection to it, about the magic that is in the land if we are able to live in the right way within our place on earth.

“It’s just a movie,” you might say. What is film?  Is it merely illusion, simply entertainment?  I believe film, at its most powerful and poetic can be a call to action or even a spiritual journey, in and of itself.  Boorman wrote a book, Money Into Light (1985), about the making of The Emerald Forest, which took three years of his life to bring to the screen.  As part of his preparation for the film, Boorman journeyed up a tributary of the Amazon to an extremely remote area and spent time living with a stone age tribe called the Kamaira, talking daily with their shaman.  Boorman was deeply respectful of the tribe’s lifestyle, and recorded their myths, rituals and daily lives. In an interview, Boorman says of the tribe’s shaman, “I felt Takuma was in possession of a knowledge, a consciousness, that far surpassed my own.  I can’t imagine ever seeing things quite the same again.”

I think much of Boorman’s sense of these people was translated into the script, and this was one reason I felt so much truth to this work.  That, and the pure, wild riotous life of the Amazon, the emerald forest, that becomes, in essence a driving force, even a character in the film.  The film tells us that the Amazon is under siege, lost to almost unimaginable destruction as man dams rivers and kills ecosystems with unregulated development.  We will lose so much if we cannot stop ourselves. The message of conservation struck me once again, and as I relived the scenes and dialogue I thought I had forgotten, I realized I had taken much of this film into myself and made it mine.

Would I have gone to Alaska several years later to clean up the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez if I hadn’t seen this movie?  I can’t honestly say whether I even consciously remembered the film when I left for my three months as a volunteer in the emerald forests of the Kenai Fjords.  But part of me knew there was something precious at stake, out there in the dark green places not cut down, controlled or hemmed in by man. Although, as The Emerald Forest and the reality of oil spills make terribly clear, these vast, seemingly untouched places can be destroyed so easily by man.

This past year, when I watched Avatar, I felt a reawakening to the spirituality of nature.  Its message of conservation was achingly clear.  But now, after seeing Boorman’s 1985 film again, I know many of my feelings, my sense of the spiritual connection we need to have with our own world, were first realized consciously with the experience of watching The Emerald Forest.  These two films do the same thing for me, spiritually.  There are pundits and critics who debate the awesomeness of Avatar.  Some claim it’s too simplistic a story, a bare beginning that is over-praised simply because it is the next big thing technically, as the first of a new generation of 3D technology.

But to me Avatar is more than a simple scifi underdog story, video game mythology or an overblown slew of special effects.  It is art, with a powerful message. So, too, is The Emerald Forest.  The two films are deeply related, and if you can, watch both and see what you come away with after entering into those two distant, different, yet ultimately similar worlds, lush with their magical forests and the peoples who harmoniously exist within their web of living flora and fauna, whether real or imagined.

And regarding the power and importance of film within our own lives, as Boorman, in Money into Light says:

“The Indians, with their music, dance and ritual, are constantly striving to escape their material lives into the spirit world. In making a movie we take the material elements of our society and transmute them into a stream of light flowing on to a wall, hoping that it will contain something of our spirit.”

Police Line - Please Cross

Like many people, in the shadowy depths of my heart I’ve come to harbor a profound distrust and fear of authority. Whether this was caused by witnessing uncalled-for wars, miscarriages of justice, or simply through exposure to the slime inherent in the politics of government, I have to force myself to be civil to anybody who has been given the authority to tell me what to do and what not to do.

I don’t even care if their orders (or as they might call them, “advice”) make sense.  I still react with rebellion, assume a contrarian position, either secretly or (if I can get away with it), flagrantly.  For example, a few years ago when I pulled into my campsite next to the Grand Canyon, and two of the rangers there warned me not, under any circumstances, to go down into the canyon all by myself, my immediate reaction was to pack up some gear and head down there, all by myself.

I took all the right precautions, brought plenty of water, knew my limits, and, rather than the hideous death that they predicted for me, I had a wonderful time.  And I think the energy that fueled my solitary seventeen mile hike down into and up out of the canyon that day was pure, seething resentment that somebody had the gall to try to tell me what I shouldn’t or couldn’t do.

Police are no exception.  I might be the model of driving perfection—but if I spot a police car anywhere near me on the road, I am suddenly faint with terror and guilt.  I don’t even know what I should be guilty about, and when I realize the illogical nature of my reaction, I get angry and resentful of the authority that triggered it.  Of course I know, after all this time, how silly my reactions are.

But those crazy, negative feelings about authority—they still continue to be set off by anybody who might have the ability or power to order me, advise me, warn me, or arrest me.

However, filmmaking is the one exception.  On a film, the police are working with us, maybe even for us, and I get such a thrill from not being afraid or resentful of their presence.

The last few days of filming we were all over the heart of downtown Portland, moving from one filming location to another inside a six by six block area crisscrossed by several busy major streets, and along a half mile stretch of the park that runs along the river.  We had police cars positioned at each of four intersections, and no matter whether the lights were green or red, we were allowed to cross at will.  We freely ignored all “WALK” and “DON’T WALK” flashing signs, and scorned the little beeping noises warning crosswalk pedestrians that time was running out.  

We could pull up to a bright red painted curb signed “NO PARKING!” on any section of the boulevard, and just leave our vehicle there for as long as we needed, right in front of the police, and no officer of the law could tell us to move on.  We even parked inside the fire station, just because we felt like it.  We double parked; we parked half up on the curb and in the middle of the main courtyard next to the city fountain, places where it was absolutely FORBIDDEN to park.

The officers helped us cross back and forth, up and down the street, stopping traffic for us if we had slow carts to push, and they kept watch on our cars and open truck beds, making sure nobody stole our stereos, tools or equipment.  Some of us even skateboarded right through the “NO SKATEBOARDING!” areas with impunity.  Repeatedly.

While I’m shooting a film, I get a brief glimpse into what it would be like to live in a world without fear of authority, and it is good.  I appreciate this unheralded little perk of the film business.

But perhaps the most wonderful of all the privileges allowed by working on a film and dealing with authority is this: I could and I did cross through, over and under, many times and many miles of bright yellow police tape proclaiming in large black letters: “POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS”

Our entire base camp had been walled off with miles of the plastic tape of officialdom in order to keep out traffic and pedestrians, and every time I had some kind of mission that took me from the set to base camp and back again, I would run up to that fearsome, authoritarian tape, silently scream “YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!” and gleefully slide under the warning and on my way.

I love this business.

Spilling the Truth

I have not written an entry for the past two weeks because I cannot bring myself to talk about film just at the moment, not when my focus is on something so much more pressing.  For this reason, I will post what I have been writing, even though film is only mentioned in passing.  As a side note, I understand that filmmakers have been going down to the Gulf to do good work.  I commend you and hope that film in your case will rise to the great transformative and insightful heights that it aspires to be.  So far Edward James Olmos and Robert M. Young have returned with the incredible video, The Short BP Doesn’t Want You to See.  You can find it here:  http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/16/video-gulf-coast-residents-are-devastated/ .  I highly recommend this ten minute eye-opener.

The following letter, one of several that I have been writing in the past weeks to entities including President Obama, BP, and Anderson Cooper’s 360 site on CNN, is in response to coverage on CNN of one of the two groups put in charge of the rescue of oiled wildlife during the Gulf of Mexico (or as my good friend Stephen Colbert has taken to calling it, the Gulf of America).

Dear IBRRC:

Just saw a feature about your work on CNN last night and was impressed by the dedication and the work of all at the International Bird Rescue Research Center. Please understand that this is not a letter about blame. However, I believe more people are needed to help right now. There are surely more birds than “twenty response team members” (the figure mentioned in your previous blog entry) on the ground there can handle, especially including the birds out in the wild that have to be collected safely.  They, the truly innocent oil spill victims, need more boat operators and trained capture personnel to get them in for clean up before they are too far gone to withstand the process, and every day of delay, of not having the people in place to respond proactively and quickly, is causing more oil exposure, more damage to internal organs, more dead.  If not now, then in the immediate future, more people are needed to do everything from manning wildlife hotlines to building bird triage or clean up centers, and their training and mobilization should start now.  Many of us, rather than using existing lodgings, would be willing to stay in campsites surely empty of tourists.

It is certainly a tangled ball of who should do what, but someone should be mobilizing the thousands of volunteers willing to help.  After locals are given slots (rapidly! they are right there and ready to pitch in), then others from around the US must be allowed to help the wildlife.  How many more birds could be collected and cleaned in time to save more lives with another thirty people or another sixty?  Of course, facilities must be organized, tasks that could and should be delegated to volunteers as well.

I believe that simply putting my name on a list and “waiting to be called” is virtually useless.  I’ve read of volunteers able to help who haven’t been contacted or even acknowledged as being on a waiting list (as on the BP site), or they don’t even know who to contact. Today I read about two volunteers who were asked to come down to the Gulf by one organization only to be stopped by another! The volunteer bottleneck, whether red tape or organizational in nature must be fixed.

I realize you can’t effect these changes, but the next time you’re on camera please let other organizations into the volunteer process rather than sending would-be volunteers into the bowels of a US Fish and Wildlife Service waiting list, or the Tri-State Bird Rescue site, which, when I tried, had no way for volunteers like me who live outside the area to even respond with our contact info.  Sending donations (which are not even allowed to go toward the Gulf spill clean up) doesn’t do it for me personally.  I work as a freelancer in the film business, so money is tight, but between shows I do have time, willingness and skills.

Please let the public know that Audubon has started a volunteer response center where people from anywhere in the US can sign up to do many different, specific, vital tasks, and they will be part of a smaller, more manageable volunteer list. The link is http://www.audubon.org/campaign/advisory/advisory1006.html#volunteer.  By the way, the link to Audubon on your site is broken.  I sincerely hope that they, if no one else, will find a place for me before my free time ends as my next job begins.   

I also hope somebody can and will act on these suggestions, for those of us who feel deeply frustrated at being kept from participating, from helping to save the animals we love when we have the time, the transportation, and the ability to help.

I worked for months on the Exxon Valdez clean up as a volunteer, and would have loved to help with the birds and otters, but was kept out of the animal work by just this kind of bureaucratic tangle. I still regret this, as I have handled birds all my life and my skills might have been better used to help those devastated creatures rather than shoveling oiled beaches, as I did.  However, the work I did do, the chance to make a difference, changed my life profoundly, and I encourage anyone who can to contact an appropriate oil spill response organization—and I wish them luck in getting past the fences that keep us from being good neighbors.

            Sincerely- Renee Prince

And as another side note: Okay, Stephen Colbert isn’t “my good friend”—but that’s only because we’ve never met.