[The following post contains spoilers for Avatar: Fire and Ash, unlike my previous post about Avatar: Fire and Ash. You will excuse me for being thorough.]

The tragedy and the menace of Miles Quaritch is that he genuinely thinks he's happy. He's not dissatisfied with his life in the Marines: while he occasionally butts heads with supervising officers and his own personnel, all this happens within the code of conduct that he's been taught to practice. These conflicts don't shake his worldview—they reinforce it.

One of the central motifs of the original Avatar film is of Jake Sully realizing how unfathomable the Na'vi world is to him. At first, he dismisses it, under the misguided belief that he already understands it. His reckoning, bit by bit, is with the realization that the culture he was raised in never taught him to comprehend the many values of the culture he now finds himself among. Specifically, he comes to the gradual, uncomfortable realization that he doesn't understand how to form genuine empathetic connections to other people, let alone to the world around him. The central tagline of the franchise—"I see you"—emphasizes the wonder that accompanies seeing, the shocking and miraculous awareness of another person's being.

Quaritch lacks this awareness, and therefore lacks the ability to be aware of this lack. Empathy, for him, only extends to the sort of cultlike camaraderie in which he encourages his compatriots to stick to the Marine credo. He has a rudimentary understanding of what it means to love his wife and child, and to his credit, he genuinely seems to feel that love! But that love is distorted by his limited understanding of what intimacy means, and by his inability to grasp that deeper awareness of others.

The Way of Water sees Quaritch's consciousness transferred to a Na'vi body, and teases the conflicted emotions that arise when he encounters Spider, his biological son who has become part of the Sully family. The stage was set for a potential change of heart, the possibility of which lingers all throughout Fire and Ash. Does Quaritch have it in him to see what he's been missing all this time, either for the sake of his son or for his own good?

The most obvious evolution of this question involves the vicious, bloodthirsty Varang, a Na'vi leader whose clan's forest has been decimated by volcano eruptions. Varang, whose response to grievous loss has been to reinterpret her suffering as a boon and who now views the world in terms of dominance, is irresistibly compelling to Quaritch. His appeal to her is simple: he offers her access to firearms and outright flamethrowers. Her appeal to him is more intoxicatingly complex: she offers a twisted flavor of the Na'vi experience, in which communal gathering is welded to the flavors of power and conquest that he's been taught to value. 

It's clear to us, watching him, that he's taken a step deeper into understanding and appreciating the Na'vi world; like Sully before him, he goes somewhat native, to the point that he begins dressing like a member of Varang's tribe and alienates himself from his commanding officer. It's also clear that he only lets himself embrace this new experience because he believes it to be aligned with his existing worldview: he's closer than ever to seeing what Sully saw before him, yet he convinces himself that this is proof that there is nothing else to see after all.

The more interesting moment comes when Quaritch has successfully captured Spider, and visits him in captivity. "I'm so proud of you," he tells his son, tearing up a little; it's clear that these aren't empty words, and that he genuinely sees things in Spider that he admires and even loves. (Earlier, in a brief exchange with Sully, he says as much, admitting that Spider has become a remarkable young man thanks to Jake and Neytiri's parenting.) He tells Spider, for the first time, about his birth mother, describing her as a war hero who died in battle. Sure, it's manipulative, but Quaritch is not a particularly devious man: he simply believes that, if Spider learns more about the mother he never knew—and about how she died fighting for human causes on a human planet—he'll develop a love for the same world that Quaritch reserves his love for.

The tragedy, again, is that Quaritch genuinely believes what he says. His love for Spider is as real and as non-coercive as he knows how to be. In terms of the world that he grew up in, Quaritch is being a pretty damn good father, down to appreciating the parenting that Sully—the man who literally killed him—offered Spider in his absence. And there is a moment when Spider appears genuinely moved by this, and genuinely conflicted. He asks Quaritch for his old dog tag: something of his old man's to remember him by.

Psyche! Spider uses the dog tag to pick the lock of his jail cell in escape. He may have saved Quaritch's life once, but he isn't remotely persuaded by Quaritch's promise of family. Because Spider understands family in a much deeper sense: he has experienced the kind of family in which every member is valued, and belongs to a community in which every member, to some extent, serves as family to every other member. Even when there's conflict, even when there's outright enmity, there is family nonetheless.

What does Quaritch offer him? Only the patriarchal love of a father assessing his son and finding merit. Only tales of a mother who valued dying in combat more than she valued staying alive for her son.

An interesting subtlety of the Avatar films is that Jake Sully isn't fundamentally much difference from Quaritch. He continually struggles with his conditioned beliefs that his duty is to act as a patriarch, towards his children and wife and community as a whole. One of the central griefs in The Way of Water is how one of his sons pushes back against this, and defies him, and gets himself killed in the process. This isn't directly a result of how Sully treated him; Cameron is not that simplistic as a writer. But his loss does prompt Sully to double down, in fear and in the conviction that he alone must keep every member of his family safe.

Which is why Fire and Ash opens with Sully losing his children and his wife amidst a violent conflict, where he is immediately captured by Quaritch himself. The whole movie, seen from one direction, is a test of Sully's belief in his own patriarchal duties, as well as a reckoning with his most primal fears. And Quaritch is along all the while, finding excuse after excuse to have conversations with Sully, where the two men clearly recognize their similarities, yet are kept apart by their most conspicuous difference.

Because for all that Sully struggles with his old beliefs, he has nonetheless chosen to accept the Na'vi way as his own. He is sometimes a real shithead dad—Quaritch comes off superficially better than Sully, in his brief attempts at fatherhood—but he is a shithead dad within the deeper, richer structure of the Na'vi family unit. And his mistakes are less severe, and his conflicts with his wife and children more forgivable, because he has committed to see them, and because they have committed to see him. They are imperfect, but they are together. There is a life and a vitality to their family unit that Quaritch neither sees nor comprehends.

Sully sees this about Quaritch. How could he not? Quaritch's journey is his own. So whenever the two of them find themselves alone, Sully makes the same offer, the same plea, to Quaritch: open your eyes. Try seeing what you haven't seen. Let yourself experience what you are gradually, despite yourself, coming to realize about this world, and about yourself.

Quaritch isn't dismissive of this, exactly. But neither is he tempted. He receives Sully's missives with the same Marine-coded discipline that he receives everything: he considers it, he evaluates it, and then he continues to serve his mission. Yes, that mission largely involves killing Sully and kidnapping Spider. But Quaritch is careful to make sure that he's been given orders from his higher-ups to do both things first. Sure, he picks and chooses which superior to obey based on which one's telling him to do what he plans to do anyway. Sure, he disregards direct orders to stand down, under the flimsy justification that he has a duty to fulfill his original mission. But he rationalizes this as proof that he understands the objectives better than the paper-pushers up top. He's clear-eyed, no matter how many hallucinogens he's been dosed with.

All this leads to the climax of Fire and Ash's grandiose action sequence, in which Sully and Quaritch wind up fighting one another, on the threshold of a massive and devastating storm, as Spider attempts to get a clear shot at his biological father to save his adoptive one. The ground he's on shakes; he plummets into Quaritch; the two of them find themselves clinging to the same ledge, Spider holding his father's hand, Quaritch holding Jake's.

"Throw him up!" Sully shouts at him. But Quaritch can't; Spider shot the arm he's now clinging to. Jake winds up hauling both up. The three collapse on the same precipice, moments before obliteration.

One last time, Sully offers Quaritch a way out—only this time, it's a choice between Jake and Spider or outright death. And for the first time, Spider's there too to make the plea. He loves this man, or at least he wants to. He'll kill Quaritch if need be, but he'd rather have Quaritch join them as a genuine part of his family.

The deck could not be more stacked. Quaritch is being offered salvation from his former friend and Marine buddy. His son is pleading with him to form a family. The choice is between a deeper happiness, a better life, than Quaritch has ever known, and a nasty, violent death.

And Quaritch jumps.

You could argue that it's because of his enmity with Jake. It's his resentment at being bested. His unwillingness to let himself be dominated by another man. But that never quite seems to be Quaritch's driving motive. It would be easier, and cheaper, to depict him as a petty, resentful man who's defined by his bitterness towards (and fear of) his peers—just as it would have been easy to depict him as an empty hypocrite of a wannabe father, something along the lines of Steven Lockjaw in One Battle After Another. Certainly Cameron knows how to write that flavor of miserable, wretched man: witness Cal Hockley in Titanic.

There was every opportunity to depict Quaritch as a weak, petty, miserable little man. So it's conspicuous how overtly Fire and Ash avoids making that choice. Quaritch is, from his own point of view, an honorable man. He kills without remorse, but he avoids casualties whenever he can help it. He respects pacts. When Neytiri shoots an arrow right between his legs after Jake's earlier surrender, Quaritch has the discipline not to respond with violence. He is, by the rules of the world he came from, genuinely civilized. And his belief in that civilization proves to be the one thing Quaritch refuses to give up.

Because to go with Jake and Spider would be to admit that the American way is not civilized. It would be to admit that the Marine Corps, not the Na'vi, are the real savages. That the values Quaritch has spent his life defending are, at the end of the day, not only evil but despicable. That civilization, family, and love mean something different than he was taught they meant.

And that's the one thing Quaritch can never do. Because, in the world that Quaritch was raised in, it's better to die for your beliefs than to live for your loved ones. There is neither doubt nor conflict on his face, as he kills himself in front of his son. There is only a perverse determination, even a satisfaction. A belief that, to the end, he was doing his duty.

Cameron is not a rhetorician. He doesn't make movies to make points. His films are drawn along simple lines, and there is an obvious morality to them, but he doesn't write parables. Subtext remains subtext. At its core, Fire and Ash is an action movie, plain and simple; that final conflict was written the way it was because it was dramatic and thrilling and emotionally cathartic.

Yet there is a clear worldview at the core of the Avatar series, and it suffuses every detail of its storytelling. Avatar is, at the end of the day, an excuse for James Cameron to make big immersive fantasy worlds, and to tell the kinds of stories that little children get excited about telling. But a part of that fantasy is: what if an entire world was sentient, not only interconnected but aware of its own interconnectedness? What if what made this species alien was its biological ability to form explicit connection, and to develop explicit awareness, with all other living things? What if the kinds of relationships, the kinds of love, that have always driven Cameron's storytelling were an overt material fact of this world? And if those relationships and that love are what truly make us human, then what if the actual human race was comparatively less human than the Na'vi?

I'm not sure whether the word "human" is used a single time in Fire and Ash. The Na'vi term is merely "sky people," and with it comes a hint of dread: these people are disconnected from this earth. They are not part of the great togetherness. A major plot point concerns Spider developing a symbiosis with a species of mycelia that allows him to link with Eywa, the Great Mother of this world, and with the Na'vi. It's a moment of joy that's quickly replaced by a deep fear: that humans could use this symbiosis to genuinely invade Pandora, and to turn it into little more than a second Earth.

Who did Cameron envision as the antagonists in this childlike fantasy universe? Why did he pick the Marines to represent the worst of humanity? Because the Marines, even more than the rest of the US military, promote the abandonment of self in the name of a higher cause. Their vision of unity is as absolute as Cameron's vision of the Na'vi, but it's antithetical in every way. Life on Pandora revolves a deep devotion to the awareness of what is. Marine service revolves around unwavering, unquestioning commitment to what should be—where "should be" is whatever mission troops have been assigned to, which historically and presently includes war crimes, the wanton slaughter of civilians, and the live occupation of both foreign and American cities.

So Quaritch is compelling, not because Cameron implies that Marines are all bloodthirsty hypocrites who fetishize conquest and cruelty, but because Cameron implies that Marines genuinely believe in their own values—and that the end result is exactly the same. Honorable or not, they still kill when ordered to kill. Their devotion to their fellow Marines doesn't keep them from serving perverse, rapacious interests, whether political or economical or both.

Cameron wrote the original Avatar in the wake of the Iraq War, where American men were sent overseas to massacre tens of thousands of innocent people in the name of acquiring oil for American companies; though we hadn't seen how our actions overseas directly led to the creation of ISIS, surely anyone with a basic awareness of history could have seen that coming. Jake Sully is explicitly a depiction of the kind of young man who went to war in Iraq and left traumatized and forever broken: the Marines made a paraplegic of him, and while we don't know exactly what mission lost him the use of his legs, we see enough of the Marines on Pandora to suspect that the cause was not a noble one. The Marines used Sully and broke him and abandoned him. 

(Sneering insistences that Sully was not a compelling or a relatable character are perfectly of a piece with our culture's abject disregard for how many thousands of young men were used and broken and abandoned in exactly this way—all in the name of an unfathomably cruel and stupid cause.)

Quaritch is the antithesis: the man who has been given no cause to doubt the Marines, and who would rather die than betray them. He loses his wife to a battle that the Marines put him in; he himself dies once while on active duty; and he genuinely believes that the son he has never met will see this as reason to join the Marines himself, to swear by their values, to devote himself to a life of military duty. He can't see how this might look to somebody on the outside, because he can't imagine the possibility of an outside to begin with. "Open your eyes and see," his former Marine college tells him, again and again. But Miles has devoted his life, and now his death, to his duty of unseeing.