My boyfriend and I just got around to watching James Cameron’s film, “Avatar,” last night. (Yes, I am a couple of years behind – I understand he’s also done something else that featured the Wreck of the Hesperus, or was it the Andrea Doria?).

In the middle of the movie, which we both enjoyed, incidentally, he turned to me and asked, “Are we watching ‘Pocahontas’?”

He might just as easily have said “Fern Gully,” or “Dances with Wolves,” “The Last Samurai,” “Dune,” or—and this reaches way back—“A Man Called Horse.”

Each of these films invokes the archetype of “The White Savior,” a myth which often involves a strapping young (white) thrill-seeker who goes off into the back-country seeking profit/fun/a rush/etc., but upon encountering the local primitives, decides to adopt their noble culture and ways as superior to his own. Acclaimed now as the natives’ “Savior,” he proceeds to go all Jihad and leads the primitives against the corrupt members of his own former society.

The beauty of this Hollywood formula is that everybody—my boyfriend among them—knows pretty much what’s going to happen once things get rolling, so you don’t have to over think story, plot, or the like.

I’m not in any way denigrating these films (did I mention I liked all of them, excepting “Fern Gully,” which I never saw), but rather, am illustrating the potency of metaphor.

Here’s another example: I once heard an argument that the actual “sin” being described in the Biblical injunction against homosexuality (“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination…,” Leviticus, 20:13) was more or less the same injunction against gluttony: that the “abomination” that’s being described is making the conspicuous consumption of sex the primary motivator for our physical intimacy, rather than a function or product of it.

In the 1980s and 90s, I remember hearing the whine that television was spelling the death-knell for the American family: the fact that every member had a TV set in his or her own bedroom, not to mention the kitchen, the study, and the original one in the living room, which was contributing to the alienation of family members from one another. This same argument has also been applied to telephones and, later, to home computers.

Fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century, and I can count on both hands and feet the number of times this week I have seen someone using their cell phone “Grindr” app, or the tell-tale brrring of an Adam4Adam message on someone’s laptop.

Technology is a wonderful thing, and can improve and enrich each of our lives in so many ways that I’m almost embarrassed to have to say it. But there’s a darker, seedier side to the Wonders of a Modern Age, especially if they serve to disconnect us from one another. I’m a grown man, and am long past judging any of the consensual ways that adults express physical love, or affection, or just satisfying an urge sent from their Reptilian Brains. But just as your sister’s phone addiction may have kept her from “enjoying” the opportunity of getting to know the members of her family in a more meaningful way, reducing each other to a set of stats on a cell phone’s read-out, or basing our social interactions with other gay men and women on their sexual desirability turns interpersonal relationships into little more than “fetishes,” and furthers the dehumanization of us all. I don’t know if there exists a “Savior” for that.

Cliff Dunn

Cliff Dunn is the Editor of Florida Agenda. He can be reached at Editor@FloridaAgenda.com.