#weapon design

One detail about Jake’s customized rifle that I cannot stop thinking about is the material used for the stock—and, more specifically, where that material touches him.

The weapon is a captured RDA Recom M69-AR, modified with an enormous carved wooden buttstock decorated with fibre bindings and beadwork. The industrial mechanism of the rifle remains recognisably human, but its original military stock has been replaced by something organic, handmade and unmistakably Na’vi.

At first glance, it can look as though the wooden section is simply decorative. But the stock is one of the most physically intimate parts of any rifle.

When Jake aims and fires it, the weapon makes contact with him at four principal points: his two hands, his shoulder and his cheek. His firing hand controls the pistol grip and trigger, while his supporting hand holds the fore-end. The rear of the wooden stock is braced against his shoulder, and his cheek rests along its upper edge to align his eye with the scope.

In other words, Jake’s hands interact with the weapon’s unaltered RDA mechanism—but where the gun meets his shoulder and face, the industrial material gives way to wood.

Technically, the dark manufactured sections may include synthetic composites rather than being entirely metal. But symbolically, the distinction remains the same: the factory-made body of an RDA weapon is held in Jake’s hands, while the parts pressed directly against the rest of him have been remade through organic Na’vi materials.

And I cannot help reading meaning into the fact that it is specifically his hands which remain in contact with the human-made portion of the gun.

Jake’s five-fingered hands are the most immediately visible evidence of his human ancestry. They are the feature that distinguishes him—and later some of his children—from most full-blooded Na’vi. The extra finger is treated as a mark of “demon blood”: a physical inheritance from the alien people who came to Pandora carrying machines, guns and destruction.

Jake therefore holds the RDA weapon with the part of his body most visibly marked as human.

His hands are also the part of him most symbolically stained with Na’vi blood.

Before Jake became Toruk Makto, those hands operated RDA weapons. They recorded information about the Omaticaya. They helped identify the structural vulnerability of Hometree. Even though Jake never intended the knowledge to be used as it was, he still helped place that knowledge into the RDA’s hands. His defection cannot erase his participation in the violence that preceded it.

Jake may have become Na’vi, but the soldier he was—and the blood attached to that history—has never completely disappeared.

So he continues to hold human violence in his human-marked hands.

But he does not allow that weapon to touch the rest of him unchanged.

Before the rifle reaches his shoulder, cheek and head, its manufactured military form is interrupted by carved wood, fibre, cord and beads. Jake retains the machinery because he cannot entirely discard the soldier he once was, but the point where that machinery meets his body has been reclaimed by Pandora.

The placement against his shoulder adds another layer. The stock is the part through which the recoil of the rifle enters the shooter. Every time the weapon fires, the force generated by that violence travels backwards through the stock and into Jake’s body.

Yet that violence does not reach him directly through the RDA’s original design. It must first pass through the wood.

Pandora stands between Jake and the recoil of human violence. It receives, distributes and mediates that force before it can enter him.

Then there is the position of the stock beside his head.

The Na’vi do not connect through their faces; tsaheylu occurs through the neural queue emerging from the back of the skull. The wood is therefore not literally shielding the place where Jake connects to Eywa or Neytiri. Nevertheless, the high curved stock rises behind and beside his head, occupying the same visual territory as his kuru when the weapon is shouldered or carried.

It creates a symbolic separation between the rifle’s industrial mechanism and the part of Jake associated with sacred connection.

The gun may remain in his hands, but it is not permitted to approach his kuru without something living standing between them.

Jake’s face possesses its own significance as well. “I see you” is not merely an acknowledgement of someone’s physical appearance; it is the recognition of the person beneath the body. Neytiri is the first person truly to see Jake across the division between human and Na’vi. At the end of the first film, she cradles his vulnerable human body and looks directly into his face—and still recognises him as the person she loves.

His face is therefore connected to recognition, identity and the self Neytiri sees.

When Jake raises the M69-AR, he does not rest that face against the weapon in its original RDA form. His cheek meets carved wood and bindings: material associated with the world that gave him a new body, a family, a people and a way of connecting to life beyond himself.

That is what makes the design so moving to me.

Jake has not rejected every part of his human past. He still possesses human military knowledge. He still uses human weapons. He remains capable of becoming the Marine again whenever his family is threatened. The machinery is still there, and his five-fingered hands still know precisely how to operate it.

But he has changed the terms upon which that machinery is allowed to touch him.

He holds the metal of the RDA with his five-fingered hands—the most visibly human part of his Na’vi body and the part most symbolically stained by the Na’vi blood he helped the RDA spill. But where the weapon meets his shoulder, approaches his face and rises beside the neural queue through which he connects to Eywa and Neytiri, the metal gives way to carved wood, fibre and beads.

Jake has not discarded the violence of his human past. He still carries it in his hands.