Like the song says, “You’re not alone on Christmas if you’re alone with a friend in the dark,”* so after a delicious traditional Christmas dinner at Congee Village in Chinatown, A White Bear and I headed over to our local multiplex for the 9 o’clock showing of Avatar.
My capsule review: surprisingly beautiful, stressful for this acrophobe to watch, utterly predictable in terms of plot and character, with terrible dialogue (and really, “unobtainium”?) and the expected racism.
SPOILER ALERT: Further half-baked thoughts ahead.
I’m not an expert on talking about the expected racism, but basically Avatar is a much less sophisticated version of Dances with Wolves: a white man encounters the mysterious beauty of the unspoiled Native people and becomes one of them — but he’s special enough that only he can save the natives from the genocidal onslaught of the other white men.**
People like SEK can explicate the structure of Avatar‘s racism better than I can, but a first pass finds racism not just in the idea that the white ex-Marine Sully (Sam Worthington) has “what it takes” to lead the N’avi in a way that none of their thousands of skilled and wise warrior/hunters do, but also in the portrayal of the N’avi as noble savages, perfectly in tune with the ecosystem and, literally, the world-spirit of Pandora.
But there’s another side to the racial politics of both Dances with Wolves and Avatar. In both films, we end up hating the white Americans. They’re fucking loathsome. And sure, we white Americans in the audience manage to dissociate ourselves from the white Americans on screen by identifying with the race-traitor hero, so we avoid taking full moral responsibility for the genocide we’re witnessing.
But here’s where Avatar‘s relative lack of sophistication actually made things kind of interesting. In Dances with Wolves, the U.S. Army is the Army of the 19th century, full of racists with bizarre facial hair who are colorably not us, modern sophisticates that we are. (Okay, I’ll speak for myself here.)*** But in Avatar, the “Company” that Sully and Sigourney Weaver’s Dr. Augustine**** work for is, basically, a company that any of us might work for. Giovanni Ribisi’s loathsome boss is a boss that any of us might have — or become, given the right incentives. In fact, although some Company workers and soldiers use racist epithets to refer to the N’avi, the film makes absolutely clear that what’s driving the genocide isn’t the logic of racism, but the logic of an imperialist capitalism directly analogous to our current world-system. The N’avi are to be killed because quarterly profits and shareholder value demand it.
James Cameron has staged a movie about the Native American genocide but cast the contemporary U.S. capitalist empire in the bad guy’s role. So it was quite a, how you say, frisson on Christmas evening to be sitting in a huge theater in the heart of the imperial capital listening to the audience cheer the victory of the Native Americans over General Petraeus and the U.S. Marines. No wonder conservatives aren’t happy with the movie — although the linked article, and most conservative commentary I’ve seen is a bit obtuse about what’s so challenging about it. Avatar suggests nothing less than the radical moral rot and ultimate self-destruction of the capitalist system — and James Cameron has made it look so awesome that audiences are cheering, a billion dollars’ worth. Like the space marine said to the alien, “Cosmic, man.”
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*What, you don’t know this one? I think it’s Cole Porter.
**It’s a key feature of Avatar that, in a head-smackingly obvious way, the blue N’avi are meant to be closely analogous to Native Americans, despite a few other “tribal” characteristics — African, perhaps Asian, and some Tolkienesque Wood Elf — thrown in.
***I’m trying to be wary of interpellating my reading audience.
****I wish more had been made in the film of the complicity of “pure” science in the colonial/genocidal project — but that’s expecting way too much.
ah, if only art were taken seriously enough to actually change anything.
@Lane
That’s pessimistic.
I can only assume that our culture and art has an influence on the perspective of the society. Each generation of people view subjects very differently (look at how opinions on war, gender, government, homosexuality, race, have changed).
You could assume that art is only the expression of a society and not an influence, but I imagine they’re more interlocked than that.
With that said, I don’t think Avatar will change the world. Until I get my blue alien suit.
Yes, yes, yes, this is exactly what I was trying to say that night and couldn’t, that the potential anti-capitalist, anti-militaristic message of Avatar seems far more radical than that of Dances with Wolves because of the ham-fisted us-ness of the corporate tools. But, IIRC, your point that night, Bave, was that we clap for the blue people because they’re tall and hott and appeal to racist fantasies of noble savages, not because we have deeply learned to hate capitalism.
That moment of sitting in a theater with several hundred people clapping for the death of capitalism was quickly replaced (for me) with the deeply capitalist desire to know what it’s like to be really tall and skinny.
yeah oneiroi i realize that “art doesn’t really change anything, but is part of change.”
it’s just that bave analysis was so interesting. it would be cool if film directors, writers, musicians, poets, had more direct influence on changing things.
but that isn’t really what art is. so anyway . . .
mostly what art does is give us occasion to talk about things. like dances with wolves sits there as object about multi-culturalism in the early 1990′s, and then we talk about what changes around the object as we move through time. the object itself might influence that discussion, but it’s more likely that science or politics move the shape of things, more than the art itself.
anyway, very interesting comparison bave.
I also read it as an explicit indictment of the Afghan and Iraq wars, which is pretty radical for a mainstream American movie and a good reason for the right to hate it.
And culturally timely because now there is a genuine questioning of capitalism and a genuine interest in ecology, so it make this less about exoticism and the idealization of the native and more about a genuine shift of values. A nuanced shift from what you’re suggesting but it says something about where we are right now.
Here are some people who are depressed because they’re humans on Earth and not N’avi on Pandora.
What your description of Avatar reminded me of most* is this movie The Long Walk Home (or words to that effect) that I saw in high school. I guess I went because of some confusing gay-on-girl crush on Sissy Spacek, but in the end I was awfully moved by the story of a white woman standing up with her black maid against racism, thereby presumably striking a ginormous, nay, a CRUSHING blow for civil rights. Um, well ok. I was seventeen. Had not given these things a lot of thought.
What I’m curious about is whether these narratives do much harm or is just deeply embarrassing. It seems to me there are two parts to it. There’s the self-congratulatory, heroic wish-fulfillment thing, and that’s just kind of an eye-roller but not so terrible in the scheme of things. Who cares if some douchebag feels smug for twenty minutes after the movie? Perhaps (and I haven’t followed your link yet) what the skeptical find more troubling is the way this sort of back-patting may feed into a white viewer’s sense that the matters bluntly alluded to are much more resolved than they are–that Avatar is a fairy-tale about those historical matters of race inequity, safe now for Sci-Fi because they’re solved.
Can’t imagine I’ll see Avatar but it’s fun to play along at home.
*Primarily because Dances with Wolves was the first Kevin Costner film for which I constituted my own drove in which to avoid it, so it can’t really remind me of Dances with Wolves. I mean yeah I watched clips on youtube later because Mary McDonnell, but.