This post was submitted by Jack

Before I say anything else, I should probably hedge all of this with the fact that I really enjoyed this movie. I’ve seen it twice in 3-D and IMAX 3-D, and it does several things right by my book. It’s a wonderfully well-executed epic that tugs at my heart strings at all the right moments, the visuals were stunning as expected and the world-building project was very respectable.

It also gave its audience a lot to chew on. In fact, one of my biggest complaints about this film might be simply that there’s too much here to write about. But I’ve zoomed in on two topics to think through, reserving the disability angle for next time and here taking up the imperialist and environmentalist content.

Since the movie came out, the blogosphere has been abuzz with analysis of the ways it dealt with race. The article that I saw popping up most was Annalee Newitz’ “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?” on i09, in which she suggests that the heart of the film is a rehashing of the white guilt narrative over the genocide of American Indians.

My own take is much in the same vein. The film is superficially anti-colonial, insisting that the human attempt to mine Pandora for unobtainium and ignoring the planet’s people and their culture in the process is patently wrong, but in many more subtle and insidious ways, it is still an imperial narrative. Firstly, the main character is a white, straight man, who “goes native” a la Dances with Wolves and, ultimately, saves the day. From the point of view of the audience, we are primarily given Jake’s perspective and asked to identify with his “discovery” of them rather than any of the actual Na’vi. In fact, the Na’vi characters mostly go undeveloped. We do spend quite a bit of time with Neytiri, and we at least know names for Tsu’tey, Mo’at, and Eytucan, but this compares rather unfavorably with the eleven human characters with specific names in the credits. However, it does jive with the general portrayal of the Na’vi as weak and generally unable to protect themselves. Although Neytiri is helpful in the final battle, the take away message is still that they needed the white dude in order to triumph.

Digging a little deeper, the classic colonial gender metaphors are also replaying themselves here. The human characters are all shown to be relatively masculine. It’s all army folks, scientists, and business people. Both the females – Trudy most notably but also Grace – and the males are butched up, while the Na’vi are feminized. Obviously there are warriors (including female warriors), but they are still shown as being primarily concerned with religion, interpersonal connections and group harmony. During much of the history of colonialism in our own Earthling history, similar dynamics were portrayed by dominant groups, from the British casting the people of India and Burma as mystical and focusing in the mysteries of “eastern” women to the Imperial Japanese Army literally raping countless local women as they penetrated into the Asian mainland.

Finally and most importantly for me, one of the defining points of the Na’vi is their communion with the planet, and this is actually what I think the film was meant to be about. Certainly the white guilt element is at play, having surfaced perhaps as a Freudian slip on screen, but what I think Cameron set out to deal with was global warming and the green movement. In Avatar, he meant to tap into the growing societal search for an alternative to our present relationship with the Earth.

Starting from that point of inquiry, it’s easy to see how imperialism quickly gets wrapped up in all this. It is a long-held American assumption that “tribal people” – American Indians, various nations of Africa, or the so called “Hill Tribes” of Asia – are deeply in touch with the Earth. And it certainly is not my contention that there aren’t cultural differences, but what I am saying is that seeing them as radically different in this way is yet another way of making them “The Other” even when it’s seen as a positive.

As much as I think that cultural differences are important to recognize, it’s also important to allow for cultural similarities. I generally follow the rule of thumb that we all have both radical differences and radical similarities and to miss the latter is as much a crime as the former. Of course anytime one goes looking for these things there’s danger of projecting cultural assumptions, but, having an awareness of that possibility shouldn’t keep us from searching for common ground.

The other major problem, here, is the lumping together of an extremely diverse set of traditions. Of course in this case we’re literally talking about fictional aliens, but it is reasonably clear from the myriad visual cues from the beading on the Na’vi clothing to the descriptions of the non-Omaticaya nations (the horse tribes of the plains, yeah…) that what’s being signified is an amalgamation of actual Earth peoples. So even thinking simply about American Indians, the movie largely glosses over the dramatic diversity in the way different native nations have related to their surroundings at different points in history, and merging them all into a single idealized and over-simplified package, is, quite simply, racist.

If all of this has largely been said elsewhere, what I hope to add to the discussion is that we do have to take the next step and look further to see what this racism is in service to in order to really learn anything from the piece besides the fact that Hollywood is still not prepared to represent indigenous people in a strongly positive way to blockbuster audiences. I think it’s instructive that major news outlets have noted a phenomenon of depression following the film due to people’s strong desire to visit Pandora. To me, this reads simply that people don’t have enough plant and animal presence in their lives, which seems to be part of the intended message. How I see this mapping onto my work as a full-time social justice organizer is that the Green Movement is really gaining steam. This particular fantasy has touched enough people to gross $1,110,401,000, but I’m not sure the rest of us are on board this particular train. What I mean is that I don’t always see people thinking about the environment, animal rights, and global warming engaging in meaningful exchange with people thinking about civil rights around race, sexuality, gender, class, etc. Of course this is for a variety of reasons, I’m sure, with strikes on both sides, but it is my fondest hope that we can bring the two closer together or else I fear that these kinds of blunders will only continue as the push to be green comes more and more to the fore.

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