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Debating Avatar

Matt Jones, Sam Gindin, Ed Janzen and Ben Powless | March 1st 2010 | 7

Avatar: Revenge of the Action Movie

• Matt Jones

Perhaps “war is glorious after all,” George Orwell wondered darkly while fighting fascism in the trenches of Catalonia. Watching the final battle scene of Avatar, in which a race of blue aliens teams up with Mother Nature and a handful of riotous war resisters to kick Yankee imperialist ass Terminator-style (in 3D), you can’t help wondering if he was right. In fact, I’d guess several million people around the world have been nursing this kind of fantasy since the first wave of smart bombs fell on Baghdad seven years ago.

Avatar is not the first action film to propose that the U.S. is the bad guy: The Bourne films pit Matt Damon against the CIA, The Watchmen laments the exploitation of superheroes as Cold War poster boys. Iron Man was a sophisticated attempt to reign in this aesthetic by setting up Jeff Bridges as a kind of corrupt Kissingerian America that had to be replaced by the nicer (Obama-era?) humanitarian ultraviolent imperialism represented by Robert Downey Jr.

Cameron evades the problem of relying on the Pentagon simply by being a guaranteed investment: a lifetime of making sentimental drek to satisfy the culture industry makes him a safe bet to sink half a billion dollars into, no matter what the film is. But it also says something about the time we’re living in: that investors think there’s a buck to be made flogging anti-imperialism to the masses.

Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) a marine who goes Native after he figures out that the only reason the U.S. Army is interested in exploring the lush, glow-in-the-dark planet of Pandor is to exploit its minerals, even if this means wiping the Natives out. His consciousness is helped along by a love affair with a blue girl named Naytiri (Zoe Saldana) that includes a steamy alien sex scene that was apparently too much for the PG-13 rating. The blue people are a weird composite of various oppressed groups that eerily crystallizes the Orientalist view of the romanticized Other as effeminate, violent, irrational, close to nature, and in need of leadership. The women strut their naked comely blue bodies around, but our sensibilities are saved by petals that dangle conveniently from their necklaces. Compared to this sensual world, the hyper-competitive, über-macho, techno-magical world of military braggarts doesn’t seem like much to go back to. Sully transcends the trappings of both species, becomes a bigger person who is able to lead the blue people and defeat the white people.

If Avatar’s cheesiness comes from its romanticized Other, what makes it gutsy is its sweeping condemnation of imperial power. The anthropologic research of Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is shown to be just another way for the intruders to know their enemy. Liberal humanitarianism is reduced to bribery: “We offered them schools, we offered them roads,” one commander complains, but the blue people are unwilling to exchange their sovereignty for a little philanthropy. In the end, if the campaign to manipulate their “hearts and minds” doesn’t work, the reins will be handed over to Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a General Patton-esque psychopath who is dying to unleash “shock and awe” on Pandor.

Avatar has been criticized for being unsophisticated, simplistic, New Age-y, anarcho-primitivist, a white man’s fantasy of redemption for the crimes of his race. All that is more or less true, but it misses the point: Cameron is mobilizing the action movie against its natural ally, Uncle Sam. Dazzling special effects, smug one-liners and American firepower are thrown back at the belligerent U.S. Army. It’s a spectacle, but one that leaves the audience rooting for the Viet Cong instead of the Marines.

Avatar: Politics Made Easy — Too Easy

• Sam Gindin

A good portion of the Left, coming to a James Cameron 3-D flick with relatively low political expectations, emerged excited about the politics of Avatar. That the film is a gross over-simplification is readily acknowledged, but its enthusiasts insist that the film contributes to a popular delegitimization of American imperialism. The bad guys are a resource-hungry corporation backed by the U.S. army, and the film has you cheering against the Americans and for the environmentally friendly natives (the Navi). And a marine — a paraplegic no less — makes the moral choice to switch sides and join the opposition. What more could one ask for in a film that will soon be the largest grossing film of all time, not just in the U.S. but also abroad?

I don’t think the film’s political problems lie in its over-simplifications, but in the easy and ultimately apolitical sympathies it evokes. Let’s start with the ending. The Navi are overseeing the defeated American soldiers shuffling into their inter-planetary ships to return to earth. How can this obvious link to the Vietcong victory in Vietnam not be progressive? The question, however, isn’t being critical of the American role in Vietnam; that hardly seems all that radical (especially with Vietnam now comfortably integrated into the capitalist fold). The issue rather is whether or not the film’s sentiments translate into our identifying with the resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Palestine. And the answer clearly is that they don’t because those masked and shadowy fighters ambushing conveys in deserts or setting off bombs in devastated cities can’t match the innocent nobility of the sleek Navi living in their utopian green world.

Moreover, imperialism is only bad in the film when it involves a direct military assault. The tension only emerges when the Americans (including the decent liberal scientists) can’t co-opt the natives in other ways; when education, health, and market relations (selling their precious resources) don’t get the job done. Everyday imperialism, the imposition of capitalism without massive carpet- bombing, is apparently OK.

In fact, if the film’s anti-colonialism resonates, it’s not in terms of the wars in the Middle East but with the destruction of Native society in the Americas. Yet for all the sympathies for Native people wanting to retain their land, history is rewritten so the actual tragedy and ongoing native struggles are replaced — and belittled. What we get is a feel-good fantasy of their defeating American power. They can tame and fly prehistoric birds, and their link to nature brings other prehistoric animals to join the battle on their side. Above all, the paraplegic American marine comes to lead them (incidentally winning the heart of the chief’s daughter Pocahontas and gains legs so along with what actually happened to Native people, we don’t have to think too much about paraplegics either).

Yes, there is a progressive message lurking here, and it’s nice to see Natives routing the U.S. army. But what does this vicarious pleasure really mean? What does it teach or inspire? Does the film really delegitimize the U.S. army, or just the John Wayne stereotype? When the marine asks “What do have to offer them other than light beer” is it challenging our consumerist culture or is this $500 million dollar film a much more substantive affirmation of that culture?

Is the film anti-capitalist, as suggested by its critique of the one corporation in the film, or only anti capitalism’s bad apples? And if the only alternatives are capitalism or going back to nature (the movie offers no other option), doesn’t that really guarantee that most people will only become jaded and cynical with capitalism — or even enjoy watching films critical of particular capitalist values — but never really move to a collective attempt to transform it?

James Cameron Is the Message

• Ed Janzen

James Cameron’s Avatar is in one sense just the latest of numberless colonial fantasies in which white guilt is formally redeemed when a dissident white man “goes Native.” From Paul Gauguin’s “savage man” to James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to the German followers of Karl May, the prospect of going Native is perhaps the nearest thing the world’s white population has to a pan-racial ritual. I do hope that Indigenous people everywhere are laughing at us, for we must look quite ridiculous.

But Avatar has another dimension, which is that the film isn’t really about what it’s about. Rather, it’s about itself. This film by James Cameron is exactly about the experience of watching a James Cameron film. You couldn’t find a better textbook case for Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message.”

As a media textbook of sorts, Avatar also verifies philosopher Paul Virilio’s observation that, in today’s world, war is a thoroughly cinematic experience. Often for us in the West, war and cinema become as one — and indeed, as the Avatar story moves irrevocably toward war, the special effects are ramped upward and upward. What begins as a potentially intriguing and even possibly subtle sci-fi narrative quickly transforms into a military-industrial orgy.

If you don’t believe in medium-as-message, here — that Avatar is really about itself — think, then, about how non-CGI story elements simply disappear. Gone by the board is Sully’s disability, which begins as an intriguing possibility, as his avatar allows him to enact his fantasy of having legs again. He should have remained human; his struggle with his disability would have made a more interesting story. But Cameron simply flips the off switch; as a story element, Sully’s war injury ceases to exist.

And the plot — remember when sci-fi flicks had those? The plot is doomed once the fighting begins in earnest, since in blockbuster movies victory by the good guys is assured. That’s simple box-office economics — and perhaps, too, a case of Middle Earth envy.

Special effects are the ultimate shock-and-awe pornography; it’s about seeing EVERYTHING. When you make a movie that way, it’s nearly impossible to retain subtleties like narratives, internal struggles, or complex plots, because, as often as not, subtlety is about what isn’t shown, what isn’t seen.

Understanding Indigenous Struggle

• Ben Powless

Despite several shortcomings, and commonly repeated themes elevating white saviours, Avatar carried a number of important themes and ideas in a way that allowed people to understand some of the elements of Indigenous struggles, even if they aren’t familiar with the Indigenous situation per sé.

I think if Avatar gets people to understand these struggles and act on them, or allows us to demonstrate those connections for people, it will have served as useful. The movie can be useful in making people reflect upon themselves, and also creating discussions.

7 comments

• The story is anticapitalist? My first thought when I came across that idea was ‘If the shoe fits’. Sam Gindin makes some interesting points in that regard. A Vulcan capitalist might call the story pro capitalist in some, or most respects. But alas, All capitalists are human. And if capitalists ‘think’ people are thinking about elements of the story in a way that they wouldn’t approve of, Well then, That’s not good. It’s “anticapitalist.” Capitalism, as far as they are concerned, is good and noble, by definition. The historical record doesn’t matter.

  Oh, and now that the movie has sat with me for a while; I didn’t really like it. I appreciated that it was bang for the buck, which we get too little of from ‘Hollowood’ these days. It certainly had entertainment value. So I must qualify my judgment. But I just thought it was too goofy. (Plug in your pony tail and off you go? Sheesh.) I also didn’t really like the visuals or the religious mumbo jumbo elements. (Is Cameron anti or pro religion?) And I will never be a convert to 3D. It was interesting, once, but I do not want to wear 3D glasses even without being turned off of it by the disgust and resentment I feel toward money-grubbing capitalists whose only real concern is how to jack up their profits more. I have no burning desire for 3D or high def and much else in the way of what passes for the trappings of a high standard of living.

  #1. Posted by Arby in Toronto on March 7th 2010 at 5:29am

• The explicit message of Avatar is clear and obvious: stealing natural resources or even destroying entire eco-systems without the consent of those directly affected is bad business, if not outright morally wrong.

  The implicit message of the movie is also obvious: the RDA corporation, which is mining for “unobtanium” on the moon world of Pandora, could go about their business in an entirely different way - a “humanitarian” way, the way dictated by “corporate social responsibility” - but they are too impatient, too greedy, and too aggressive to compromise with the native Na’vi. So, it would seem then as if the implicit message of the film is that there is no need, when prospecting or exploiting, mineral or other natural resources, for the destruction of entire ecosystems and “alien” worlds. A compromise must be and, if carefully and “scientifically” conducted, can be sought with native peoples in resource-rich worlds (i.e. “developing” countries).

  The problem with Avatar does not at all lie in its obvious message. Judging by its tremendous success at the box office, even mainstream Americans sympathize with the native Na’vi people and the paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) turned activist and gone native, in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and in solidarity with the anti-corporate struggles of Pandora. The problem with the film is not even the fact that this “white” man, once again, comes to the rescue of oppressed and persecuted natives as, in fact, what happens is what is commonplace nowadays from Venezuela to Chiapas and beyond: anti-globalization activists from the Global North go south and “join” the revolution in solidarity - many of them go totally native and fall in love as well - with the struggles of the wretched of the Earth. Nothing really problematic there, then.

  Rather, the problem with the Avatar, a problem unquestionably issuing from the deeply rooted liberal values of Cameron himself, is the implicit and not so obvious message of the film: there is nothing essentially wrong with the world-eating, unsustainable, and impersonal machinery of global (in the movie, universal) corporate capitalism except, maybe, the way “some” of these greedy corporations go about making profits throughout the world or the universe. The film is not an indictment on global capitalism, but a simple critique of the way some corporate behemoths go about their greedy profit-seeking business in an increasingly shrinking world of natural and beautiful ecosystems. In this regard, the implicit message of Avatar is exactly the same as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Both propose that the destruction of the world does not stem from the essential nature of capitalism but by the dysfunctional way in which technologies, resources and peoples are used or exploited.

  #2. Posted by Marco Fonseca in Toronto, Ontario on March 7th 2010 at 1:28pm

• Well, It should be good for generating discussion. But it never fails to astonish me how uninterested people are, seemingly, in everything. But people can’t be that dull. It’s more accurate, and no less disappointing, to realize that people just aren’t interested in talking to other people outside their tiny worlds. Maybe a movie using anologies pertinent to that problem is in order.

  I believe capitalism can be made to work for everyone. I just don’t believe in capitalism. It’s imperfect and not necessary, just as capitalists might make the argument that the approach by some of their own is imperfect and not necessary. But truly, All solutions stem from caring. I’d much rather see all of us, from all backgrounds, pull together to make this imperfect (and temporary) system work for all. It’s just not happening. And I don’t believe it will happen, which is not intended as an argument for giving up caring ourselves or trying to reach pass the corporate propaganda to talk to others, ourselves, among the majority.

  #3. Posted by Arby in Toronto on March 7th 2010 at 2:58pm

• Most people do understand that capitalism is the disease, but most of the people benefiting from it, will not willingly give it up.
  I suggest that to replace the power of capital, we need to change our easily corrupted representative democracy, with PERPETUAL DIRECT DEMOCRACY. A framework of this innovative solution is demonstrated on http://www.nowpolling.ca

  When a significant number of people realize the power of self governance, or direct democracy, we, together will change the world.

  #4. Posted by Pedro J. Mora in Victoria - Canada on March 7th 2010 at 10:38pm

• The real gems are in the comments here people. These articles are written from jaded and short sighted points of view. The movie has some fantastic points and has sparked conversation worldwide, isn’t that enough? What are you expecting, the cinematic equivalent of the messiah? I think the medium IS the message. Your critiques about Avatar are really only about themselves.

  #5. Posted by Been Thirsting on March 8th 2010 at 8:02am

• Avatar’s story has been at the screen many times, Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman. Solider Blue with Candice Bergman. A man Called Horse with Richard Harris. Dances with Wolves with Kevin Costner.  Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford. All elements of a White Saviour. The White saviour is not always successful but he nevertheless has a good heart. In Avatar the good heart wins over the dark heart. In this case the darkheart is the greedy developer backed by the state army. A bit of environmentalism is showcased in the movie. Which is very topical since our own world has seen some change.
  Avatar is Hollywood. Even though the bad guys are similar to U.S. type business controlled government agendas, they still have the power of the individual to conquer and control others. Others that are not their equal.
  In the end the good guy wins and the bad guys get theirs.

  The best movie line, “everything is sacred, you can’t throw anything without hitting some sacred tree”.

  #6. Posted by Steve Courchene in Sagkeeng First Nation on March 23rd 2010 at 1:32am

• I can only take Sam Gindin’s contribution seriously, as it is the only one that does not fall mindlessly into a flattened anti-imperialism.  I am pleased to see Gindin write on this topic, as I do not recall him writing on contemporary anti-imperialism previously.  I am glad to see him writing on this topic, if only in a very modest way.

  Gindin has done something that few have done; he reveals how the Left’s analysis of anti-imperialism in this film generally suggests its profound morbidity.  For a true Left would root its anti-imperialism in some variety structural analysis and would not mistake all anti-American struggles as coming from the Left.  It would see how some acts of resistance may, in fact, domesticate struggle and blindly reproduce oppression under capitalism.  That while even Vietnam cannot be understood as a straight-forward of the Left, the anti-American battles being waged in the Middle East and Central Asia cannot be considered as remotely signalling the rebirth of a Left; it is in fact the symptom of its general disappearance from the region.

  Gindin, however, avoids thinking too deeply about the basis of the film’s popularity.  This popularity is bound up with an insatiable appetite for anti-modernity amongst a broad swath of working people.  This should be more deeply troubling than it is.  Greg Gabrellas’ ‘Caught in a Smurf romance:Avatar’s popularity reflects modern psychological hang-ups’ is much stronger piece in this regards:

  http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2010/2/26/caught-in-a-smurf-romance

  #7. Posted by Andony Melathopoulos in Demmitt, AB on April 3rd 2010 at 11:08am

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