Could this be any good?
The original falls comfortably into the "hopelessly flawed yet endlessly entertaining" category. I suppose that the biggest problem I have with the trailer is the implication that Gordon Gecko could actually be broke upon leaving prison...
Saw Avatar last week, and apparently I must weigh in. Lot's o' spoilers ahead...
Is Avatar racist?
Sure, but that's not a very interesting question. Back before I saw 300, I was prepared to be irritated by its racism, ethnocentrism, and violence to history, but after watching for about 20 minutes I realized that all of these complaints were simply beside the point. 300 is racist and ahistorical, but seriously, who cares? It's not just that 300 is about abs and spears and gay giants and fat guys with knives for hands, although it is about those things. Nor is it to say that 300 should be treated as off limits for serious literary or philosophical inquiry; "you're over-thinking it" is one of the least useful complaints that one can make about serious criticism. Rather, it's to suggest that the racism and ethnocentrism of the story are among the least interesting, least novel, and least productive avenues of such inquiry.
Now, I will grant that Avatar is more complex than 300, and that the racism/racialism is, in some relevant sense, more deeply embedded in the story. I think that Westerners sometimes like to fancy that imperialism is something that they did to other people, but that's not quite right; the Western experience of imperialism is so deeply embedded in our narratives of self that it's essentially inextricable. In a hundred years, when China and India dominate the world economy, tales of Western imperialism, conquest, and exceptionalism may lose their charm for film-going audiences. For now, the background notion of dominance, modified only by Western forebearance, itself evidence of Western moral superiority, remains a foundational way of thinking about the confrontation between the West and the Other. While there are certainly examples of narratives in which humankind represents the oppressed rather than the oppressor (V, Battlestar Galactica), and narratives which essentially sidestep the question (Star Wars), stories in which human/Western/American dominance is the unproblematic assumption have their own intuitive appeal. Star Trek, in which human moral superiority prevents the full exertion of military superiority, is a science fiction example of this genre; another might be Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. Ursula K. Leguin's The Word for World is Forest takes this narrative as a starting point and further problematizes it, but then Leguin is considerably more thoughtful than we have any right to expect James Cameron to be. In any case, Avatar takes this assumption about the relationship between the West/humankind and its subjects as a starting point, and as such is fundamentally about colonialism. Moreover, while Avatar is anti-colonialist it doesn't particularly challenge the basic colonial/imperial structure of the narrative. More on this in a bit.
At the same time, I think it's worth noting that the idea of an alien Messiah was present in Western civilization prior to the colonial period. The story of Miriam, Moses, the reeds, and the daughter of Pharoah can be read as an extended effort to "naturalize" the leader of the Hebrews. Even Jesus Christ is, in some important sense, alien to the population of his ministry. The alien messiah is also present in explicitly anti-colonial ideologies that nevertheless accept the basic narrative structure of Western imperialism; I have no doubt that Che Guevara understood his work in a messianic sense when he tried to draw the Indians of Bolivia into a revolution that they didn't particularly care about. I suspect that there are a few idealistic converts to anti-colonial Marxism that understood themselves as playing the Jake Sully role. Nevertheless, there's considerable synergy between the "alien as messiah" narrative and the colonial/anti-colonial narrative; Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, for example, are based around combinations of these narratives.
So what can we say about Avatar's politics?
And so if the racial question is only mildly interesting, what else can we say about Avatar's politics? From a foreign policy point of view, it's clearly a very left wing film. Much has been made of the difference between the mercenaries employed by the Corporation and actual marines, but to my mind the distinction didn't mean very much. It's clear that the (genocidal) mercenaries were veterans of the (presumably American) military, and the film gives us very little reason to think that the interventions they carried out while serving under the flag (a couple are alluded to, including a war in Venezuela) are any more just than that depicted in the film. Colonel Quaritch and Parker Selfridge are about as complicated as Billy Zane's Cal Hockley, and the film falls very comfortably into a neo-Marxist explanation of the sources of American foreign policy. Unfortunately, Cameron feels the need to laden the already obvious analogy with relatively direct allusions to the Bush administration and the Iraq War. Cameron doesn't trust his audience enough to make the blindingly clear connection between resource based imperialism and... resource based imperialism. I think that in our rush to interpret Avatar as racist/racialist, we run the risk of forgetting that a fundamentally imperialist/colonial story can also be very left wing in the contemporary political context. This is not to say that the politics of Avatar are particularly liberal; the closest theoretical fit would probably be a kind of left-wing Burkeanism.
I'm surprised that I haven't read more about Cameron's troubling vision of gender relations(and probably has been; forgive me for not fully exploring the literature produced on Avatar thus far); it's true enough that the Na'Vi women hunted, but the gender division of labor nevertheless seemed very traditional, with women maintaining the spiritual health of the community while men manage its temporal affairs. Also, on passing their coming of age ceremony, Na'Vi men get their choice of (lifetime) mate, even though Na'Vi women apparently have to undertake exactly the same coming of age test. I also think that the question of disability could be profitably investigated. There's a potentially productive parallel between Sully's effort to escape disability in Avatar and Lieutenant Dunbar's utter terror of amputation in Dances with Wolves.
Is it Dances with Wolves in Space?
Sort of. It reminded me more of The Mission than of Dances with Wolves, primarily because the tension between the scientists and the Corporation was reminiscent of the tension between the Jesuits and the colonists. The narrative of personal redemption (apparently necessary to any big budget American film) is more reminiscent of Dances with Wolves, although some parallels could be made between Sully and Robert De Niro's character in The Mission. The montage of death near the end of Avatar was also echoes the final scenes of The Mission. On the other hand, The Mission rarely involved serious conversation between Indians and Jesuits, while Avatar and Dances with Wolves both include extended conversation in native language. To explore the comparison more deeply I'd need to watch Dances with Wolves again, which will never, ever happen. I suppose that the extensive use of the oboe in the scores of both Avatar and The Mission may have brought the parallel further to mind.
In any case, though, the three movies clearly sit within the same imperial family. In every case, Western/human/American domination is assumed. In every case, the only thing capable of preventing domination of the worst sort is Western et al moral superiority; the natives are assumed to be morally pure, but their morals and their military capabilities aren't very important to the story. In all three cases, morality essentially fails to limit or modify temporal power. In Avatar and Dances with Wolves, a small group or single individual prevents or mitigates the domination (at least for a while), while in The Mission the Catholic Church is supposed to provide Spanish imperialism with a conscience. I further think that there's some interesting ground to be covered in the comparison of the role of the Church in The Mission and the role of "science" in Avatar. At her other place, Charli wrote:
Other "good" characters too seem all too easily to manage the cognitive dissonance of knowing what is in store for the Na'Vi they consciously respect and love. Grace the xeno-biologist makes a few half-hearted attempts to dissuade when the tanks are already rolling. But surely she understood what was coming sooner? Soon enough to avoid feeding all the relevant facts to "the company," or to warn the Na'Vi, or to engage Jack Sully about the ethics of his duplicitous posturing. If anything this is not a story about assuaging historical guilt but about forgetting the lessons of history. It is as if these characters are blissfully unaware of every mind-numbingly obvious political metaphor in the story.This is interesting because the conflict between the spiritual authority of the Jesuits and the temporal power of the colonial state in The Mission is historically genuine; Jesuits and Franciscans often resisted state power, sometimes bitterly, in an effort to protect Indian populations in the New World. At the same time, the clerics themselves served as the vanguard of domination, giving the Spanish state a taste of Indian revenue, mapping out the physical and human terrain of native peoples, and in general providing the structure through which the colonial state was able to exert control. Indeed, the clerics themselves regularly engaged in the physical domination of the populations to which they ministered. The Jesuits and Franciscan weren't stupid people, but there was the same kind of tension between their project and that of the Spanish colonial state as there was between the scientists and the corporation in Avatar. To bring this back to the point about Western colonialism made above, it bears mention that the scientific project is both the enabler of imperialism and its handmaiden; science helped make Western armies and navies invincible, while Western armies and navies opened broad vistas of study for anthropologists, biologists, zoologists, and so forth and what not. We shouldn't forget, either, that the work of the scientists in Avatar is underwritten by the Corporation, just as the endowments of many major universities (not to mention the resources that went into the construction of more than a few Catholic cathedrals) were made possible by the wealth appropriated through imperialism.
I don't really understand how a 70 minute review of a terrible movie could be incomparably awesome, but there you go.
Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists). Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material. This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it's that too. I'll address the racial politics more in a moment, but let me address the portrayal of the military (much bemoaned here) first:
Blackwater/Xe Services LLC is not the military. Mercenaries are not symbols of the military. They are a perversion of the military. James Cameron has an unabashed love for the military (Aliens, The Abyss, etc.) but that love does not extend to those who make war for profit. It's obvious that the only authentic military man in the film is the protagonist, Jake Sully, who lost his legs in a legitimate conflict. He turns from the soulless mercenary-logic like a good proxy for the audience, and this is where the racial politics become problematic.It all adds up to crossing a line that I’ve never experienced in a major American film: drawing the audience to cheer the brutal deaths of Americans who are clearly symbolizing the military.
The titular "avatars" are genetically designed Na'vi bodies that can be remotely piloted by people like Sully with the intent of studying the natives. (Think anthropological immersion at its most literal.) The Na'vi are not merely distrustful of "the space people," they're inherently xenophobic, incapable of trusting any sentient being that doesn't look like them. If that mistrust is justified for some other reason (like a hairy first contact), the film never mentions it, meaning (in a classic case of projection) the humans assume that the Na'vi will be xenophobic before they even meet them.
But the racial essentialism of the film creates a whopper of an unintended thematic irony.* The planet and everything on it do not simply coexist in a harmonious balance of the New Age variety: they are hard-wired into a single neural network that makes the entire planet into a single entity and "the space people" less like a colonizing mercenary force than a disease. The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different. They do not belong to the planet and therefore there is no possibility for peaceful coexistence. The only way humans can be accepted is for them to forsake their humanity and become Na'vi. (Think literal assimilation.)
This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling. The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens. In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible ... and those assumptions are racist. In football terms, this is a variation of the black quarterback "problem."
For decades, coaches and scouts wished they could find a black body with a white brain in it. ("If only someone could find a way to stuff Peyton Manning's brain into JaMarcus Russell's body!") The essentialist logic at play there is obvious: black people are more athletic than white, and white people are smarter than black. No matter how descriptive these people thought they were being, in truth they were creating the conditions they claimed to describe: black quarterbacks were increasingly valued for raw athleticism, white athletes for their pocket presence and tactical acumen. That's an expectations game based on racist expectations ... and it works according to the same logic behind the narrative of Avatar.
Clint Eastwood has made some fabulous films (Unforgiven, Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima). He's made some films that aren't quite fabulous, but are marvelously entertaining (The Outlaw Josey Wales, Million Dollar Baby, Grand Torino). And he's made some terrible films (Blood Work, Absolute Power, True Crime, etc.) Before this afternoon, however, I can't recall having been bored to tears by a Clint Eastwood movie. To say that the film sinks beneath the weight of its own pretension really understates the matter; it sinks, gets refloated, hits an iceberg, sinks again, and gets torpedoed on the way down. Then it hits an uncharted rock. Then it sinks into the mud.
That said, fitting 164 minutes of rugby action into a 134 minute film does represent a certain kind of cinematic achievement. I can thank Clint for the life lesson I learned today; I find rugby staggeringly boring.
Blech.
Those who questioned my decision to include Top Gun in last year's Patterson School Fall Film Series must be scurrying for cover now:
A fighter pilot who headed the Navy in the Pacific and made a cameo appearance as a Tom Cruise foe in ''Top Gun'' has taken over as the top U.S. military commander in Asia and the Pacific.Read more...
Adm. Robert F. Willard assumed control of the U.S. Pacific Command in a Monday ceremony presided over by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who stopped in Hawaii en route to meetings in Japan and South Korea.
In the 1980s, Willard was the executive officer at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, also known as ''TOPGUN.''
Willard was a consultant and flight choreographer on the 1986 film ''Top Gun.'' He also portrayed a Soviet MiG-28 pilot who wore a black helmet and took on Cruise, who famously gave Willard's character ''the bird'' while flying upside-down above him.
The NYT reviews The Damned United, which piques my interest. When I have time, which latterly has not been plentiful, I devour film reviews, perhaps because Plymouth is not exactly in any one's cinematic top 20 (this is one of the things I miss the most about Seattle).
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