war on film: avatar

Before going to see Avatar, I read Annalee Newitz's heavily circulated io9 article, "When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?" in which she skewers the all-too-common scenario in which "a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member." I found the article pretty funny and insightful, but then I read responses from a few people whose judgment I trust saying that Newitz was being too harsh and Avatar was awesome and maybe the most politically radical blockbuster of all time. So I decided to approach the film with an open mind.

And I have to say, it was kickass. James Cameron has made an anti-colonial popcorn movie, and damn is it fun. If you are going to the movies to watch shit get blowed up real good, having it be some colonizer's shit for a change is really, really awesome. I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve, two days before flying to Cairo for the Gaza Freedom March, and I won't deny that it felt like a perfect sendoff.

Avatar is clearly a technicolor sci-fi re-imagining of the colonization of the Americas, complete with environmentally rapacious extraction of raw materials and displacement and massacre of the indigenous population. But Cameron mixes in plenty of neo-colonial imagery along the way. American audiences will instantly recognize visual echoes of Vietnam in Avatar's lush jungles and helicopter gunships. The phrase "Shock and Awe" is dropped into the dialogue at a key moment, and the squad of corporate-funded contract killers hired to conquer Pandora seems to be what a hybrid of the East India Company and Blackwater might look like if it were run by Colonel Kurtz.

Cameron has never been known for his subtle and delicate touch--but then, neither has colonialism. I never thought the colonizers, who are after a valuable metal called...wait for it...unobtainium, were too crude or violent or racist. Colonialism is crude and violent and racist. Aliens are often a metaphor for the other in science fiction, and these colonizers regard the other with an utter contempt that is thoroughly believable. They build schools and use anthropologists to manipulate the population into trusting them. When that doesn't work, they use spies like the film's protagonist, Jake Sully. And when Sully and his Scooby gang decide the natives aren't so bad and turn against the colonial masters, the colonizers are perfectly willing to switch tactics to full-scale genocide.

There are plenty of cliches in Avatar. Yes, the Na'vi dress like stereotypical Hollywood Native Americans for no apparent reason. (In one of my sci-fi pet peeves, lots of things also happen to have extra legs and grow to enormous size for no apparent reason. Why does a galloping animal need six legs? That makes no anatomical sense.) Yes, of course the white guy main character falls in love with the tribal chief's svelte blue cat-daughter Neytiri. Come on, did you really think there wasn't going to be a love story to write a ballad about for the closing credits? Might as well go ahead and just call her Pocah'ontas.

But none of these cliches were terribly unexpected, and I was having enough fun enjoying the ride that none of them would have been a fatal flaw and Avatar could have been an exceptionally well-made popcorn action flick with a solidly anti-colonial message.

Except.

Except for the part when the white guy flies in on a giant pterodactyl (I swear I'm not making this up) and saves the day. And magically sweeps away all the indigenous leadership and unites the Na'vi tribes in a way no Na'vi has ever been able to do and then leads them in battle (where, conveniently, both of his two male rivals for leadership, Neytiri's father and betrothed, are killed.)

And then I started to see the point of Newitz's article.

Here's the thing. I have absolutely no problem with a movie in which some of the oppressors switch sides and decide they're willing to fight and die on the side of oppressed. I think that's quite awesome. In theory, I would not have a problem with a scenario where these race traitors provided a crucial bit of information that led to victory. That's exactly why double agents and collaborators are so dangerous--they know the other side. But, because it's a Hollywood movie, the white guy (and ex-Marine!) who switches sides to stand in solidarity with the blue people can't just be part of the struggle--he has to lead the struggle. And he has to lead it way better than any of the blue people ever could. Because clearly they weren't capable of winning their own liberation; they needed some white dude to roll in and convince them he deserved to be their leader because he could ride some giant bird like one of their ancestors could. And because they're simple native people, they believed him. And because it's Hollywood, he was right.

All of this, in turn, begs the question: why is there a white guy as the protagonist at all? Why isn't badass fighter and hunter Neytiri the protagonist? Or, if a blue catwoman is too radical for Hollywood, what about her father? Or Tsu'tey, a gutsy warrior whose role in the two hours of the film before the final battle is mostly to cock-block Jake?

I don't buy that it's because audiences can't identify with a blue-cat-person protagonist. The creators of Wall-e made us identify with a toaster.

There's a white male protagonist in Avatar for the same reason there's a white male protagonist in Dances with Wolves, or The Last Samurai, or Blood Diamond, or Glory. (You can play this game with so many Ed Zwick movies!) Because the missing element that the oppressed need to win their liberation is clearly Kevin Costner. And because the presumed mainstream movie audience is white, and male for anything involving action, and the Hollywood studio presumption is that people can't identify with a protagonist who doesn't look like them.

Turns out, there are a few people who've had no trouble at all identifying with the Na'vi. A tribe in eastern India is appealing to James Cameron to help them stop mining company Vedanta from drilling into a mountain they consider sacred. (Think he will?) And last Friday's weekly protest against Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Bil'in featured an Avatar re-enactment by Palestinians and Israeli supporters. The Israeli soldiers standing by seemed not to get the joke, and fired tear gas and sound grenades per usual.

The Bil'in Na'vi pictures zipped around the interwebs and reached such diverse sources as the New York Times, AP, the Telegraph (UK) and AOL News. I don't know if I think this is a brilliant PR move, completely silly, or a bit sad that these demonstrators--who've been protesting nonviolently for nearly five years against the wall that's cutting their village lands in half--had to dress up as fictional characters to get the point across about their real-world struggle. But then, maybe when you've been protesting every week for the past five years, you just need to do something different every once in a while to spice things up.