Why Avatar was Significant, and Not a Simple Guilt Fantasy

I finally saw Avatar, and now I can judge the hype and the con­tro­versy for myself. The movie was good – not great – but its merits seem to be dis­missed with the accepted crit­i­cism that it’s just another white guilt fan­tasy. I think that’s a sur­face reac­tion (which I’ll address at the end of this post) that passes over some­thing more significant.

Whether Avatar will reach the status of Star Wars or The Matrix is doubtful, but I do think it rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in our shifting cul­tural values. Our thinking is changing, and the themes of pop­ular movies, including this one, give us a way to mea­sure those changes.

Shift #1: Rein­forcing a New Mythology

In 1974, Joseph Camp­bell noted that once we made it to the moon and looked back at our home, our global mythology changed. No more could we see our­selves as simply the pro­tec­tors of our own sep­a­rate king­doms, pro­jecting our hate out­wards toward those who didn’t share our loca­tion or phys­ical fea­tures – because our loca­tion was revealed to be the same for everyone, and to attack each other was to attack ourselves.

With this also came a renewed appre­ci­a­tion for nature, which I would say actu­ally rep­re­sents a shift from the story of Noah to the ear­lier story of Adam. After the bib­lical flood, man is given the earth and its inhab­i­tants to destroy or master at will, with a spec­tac­ular example already set by God. With Adam, how­ever, man is told that his very body comes from the earth, and that he must tend that earth and respect its bound­aries, lest he lose his priv­i­leged place.

Remember the vil­lain in Ghost­busters? It was the EPA.

For Amer­ican audi­ences to accept the cen­tral con­flict in Avatar, they must accept this same phi­los­ophy. Our movie vil­lains gen­er­ally com­prise that which we con­sider to be the biggest threat to our safety and our beliefs – they are who we fear, and who we fear becoming.

In Avatar, the vil­lain is an oppor­tunistic, war-loving society that looks to spoil another planet after having wasted their own. This would not have been palat­able even in recent years. A while ago I watched Ghost­busters again – does anyone remember the vil­lain – the evil against which the common working ghost­buster had to fight? It wasn’t just the Stay Puft Marsh­mallow man, it was the Envi­ron­mental Pro­tec­tion Agency.

Shift #2: Respecting ‘The Other’

The Native Amer­ican Image

Instead of being offended, I find the use of the Native Amer­ican pos­i­tive, if only because it has sur­faced in the nation’s con­scious­ness as a reversal of what it once was. Instead of sym­bol­izing the untamed, savage boogeyman, the his­tor­ical native Amer­ican has become a symbol of the indi­vidual at one with its envi­ron­ment – an indi­vidual that holds an intu­itive wisdom about our world that those of us who have been tamed by eco­nomic pur­suits cannot easily find in our­selves. In short, using this like­ness is a com­pli­ment, and, I think, an overdue recog­ni­tion of native values.

The New Heroic Act

Cameron’s own natives are simply mythol­o­gized ver­sions – they are an image of what Amer­i­cans increas­ingly want to be. From the phys­ical bonds they create with other living crea­tures, to the envi­ron­mental stew­ard­ship they instinc­tively show, from their color and size to their habitat, they are both alien and familiar. They are heroic role models, achieving fully what we only attempt through our own small efforts.

If the movie is a ful­fill­ment fan­tasy, then the story could hardly be more overt. A broken, dis­placed pro­tag­o­nist has inher­ited an exciting, if vague, chal­lenge, largely because of his people’s (brother’s) off-screen mil­i­tary his­tory. He takes advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity it presents him, and earns whole­ness by finally learning respect for others and the nat­ural world around him – so much so that he turns his inherent mil­i­tarism against his own past, and even­tu­ally sac­ri­fices his very body to become one with the other.

This last ele­ment – losing one­self to walk in another’s shoes – to ‘see them’ in the movie’s terms – could be the heroic act of our new mythology. To para­phrase Camp­bell, we can no longer find whole­ness by con­quering strangers and returning home with their trea­sure; in order to sur­vive now, we must also learn self-sacrifice, self con­trol, and cooperation.

Shift #3: Science

The vil­lains of the early part of the last cen­tury were mad sci­en­tists, tam­pering with nature and sub­ju­gating the world with their eso­teric knowl­edge. More recently, our vil­lains have been the tech­nology itself–Skynet, WOPR, and anyone who would use such tech­nology for our destruction.

Avatar shows a much more agnostic view of sci­ence. It can be used to heal or advance under­standing just as easy as it can be used to destroy. It is simply a tool. In addi­tion, this time the sci­en­tist was not simply the gadget or weapon provider for the hero, but a heroine in her own right.

White Dom­i­nance, Evil, and The Force

There is more to the charge of racism than one might think, but it may not be what most people expect. It is granted that in this film, a white man joins a native people and teaches them to use war to achieve their ends, where they would have been destroyed oth­er­wise. If this is truly about race rela­tions and the dif­fer­ences between races, then I would argue that the white man’s involve­ment, by which he brings cal­cu­lated vio­lence and anger, and teaches the natives to be more con­sciously evil (more orga­nized, focused killers) rep­re­sents a degra­da­tion of their core, life-respecting prin­ci­ples – some­thing that may have informed the main character’s name. It would follow then that the white man rep­re­sents nec­es­sary evil; hardly a white fan­tasy (at least, not mine.)

I think this is accu­rate, though. The white man’s appear­ance in the tribe’s time of need is no dif­ferent than the coin­ciding appear­ance of the giant red dragon, which also inter­cedes only in the rare cir­cum­stances where nature calls upon it. In the film, the two ride together as one – the evil intel­li­gence and the brute force to carry out its ends. When peace is achieved, these weapons are put away.

Is this how aggres­sion fits within the new mythology? It may be, but I cannot help but com­pare it with the phi­los­ophy in Star Wars, where the kind of anger that Jake pro­motes in the natives is con­sid­ered a path to irreparable evil. Obi Wan’s wise, pas­sive dis­ap­pearing act in his fight with Darth Vader comes to mind. Both sto­ries are built upon the idea of nature as a living force, and I wonder what a Kenobi-like sub­mis­sion on the natives’ part might have gen­er­ated on Pan­dora. There is more to say about reli­gion, espe­cially about the sac­ri­fice of the main character’s earthly body, but I’ll leave that to others.

My Crit­i­cism of the Film

This part is easy. The dia­logue can serve as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the film’s col­lected prob­lems. It is mediocre and flat in its most impor­tant scenes, egre­gious in parts, and it will be dated before the sequel comes out.

The movie is full of phrases that tether it to cur­rent events, such as “shock and awe” and adding “, bitch!” to the end of quippy lines. That’s not going to wear well.

Con­versely, names like “Pan­dora” and – I cringe to even write it – “Unob­ta­nium” are so lazy and ridicu­lous that the writer’s guild should fine who­ever wrote them, just to main­tain pro­fes­sional standards.

Con­clu­sion

A visu­ally beau­tiful movie that tells a story which is more rel­e­vant than profound.

Epi­logue

“When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?”

Yes, this is a story about a white man who joins a tribal people and saves them in a way that they appar­ently could not have saved them­selves. Some view it at this level and find it offen­sive – and I under­stand. We all project our beliefs and values into sto­ries, so I cannot begrudge a person strug­gling to estab­lish social parity among races for seeing in this a rein­force­ment of white dom­i­nance. Nor can I begrudge someone tired of stereo­typing for rolling their eyes at the many rec­og­niz­able stereo­types in the movie – even if I find their inclu­sion positive.

I do take issue, how­ever, with the appar­ently guilt-ridden white person who wrote, “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?” I respect one’s right to project their own guilt, but her rec­om­men­da­tions are bad. “Whites should tell dif­ferent sto­ries” simply doesn’t make sense.

Every group and every person tells sto­ries that reflect their expe­ri­ence of the world as they inter­pret it, and to ask one par­tic­ular race to do some­thing dif­ferent is futile and not a little racist. You don’t have to like it, but people are what they are. I submit that an article titled “When will black people stop writing songs like ‘This Life I Lead’” would not be met with the same welcome.

Lastly, I have to point out that a white person writing a spir­ited article in defense of a minority that appar­ently cannot write its own arti­cles, which has as its cen­tral theme, “It’s insulting for whites to rush in and save minori­ties as if they’re help­less” is so ironic that at first I couldn’t believe that the author was white, and when I found out they were, I read it again to make sure it wasn’t actu­ally a parody. None of that affects her argu­ments, of course, but I may have never seen anyone so vehe­mently sawing through the branch they were sit­ting on.