James Cameron’s blockbuster sci-fi film Avatar is receiving more than accolades and tons of money. (The movie now boasts the second largest box office receipts of any movie in history.) In recent weeks, a growing number of critics from all quarters also charge that the story line of the movie is overtly racist and the plot is hackneyed and colonialist.
These critics point to the cliche plot device of the powerful white man who comes to save the noble but innocent savages from the …um, powerful white man. Some say Cameron might have at least written one of his Na’vi natives in as the hero (or better yet, the heroine) instead of making the story all about the white guy and his interracial marriage to a hot-blooded Na’vi woman in a teeny weeny thong.
OK, OK. There’s a point in there, or two. Stale narrative. Stereotypes. Great white saviour. Yuck.
But I think that charging the film with overt racism is overstating the case. While some cultural and racial stereotypes are easily identifiable in the film (the Noble Savage, the Wise Shamaness, the Hot Headed Young Warrior, and so forth), the story is really about broader and deeper themes than the color divide in America.
Not that the color divide in America is some kind of shallow reflecting pool. It’s just not the pool Cameron is sloshing around in here. The charge of racism is itself is in some ways as stale as the narrative it critiques. We may not be a post-racial America yet, but we aren’t the America we were twenty years ago either, when this sort of criticism first appeared on the academic scene and started to irritate old guys with beards and light teaching schedules. By 2050 white people will be minority in the U.S.
Only 40 years to go.
In the meantime, for an interesting look at how stale film narratives that prop up institutionalized racism in America are NOT sorted according to the skin color of the director, compare Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever with Indian director Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala. Same topic, wildly different movies; one depressing and harsh, one surprising and warm.
Spike Lee burst onto the movie scene in 1989 with Do the Right Thing, and was immediately hailed as ‘the voice of black America’. Lee then proceeded to validate every white stereotype about black people he could in film after film until he made Malcolm X, which had to more or less follow history. Nair’s point of view as a multicultural outsider (and a woman) was fresher, more human and humane, not as poisoned by the toxic historical sludge and bogus storylines that run through the veins of all Americans. Nair’s film characters were able to be human beings first, colors second.
This is often the case when the color line is broached professionally: The first in the door in any venue, the first to break the apartheid, tows the line. Then, slowly, others come and tell different stories from different, more authentic points of view. Another way to look at it is that Lee, as a Hollywood director willing to validate the status quo, was able to get his movies out there in the 90s. It’s no good being a purist if you’re watching the stuff with your grandmother on your DVD while the rest of the world ignores you.
This is stodgy, decades-old stuff, this deconstruction via lack of politically correct point-of-view business. I don’t mean to minimize the critique either: I wish every moviegoer was more aware of point-of-view, or aware of it at all. I just think that in the case of Avatar, the charge is beside the point.
Cameron might have been more sensitive, but what he’s really making here is an antiwar movie about how we project otherness onto creatures, and how that otherness is really a darkness inside ourselves. We destroy ‘other’ beings hoping to control our own darkness, when really, it is this very darkness that offers our most intimate and fertile relationship with life. We fear it, so we blow it up.
Bad idea, Cameron says in his big splashy movie. Bad idea, let’s knock it off.
Something similar happens to create institutionalized racism in America, but Cameron isn’t talking about that specific aspect of projection in this particular movie; he’s after something more universal and global. Cameron is discussing the deeper psychological forces that fuel racisim and other kinds of human violence—especially insofar as these forces drive our violent, dysfunctional relationship with the third world. Maybe it isn’t the movie Sherman Alexie would have made. Maybe Cameron is a bit tone deaf and egomaniacal. But the movie doesn’t totally suck either.
Avatar has been dubbed Dances with Smurfs, a unusually funny use of snark that does make a legitimate point. I had a Potawatomi friend who, just after the real Dances With Wolves was released, quipped, “Dances With Wolves: a movie about a white man and a white woman who fall in love on the prairie.” Cameron is guilty of this kind of myopia, sure. But I do think he takes it beyond Kevin Costner’s self-indulgent liberal wallowing into the realm of dreams and the unconscious, a place where change can happen.
Echoes of Pochahontas also clearly reverberate through Avatar, which is uncomfortable and unfortunate, but at least it isn’t the Disney version of Pochahontas, (which my two grown daughters used to refer to rather brutally as Whore-a-hontas). That delusional bit of mythic porn was actually pitched at children.
The real Pochahontas died in England at the age of only 22, a tragic life cut short by stupid, brutish white people. No evidence exists that she and John Smith were ever lovers, and many scholars doubt that her intervention on Smith’s behalf to save the English Settlers ever really happened. Smith may well have made the story up for his own selfish political reasons.
James Cameron made Avatar up too, but we knew this going in. Yes, the conquerors are still telling the same old stories, and yes they are still telling them in ways that flatter themselves. But this story has some sting in its tail and makes some points that apply to all modern people regardless of skin color.
Plus, Cameron might be a really, really rich white guy, but he’s not a conqueror. He’s a Hollywood movie director. He’s in this for the money, not for an award from the Women’s Studies Department. I personally believe America needs a ‘big story’ that can change our culture at the heart instead of way up in the head, and this is the closest thing I’ve seen to it yet. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.
Let’s definitely keep pointing out point-of-view wherever we can. Let’s keep discussing it. Let’s teach our kids to discuss it. But let’s not cloud the waters by throwing out charges of racism every time a stereotype shows up on film. Art shuts down when the police show up, and talking pretty and making politically correct art doesn’t cure racism, it just covers it over.
That’s my take on it anyway. When Sherman Alexie writes another movie, I will buy a ticket for sure. (Check out Smoke Signals and you’ll see why.) That guy is awesome. Until then, we’re stuck with 3-D glasses and Cameron’s giant blue natives making a slightly preachy plea to stop blowing everything up, please.
It could be worse.
Click here to read Pam’s Avatar review including video trailor by Pamela Grundy, Senior Editor Eye on Life Magazine, The PGrundy Review.
Pamela Grundy, Senior Editor | 