Of "Avatar" and "District 9"

[villager]

some interesting perspectives here:

<snip>

Argument two: to say that Avatar is ideologically inconsistent is to make a molehill out of a mountain. This is the perfect film for our times, when Barack Obama can make a speech defending a policy of perpetual war while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, when there is endlessly debate about climate change that touches on everything except the actual problems behind the crisis (the market is not the solution, people; it is the problem). This is a film that appears to want to be an endorsement of peace but that ends in a fierce and very bloody battle for territory and resources that the audience is supposed to get behind. In a similar fashion, Avatar makes every gesture possible towards valuing nature and the Na’vi are shown – over and over and over again – being ecologically minded and treating Pandora’s animal life with respect; however, in the film’s climactic orgy of violence, Pandora’s Gaia analogue sends all manner of creatures to their deaths in the name of preserving the Na’vi, who are thus obviously the most important creatures on the planet.

This is a major Hollywood studio film – and I do know that Cameron is actually Canadian – that is trying hard to say something genuine about ecology and capitalism but doesn’t know how to say anything that hasn’t been said for the last four or five hundred years. Perhaps, more worryingly, it cannot, given that it is also one of the most expensive films ever made and it will need to recoup its costs largely in the international market, and thus cannot do anything but pander to the lowest worldwide common denominator. This is a deeply confused film that reflects in every surface the convoluted and confused nature of our culture. It is everything that it believes that it is not. We deserve this film, though I wish I could say with any confidence that we deserve better.

Argument three: Avatar is the ultimate in Orientalist fantasy. When Jake opens his eyes at the end of the film, having defeated the Europeans and sent them packing and having fully, literally become one of the Na’vi, he is living out the dreams of every white neo-pagan, Druid, or Wiccan out there who wants to truly recover a past that is, for the most part, a Romantic fantasy that has no roots in history. Unlike Wikus in District 9, who also becomes an oppressed alien but takes up arms against the oppressors because he is a selfish git largely concerned with saving his own ass (a fact that the film is smart enough to admit), Jake is a classic Hollywood hero who is able to be both coloniser and colonised at once. He is a coloniser without the need for guilt or any serious reflection on what he has done (he is instrumental in destroying the Na’vi’s village) but he is also colonised in that he can take part in a fantasy culture where everything is sunshine, simplicity, and sacredness. Jake is liberal guilt made flesh. In all of this, Cameron is ideologically at least the equal of the great Orientalist novelists, from Rudyard Kipling to Joseph Conrad, though these two have the distinct advantage of having been able to actually write.


The film, on a technological level, is a game-changer, as they like to say. As a narrative and as an example of the colonial gaze, there is nothing in Avatar that is any different, or any better, than eighteenth-century missionary and colonial writings about Egypt or India. This does nothing to exorcise the demons of colonialism or imperialism; indeed, it is a wholehearted embrace of both of these things cloaked in the shell of a protest against them.

To be fair, I’ll throw in a few positives: everything in the film from the production design to the intricately imagined and convincingly rendered worlds, looks amazing (even in two dimensions, as we down here at the ends of the Earth still don’t have a 3-D theatre) and the climactic battle is a stunning achievement in editing, effects, and pacing. Finally, Zoe Saldana as a nine-foot tall Smurf? Still hot as all hell.

http://dunedinschool.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/cinema-as-exorcism-four-avatar-as-european-orientalist-fantasy/

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. I'm reminded of when 300 came out.

A lot of fanboys went on at great lengths to discuss the "meaning" of film. And the "politics."

Load of bullshit back then too.

[paulsby]

2. the market is NOT the problem

in regards to global warming.

all one has to do is look at the abysmal environmental record of such nations as the USSR, etc. to see that the market is neither sufficient nor necessary to harm the environment.

the market will adjust, as it always does, to gw concerns

[mn9driver]

3. Obvously written by someone who doesn't understand the premise of the movie.

The "Eywa" entity was not saving the Na'vi, it was saving the group/hive mind of the planet, which was itself. That's a pretty basic and obvious plot point to get completely wrong.

If the writer wants to further posit that white men have no right and no true ability to aspire to be anything other than colonialists, imperialists, or "selfish gits" because they have "no roots in history" for anything else, well, he or she can bite me.

Happy New Year

[baldguy]

4. In Avatar, it struck me that the Na'vi were NOT the "most important" species.

They were merely the most intelligent, and they were part of a whole system - the most important part which of which are the trees. The big tree where the village was didn't just function as a tree, or a base for the Na'vi. It was at the center of a planetary information & energy network. The entire biosphere of Pandora was fighting for it's life as a unit, and even if it was injured (losing some individuals in the fight) it still prevailed in the end.

The mercenaries and the corporation didn't fail because they weren't effective enough in carrying out the White Man's Burden in the genocide of the Na'vi. They lost because they were fighting against something they had no conception of, and the scientists had just a small inkling.

[bigwillq]

5. Two movies I have no interest

in seeing.