So, I saw Avatar on New Year's Eve...

[grinninfoole]

In one word: WOW.

In more words: I was moved by this movie.

I have read several critiques of the film which all pointed to a racist sub-text of one sort or another.
Tasha Robinson posted a good short review, and there are links to some of those more negative reviews of this sort in the comments. (For reviews attacking the film as 'liberal' and 'America hating', check out Big Hollywood.)

I do not contradict those opinions–even the ones at which I rolled my eyes. Avatar does share thematic (and plot, iIrc) elements with Dances With Wolves, and probably a number of other films. Seeing as the latest in what rollick  calls America's Holocaust Narrative makes sense, and this is the story of a white man who becomes one of the colored people, etc.

As a (re)viewer, though, I tend to focus on the particulars of the film itself, on how the story works within its own little world. (Yes, I know, very New Criticism. I did go to Kenyon.:) I don't deny the applicability of larger perspectives, or of experiencing the movie through the emotional lens of 'ugh, this is White Guilt Fantasy–I hate those', but this film, I think, is not an allegory, and I believe that there is more to it, both emotionally and dramatically, than a sop to White Guilt.


For me, the experience of Avatar tapped into something that feels more primal than white guilt–the desire for a perfect communion of flesh and consciousness. For one thing, the Navi are physically cooler than we are: they’re ten feet tall, stronger, tougher, and beautiful. They are all slender and fit, with gorgeously expressive golden eyes, soothing blue skin tones with appealing highlights, fun little tails, and patches of bio-luminescence (that’s right, they literally glow with beauty.) So, too, does the forest in which they live. Jake Sully, the film’s protagonist, finds himself stranded alone at night in this forest, and aware that he could be in mortal danger, he does what any marine would do: makes some weapons and gets ready to defend himself. So he sharpens a stick into a spear, and then wraps the other end in cloth and soaks them in some sort of sap, and makes them into a torch.


Using fire to defend ourselves against dangerous beasts is perhaps the oldest human trick, of course, but it just makes him a target on Pandora. He’s saved by a Navi who puts out the torch, and then Jake discovers that he isn’t plunged into darkness, but into a soft, glowing blue dreamscape. The forest is alive with light, and the plants and his flesh both glow brighter when they brush one another–even the very ground lights up as they stride over it.


This world doesn’t only look like an SF Lothlorien, it is measurably, scientifically demonstrably, alive and conscious. The Navi refer to the world-mind as Eywa, and treat it with something like worshipful reverence. (Though not actual worship, since they are interacting with a discrete, albeit vast, physical being, and not an emotional projection onto the universe in general.) The Navi have an appendage, a long bundle glowing strands (that look like fiber optic cables) that apparently connect directly to their central nervous systems. Most of the animals and plants on Pandora have similar strands, and it allows the Navi to actually, physically connect themselves emotionally and mentally to their environment. They don’t just get on the backs of their pterodactyl things and ride them, they actually share the experience of flying. Of course, this also means that when the Navi hook up for sex, they literally hook up.


And when Jake, afraid that the Navi’s efforts to defend Pandora from the marines will fail, doesn’t just pray to Eywa for guidance or intervention, he literally plugs himself into the forest and shares his concerns. And Eywa, alerted to the threat, responds by rousing all the animals of the planet to mass and attack the marines before they can bomb the sacred grove/central processing hub.


Contrast this amazing alien world with Jake’s human existence: Earth is apparently an environmentally degraded hell-hole, full of wars and pollution etc. etc. Jake himself was a marine, fighting a jungle war in South America, until he was wounded in the spine and mustered out because he’s confined to a wheel chair. The total fluke that his identical twin, who spent years studying the Navi and for him the Avatar of the title was grown, was killed in a random mugging means that a proudly ignorant jar-head finds himself on another world in a superior alien form, that also allows him to walk again.

So, really, to get this film's appeal, do we have to bring in a racist, colonial meta-narrative about expunging white guilt, co-opting native identities while preserving the colonizer’s privilege, putting white minds in black bodies, or playing Peter Pan going out to play savage with insultingly stereotyped Indians? I’m not saying that those shoes don’t fit, but, really, what nerd doesn’t understand the attraction of being able to discard the soft, awkward, clumsy, hairy, pink/brown/olive/etc. meat-sack we currently inhabit in exchange for a beautiful blue dream-self? What person who survived puberty doesn’t want to be able to really connect with other people, and indeed, their whole environment, in a non-trivial, no bullshit way (without having to use mind-altering chemicals–the Navi can expand their consciousness and drive all at the same time!)? For that matter, who hasn’t, at least once in a while, craved a moment of total communion with their entire world, in which that world evaluates your whole being, your true inner self, and finds you worthy? I certainly do. Jake Sully, the lucky cartoon bastard, gets that.


Me? I’ll have to do it the hard way.



Or, maybe this comic puts it more simply: Multiplex from last week.

Comments

[blue-crow.livejournal.com]

The more I've thought about Avatar, the more it shared parallels to Dune- and the more that made me uncomfortable about liking Dune. While Dune has a longer narrative arc and some extra political factions to contend with most of it is really the same- majority male from off-world comes in, has to depend on the natives to survive, has to fight some of them for his place in the order, falls in love with the spiritual girl (which is convenient because she's the one that will help him secure his leadership, because the spiritual girl is also the one who will become the spiritual leader when the current spiritual leader dies) and eventually becomes so much better at all the current native customs than any of the other natives who have been doing those things all their lives that he uses those customs to defeat his own people. Even Jessica was more or less Dr. Grace.

I'd never interpreted Dune as a white-guilt fantasy and now I have to.

I have a lot of mixed feelings on the whole innate potential/"really i'm special but no one sees it yet" theme. Everyone wants to have a talent that hasn't been discovered yet- I mean, that's the theme of every action movie as well as every teenage girl makeover rom-com. I just wish there was a gratifying way to do it without making everyone else look the weaker for it. There are ways to have talents that aren't "and i'm instantly better than everyone else who has been doing this their whole lives because I'm special!" That was the part that ruined Avatar for me, really, that he had to be the best to be useful. I guess he'd trained as a Marine for a long time, but the whole spiritual connection with nature that he had as well as a native in two months- it just seemed wrong to me.

The only character I really liked was the pilot chick. She had a better balance- she got to learn new skills (navigating in the earthmotes) but mostly was useful based on her moral compass and her prior learning.

Yes, but...

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

I won't deny that reading of Dune, but I think it misses the book's central truth: that it is a tragedy, and that Paul's story is one of failure.

Yes, by combining the different elements of his home culture, such as his mentat training, with his immersion into Fremen culture, Paul is able to achieve things no one else ever has. However, his goal throughout the book is not to become leader of the Fremen, or Duke Atreides, or Emperor, or Muad'Dib per se. It's to avoid the various possible futures that he sees. He doesn't want to die (which is selfish, but forgivably so), and he doesn't want various other options that he sees to play out, so he makes the choices that he makes, even though they draw him ineluctably towards the Great Destiny of becoming emperor and triggering a galactic jihad that kills billions. Which is what he's wanted to avoid in the first place.

That may be White Guilt, and it may be a fantasy, but it's also a nightmare. No thank you.

Also, Paul is way cooler than Jake Sully. Jake is, more or less, a blank slate. He's had previous life experiences, obviously, but he's the intensely educated, highly accomplished person that Paul is, even though Paul is only, what, 16 when the book starts? Paul may know little about the Fremen, but he's been trained by the Bene Gesserit and by mentats and by the most accomplished swordsman of his era. He was, already, a person to be reckoned with.

Consider this: if both Jake and Paul were very dark-skinned, the obvious racio-political iconography would be somewhat blurred. Jake, however, would remain someone without a place in his home culture, ready to embrace something different, especially when it offered the obvious, immediate appeal of walking again.

Arguably, it's that very ignorance that allows him entree to Navi culture that Grace hasn't found. (Though, really, that does beg some questions, because she would have started out as ignorant as he is, and somehow they learned Navi language and got tissue samples, etc. Also, if she's interested in the forest as a neural net, why didn't she plug herself into it instead of just studying it? If she did, what happened? There's a hole I bet Cameron never plugs.)

Anyway, I'm not an anthropologist, but from what I gather, when one makes first contact with a new society, one tends to interact with two segments thereof: the outcasts at the bottom and the elites at the top. The outcasts because they have little to lose, and the elites because they have the social capital to interact with weirdo foreigners. The majority of the society tends to interact with outsiders only after those interactions have become more commonplace, literally more accustomed. So, Jake getting taken in and trained by the leader's family isn't surprising. After all, the Navi have a problem, and maybe finding a new way to deal with these fucked up Sky People will solve it. Which means taking this new opportunity of a Sky Person who has been marked by the World Mind as special and wants to learn their ways. (Though, again, is he really the only human/avatar to ask for that? Really?)

Once he's gotten some understanding of their society, and decided that he prefers it, the Home Tree is napalmed, and he's cast out. So, really, the only way back is to move from one extreme to the other, and the one way he knows to do that is to try the crazy scheme of flying the Big Red Thing. And he gets lucky, and it works. Who knows how lucky he really got, though? Maybe if others were to try it, they'd succeed, too. But maybe only he's been desperate enough to try for the past few hundred years. And, really, that's his only 'heroic' act. The rest of the time, he's a figurehead, or just one many fighting in a cause.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Paul, in contrast, is still Duke Atreides. If he'd escaped Arrakis and gotten home to Caladan, he would still have been a political threat to Shaddam IV, and might possibly have wound up taking the throne in a bloody war anyway. His adaptation to Fremen culture, and adoption into Fremen society, is a flash point that leads the Fremen to recognize and exert their own power on a galactic stage. They already call the shots on their home world, mostly without anyone else even realizing. Paul brings his own assets, but even without him, the Fremen already had the deadliest army in the galaxy (as good as or better than the Sardaukar) and, because they control the spice, they also control the galactic economy. These things are true, regardless of Paul's contributions. Paul's role is simply to lead them to exercise their power. He is an outsider, but any insider who had similarly unified the Fremen could have do it, if he or she had decided it was worthwhile.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Michelle Rodriguez was terrific by the way, and I wanted them to show us more about her character, who was one of the few humans in the film without an avatar to recognize that mass-murder and terrorism are evil.

[trovia.livejournal.com]

As a (re)viewer, though, I tend to focus on the particulars of the film itself, on how the story works within its own little world.

That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?

"That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

In a word: yes.

In more than a word: yes, but…

Well, first, I can tick off most if not every box on the white privilege checklist, which is why I do not want to tell people who see this story as a narrative stemming from or playing into such privilege that they are wrong. I can see the applicability of many of the complaints: yes, the main character is a played by a white, male actor; all the CGI Navi (who are physically gifted people of color who live in close harmony with their natural setting) are played by non-pale actors like Zoe Saldana and Wes Studi; yes, the culture of the Navi is based on a mish-mash of native American traditions; yes, the white hero is reluctantly taught their warrior-ways, and rises to unite all the Navi tribes in a war against his own kind; yes, he winds up bagging the chief’s daughter. Altogether, it means that Avatar can have a strong appeal to pale people who want to appropriate positive qualities of other ‘races’ while still maintaining the social power and status (i.e. privilege) that Whiteness affords them.

I just don’t think it’s the only reason to like this movie. I don’t think it’s why I liked this movie. Getting to be the big hero, the leader, the guy with the hottest girl friend is not without appeal to me, but the root of it (for me) is the physical transfer into a better body, and the literal communion with the world around me. One might label this a racist fantasy, especially since the Navi explain this phenomenon with concepts taken from various animist traditions.
However, I contend that one need not be a racist, sexist, capitalist, patriarchal colonialist to understand the appeal of literally plugging one’s central nervous system into a vast consciousness composed of all the plants and animals of the world on which one lives. And while for us this is a metaphor, for the characters in the film this is a literal, scientifically documented state of affairs.

As a more-or-less atheist, I find that appealing.

Or, to put it more viscerally, I liked the idea of going from someone with an ill-fitting, awkward flesh-mantle and a desire to fit into a social world (yet uninterested, if not repelled, by the one in which I find myself), to a, basically, a jock who fits right in.

Millari suggested to me that maybe your point is simply that the act of disregarding the racial metaphors and enjoying what I like about the story is, itself, an act of white privilege. If so, I must emphatically disagree. Everyone has their own unique impression of the art they read, watch, hear, etc. Choosing to enjoy something for one’s own reasons is, therefore, something that anyone and everyone can and should do. Such true democracy is the antithesis of privilege.

The privilege comes in when one insists that one’s personal experience is better than others, or that someone else’s objections don’t matter. I don’t mean to make that claim. I wrote this post to talk about what I like about this movie, not to deny what other people didn’t. I might not have bothered, but the commentary on the film that I have seen has been either lauding it for amazing visuals and cool action or deriding for racism (or, in a couple of cases, hating America.) So, I thought I’d chime in, too. That’s my right, and my privilege as a person with a livejournal, but that’s all.

Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[trovia.livejournal.com]

Millari suggested to me that maybe your point is simply that the act of disregarding the racial metaphors and enjoying what I like about the story is, itself, an act of white privilege.

Yes, that. For the record, I don't know the movie, I don't know much about the whole privilege debate and I wouldn't recognize the white myth that this movie may or may not be exploring for the life of it, if I watched the movie. Which I may still do, as my colleagues tell me it's a good movie. Even the POC amongst them.

What I know is though that you can hardly claim that you have chosen your POV because you like the New Criticism (whatever that is, if we have it here, we don't call it that). It implies that other (non-privileged) people could have made that choice too when clearly they couldn't have. Saying, "Who cares about racism, it's a great movie" is one thing. Saying, "I choose not to look at it like that because I'm from this other school of thought" is slightly insulting because you're arguing from a standpoint that the "This is racist!" faction simply cannot take. Calling the whole business "true democracy" afterwards... well.

Last Christmas, when my family still hadn't quite learned to deal with my being gay, we watched the movie "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry" together which is about two straights who pretend to be a gay couple. Adam Sandler movie, not my kind of thing in the first place. I wasn't in the best of moods and the movie annoyed me. I made a couple of comments of choice about how this movie doesn't do shit to promote gay rights, as it just explores the new setting from a straight POV. This annoyed my family who just wanted to enjoy a good comedy, advising me I should stop looking at the greater picture. Long story short, this resulted in a big fight and it ended with me getting the hell out of that house.

If there were no people on this planet thinking what you're thinking (about homophobia instead of racism), I would never have to have those fights. That's my reality.

Anyway, my two cents.

The privilege comes in when one insists that one’s personal experience is better than others, or that someone else’s objections don’t matter.

But that's wrong. Privilege is about the freedom to ignore that which you want to ignore. It's about choice. There's nothing wrong with exploring that freedom if you have it but it's another thing to act like it's a matter of academic preferences to do so. The former is just rude (and god knows I choose to be rude on all kinds of topics all the time) but the latter is dismissive. Also, untrue. Or so it seems to me. Hence, my original comment.

Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that I understand your position, so what I'm about to write may miss the point. If so, please do set me straight.

I think your family was wrong to disregard your response to Chuck & Larry. Telling you to shut and stop spoiling their fun with your perspective is exactly the sort of privilege you and I both dislike. That's what I'm trying to do or to defend, nor is it at all democratic. [NB, I have avoided seeing this movie, because I suspect I'd hate it just as you did.]

If someone had said to you 'I know you hated the movie, but I liked XXX about it, especially when Adam Sandler did YYYY and then someone hit him with a pie', that's not an assertion of privilege. It's an expression of a personal experience and individual taste. It doesn't dismiss your response, even if it doesn't agree with it, and it allows room for you and this other person to have a conversation about it, after which you might see some virtue to the film, and they might have come to despise it as the homophobic piece of crap that it appears to be. That's what I mean by 'true democracy': it's a game we all can play, if we don't insist on 'winning'.

I don't insist that others agree with my response to Avatar, nor do I claim that the other reviews that criticize Avatar are wrong, though the blowhards at Big Hollywood do mightily tempt me. I don't think that I choose my positive emotional response to the film anymore than this guy (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jtreese/2010/01/11/treese-avatar) chose his negative one. (Though I bet his stridency is motivated by long-suppressed guilt.)

It's true that very few people share my social, economic, national, and cultural background, and that makes it harder for them to see things my way. But it's hard for me to see things their way, too. And I haven't given up on doing so.

Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[trovia.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't mean to do more than point out my impression. The rest is just decoration. :)

We could probably have a really interesting conversation about this, especially considering I think our opinions aren't that different. I hope you don't mind if I don't continue, as I currently have a hard time focusing on long posts. It's entirely possible that I ended up being confusing for you due to that, too.

Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

After a few years out of academia, I find my ability to focus and dissect longer texts has gone right out the window.

It's totally fine to leave it here. I definitely don't want to have one of those dumb arguments where you more or less agree, but somehow can't seem to leave it at that, so you keep wrangling and wrangling and wrangling...

And I'd really like for you to like me.

Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[trovia.livejournal.com]

But those arguments are the best. ;) I joined fandom originally- Star Trek fandom, that is- because it was a place were you could have endless debates about why there are no toilets, and why do the doors know to open. They were all very vicious but you can hardly get angry at somebody for believing the doors are intelligent lifeforms, and members of the Federation. :)

Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

That's awesome. :)

The lack of toilets didn't really get to me (we don't see a lot of WCs on other shows, either), but the lack of time pieces. They're prompt people, they have a calendar system, they have a quasi-military culture, and yet none of them wear watches of any sort. How do they know what time it is? They never ask! This really started to bug me back in 1989, when my parents gave me a Star Trek watch for Xmas.

And, really, at what point do intelligent computers become sufficiently conscious to qualify as people? Star Trek ducked that one a lot, I suspect largely for budgetary reasons.

Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"

[trovia.livejournal.com]

The curious thing about the toilets was that they are not on the blueprints. There was such a thing as official blueprints of the Enterprise, and bathrooms were not part of it. I'm very certain that this is were all the bathroom scenes on BSG originated. Personally, I've always promoted the idea that the content of the bladder is beamed directly into space but strangely, I was alone in that belief. It would sure be an advantage in battle.

The lack of watches is curious. I've never noticed that. You must have been very pleased to notice that Gaeta always wore a watch.

And, really, at what point do intelligent computers become sufficiently conscious to qualify as people?

At the point where they have a big enough fan base. ;)

[mole-underfield.livejournal.com]

Excellent review!