Everyone else is talking about Avatar, so I want to talk about Avatar, too. What follows is my spoiler-tastic response to the film as well as several other people’s reactions. Since I spend several hours of my work week scouring the Internet for things to read, consisting almost entirely of critical analysis and cultural commentary, I’ve read someone’s take on Avatar almost every [work] day since the film came out; about how it’s just the latest manifestation of the white guilt narrative, about how it’s not just the latest manifestation of the white guilt narrative, how it’s the new Ferngully, the new Pocahontas, etc.
In my opinion, these interpretations are all valid, but attempting to boil down the main thrust of the film into merely a cautionary tale against imperialism, or ethnocentrism, or capitalism, or colonialism, or overconsumption, or militarism, or etc. could be to the detriment of all the other fruitful readings. This is why my post is going to be so completely exhaustive, reflexive, and at times, contradictory. And, I’ll probably still manage to get a lot of things not…quite…right. [Most likely as a result of fatigue, caused by taking too long to finish and wanting to move on with my life--no excuse, but an explanation.] So, bear with me, this is what I saw.
I had planned to forego the synopsis but realized it would probably be incredibly frustrating for anyone to read this who hadn’t seen the film to manage to follow it. While I’d like to take for granted that everyone has a general awareness of what it’s about and who’s who to save myself the laboriousness, it’s rude. So, here we go:
We find ourselves on a moon of distant Earth-like planet called Pandora in a not-too-distant future following young, white, presumed heterosexual, working class, paraplegic, American Marine named Jake Sully. He is taking his recently deceased twin brother’s place in the Avatar Program. The Avatar Program, created by Dr. Grace Augustine is a privately-funded, scientific-anthropologic-military endeavor where humans are more or less plugged into avatars, or bodies created from both human and Na’vi DNA. The Na’vi is the “humanoid” indigenous population of Pandora who happen to live on top of a plentiful deposit of “Unobtanium”, a precious mineral that an American corporation has been mining on Pandora and shipping back to Earth with the security help of the US Marines. The Avatar Program seems to be just latest in a long line of colonialist attempts to reach out to them such as: setting up schools, teaching the Na’vi English, offering them medicine/technology, etc. Thus far, these efforts to “win the hearts and minds of the natives” have done little more than stoke tensions, resulting in casualties on, presumably both sides but, definitely the human side. Jake is given three months to infiltrate the Na’vi, become one of them, and provide military intelligence as to how to get the Na’vi to “move”. His already hefty paycheck is then sweetened by the promise of Colonel Quaritch to “get [him his] legs back”; a procedure that is entirely possible on future-Earth, but far too expensive for a working class Marine. In essence, Jake is given three months to avert what is, judging from the trigger-happy military presence, an inevitable massacre, and he gets to walk around while he’s doing it (in his avatar) AND afterwards back on Earth! It sounds like a win-win; all he has to do is manage to convince an entire race of beings to move from their homes, entire way of life, sacred everything, so that the humans can gut their land. What Jake does instead is not only fall in love with, but “mate” with Neytiri, the “warrior princess” of the Na’vi as she teaches him their ways and he ascends their ranks to become a legit warrior member of their tribe, but not without ruffling a few feathers. Naturally, Neytiri is betrothed to Tsu’tey, the distrusting and aggressive “warrior prince” of the tribe who always seems to be waiting around for Jake to meet his doom. When it comes time for the Na’vi to move or be moved, Jake rushes back to warn “his” tribe, but Neytiri is less than enthused to find out that her life partner was sent to spy on her people, so she screams at him. And then ties him and an avatar’d Grace to a stake with a front-row seat to the decimation of the Na’vi’s “home tree”. He narrowly escapes death when the queen, Neytiri’s mother and the spiritual leader of the tribe, cuts him loose. Eventually, Jake, a few renegade scientists, and a renegade pilot defect from Plan Genocide and help Jake return to lead the Na’vi in a counter-offensive against military forces before they effectively wipe out every living thing on that side of the moon. After much bloodshed on both sides, what’s left of the Na’vi declare victory as what’s left of the Earthfolk pack-up shop and fly back to “their dying planet”. Jake stays with Neytiri and the Na’vi, presumably as their leader, where he feels he truly belongs.
I don’t know if the poignant metaphor could be more thinly veiled, but apparently people think it’s up for debate.
Anyway, while I think there are certainly elements of the white guilt narrative present, I think that narrative as we have come to recognize it is disrupted (at best) by a couple of elements. First, the fact that Jake is paraplegic and working class; and second, that Jake does not maintain his white privilege, or even, arguably, his whiteness in the end. Jake’s disability should not be taken for granted. While he’s representative of the hegemonic white male figure, his disability and class status render him a devalued and in fact, othered embodiment; a fact which is made abundantly clear for the first hour of the film when he is first slighted by other military personnel (because of his disability) and then condescended to by Grace and the other scientists (for not having a PhD, like his brother). When he first encounters Neytiri it is because she saves his life in spite of her first inclination to kill him (her mind is changed by a sign from Eywa, the Na’vi’s deity), and she proceeds to tell him he is “like a little baby”, and it is Tsu’tey’s personal mission to constantly remind Jake, as well as Neytiri, that he “will never belong”. A feature of the white guilt narrative is the that the guilt-feeling white in question is a hegemonic, and therefore, valued member of their world; the unmarked, the holder of power, the privileged. Jake does not float easily between “his” world and that of the Na’vi, nor is he exiled from his own into the open arms of the Na’vi. He works to be respected by his Earthly counterparts, a desire made tangible by the colonel’s promise to “get [him his] legs back” and abandoned when he realizes he belongs with the Na’vi; a revelation brought on less by guilt, or even any sense of morality, and more by his own selfish desires. Although he has fallen in love, the rest of the Na’vi are not altogether very welcoming. He makes his choice based on his feeling of belonging with the Na’vi, in a Na’vi body. Although he goes on to live a hybrid identity, having been born and raised on Earth, he gives up any and all privilege attached to that status when he elects to stay on Pandora, in a Na’vi body, as everyone else that recognizes him as what he is/was returns to Earth.
A moment ago, I said, “He works to be respected by his Earthly counterparts, a desire made tangible by the colonel’s promise to “get [him his] legs back” and abandoned when he realizes he belongs with the Na’vi; a revelation brought on less by guilt, or even any sense of morality, and more by his own selfish desires.” This irked the crap out of me and I couldn’t figure out why. My derision at Jake’s motivation for liberation opened my eyes to another means of understanding how this deviates from merely a white guilt narrative–clearly, not a lot of guilt was happening in Jake’s heart. Rather than taking a moral stand against oppression, exploitation and genocide of which he had been an instrumental part for a few months, Jake takes the actions he does, arguably much too late, because he sees Pandora as his home, his land, as well as that of the Na’vi. He does nothing at the end of the film to prevent the people of Earth from doing exactly the same thing to somebody else. He’s content to prevent total destruction of his new home and live happily ever after in his untouched utopian paradise in his new body with his Pocahontas.
Speaking of Pocahontas… I’d like to discuss Neytiri as Jake’s necessary love interest/object. Another feature of the white guilt narrative is the romanticization (and simultaneous erotization) of an “untouched” indigenous population living in utopia. When Jake meets the tribe, it is clearly a two-sex system led by a “mated” couple in which the man is the warrior leader and the woman is the spiritual leader. Incredibly obvious and salient traditional gender roles aside, Neytiri isn’t just an updated version of the beautiful, indigenous woman we’ve come to expect. Or is she? We aren’t given the opportunity to know much about the individual tribe members outside of the four I’ve already described (there is actually no scene in the film, that I can remember, in which we see the Na’vi talking to one another outside of Jake’s presence), but Neytiri is the only woman I noticed that had the warrior training and duties like the men. This fits in perfectly with a Western ideal (or hegemonic utopia!)–we still have a rigid two-sex system, in which members of opposite sexes mate FOR LIFE and divvy up responsibilities (and probably have lots and lots of babies), but we conveniently have Neytiri, who we can measure as Jake’s equal because anything he can do, she can do [better] (except ride that big bird thing). Neyteri is the embodiment of the “liberated” Western woman in a supposedly egalitarian society. Oftentimes appearing enlightened, “civilized” and well-spoken (she does speak English, afterall), but on more than a few occasions resembling a completely feral cat–especially when she assumes the “woman scorned” role and begins screaming/hissing/crying at Jake after it’s revealed that his initial mission was to more or less spy on her people. The lines between man/woman, white/colored, civilized/savage, human/animal, rational/spiritual, dominant/submissive are constantly reified through Neytiri’s actions and interactions with Jake.
Jake and Neytiri’s early interactions do much to illuminate another feature of the white guilt narrative: the part where those oppressed are responsible for educating their oppressors, and more importantly, the oppressors feel completely and utterly entitled to this education. In this way, it becomes the oppressed peoples’ fault that the oppressors are ignorant, and therefore, not responsible for their actions and complicity. Although Neytiri never blatantly explains to Jake that by pillaging and occupying their land his people are destroying their entire way of life (maybe that’s why he misses that point in the end!), it is through their teaching/learning relationship that Jake is able to empathize with the Na’vi (being, quite literally, in their shoes). Obviously, it is not necessary to live as someone else to have an awareness of their suffering, and conveying the message that only through adopting a way of life completely different from one’s own can they truly grasp the concept that obliterating such a way of life is wrong is ridiculous and completely obliterates responsibility and undermines the role of agency in one’s actions. It’s called willful ignorance.
Although the film attempts to shed light (via metaphor) on past, present and future atrocities perpetrated and perpetuated (and continuously obscured, if not entirely erased) by Western imperialistic ideals, we see individualism triumph again. Jake’s not only the main character, but most of the time seems to be the only character. There is no scene in the film in which he doesn’t either appear on screen or in narration (that I remember). Not only does Jake pretty much single-handedly (despite the support he receives from the geek squad) succeed in assimilating into the Na’vi and then saving them from certain extinction (for now), he fails to do so with any consciousness of or regard for 1. the long and bloody histories of exploitation, cultural erasure and genocide on his home planet; 2. why and how this continues to happen; or 3. a desire to keep it from happening anywhere ever again. Rather, he is content to send the humans packing and live out his personal life happily ever after on Pandora with his new boo. Everything Jake does is motivated by his own highly individualized desires, and he is rewarded time and again for acting on them.
What happens in Avatar 2: The Empire Strikes Back? They still want that Unobtainium and the violence that’s just occurred against “hardworking Americans” (or whatever) provides a (backasswards) “reason” for a retaliative nuking of the whole fucking planet. The film ends with the imperialists returning to “their dying planet”, as far as Jake knows; but we all know what really happens is they return home for more firepower and fresh warm bodies, or, they abandon Pandora entirely (one can only hope?) and move onto the next mineral-rich astronomical body and do the same thing all over again–maybe they send PeaceCorps members first in an attempt to influence their belief systems and create trade markets. Jake does nothing to “win the hearts and minds” of his fellow Earthlings and, in fact, effectively tells them that the way to definitely not get what they want is to send one of their guys in undercover, because they’re just gonna “go native” and stage a revolt! FREEDOM FAIL, JAKE.
I should probably sit on this for another few days and add more and actually conclude it and read over it a million times to make sure everything makes sense and that I didn’t misuse the word “hegemonic” or overuse the word “oppressed”, but I feel like if I do all that like a responsible, opinionated person should I’ll never get this posted, so here goes!
Some links to things I hotlinked and some I didn’t:
In Which We Teach James Cameron a Thing or Two – The Recording
Avatar, Surrogates, Posthuman Blackface - Theory Friction Practice
The Measure of a Man: What does Avatar tell us about Masculinity, Wounded Soldiers and Disability? – We Are Respectable Negroes
When will White People Stop Making Movies like Avatar? – i09
Avatar: Totally Racist, Dude - The Moving Image
Avatar and the Genocides We will Not See – CommonDreams.org
