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Links: Avatar Racist? Anti-Imperialist?
24 Dec2009
James Cameron’s film Avatar has had the blogosphere talking about race and imagery in film. Is Avatar a racist tale or an anti-imperialist parable? Going into a holiday weekend, those considering catching the film may want to get a sense of what people are saying of the Avatar‘s politics and ideas.
Reappropriate compares Avatar to other films in which whites make incursions into indigenous lands.
Annalee Newitz asks when will white people stop making movies like Avatar? For what it’s worth debunkingwhite reminds us of Newitz’s racial identity and past writing. But Racialicious goes in on the funniest (but most true) part of the comments out of the Newitz review.
Eric Ribellarsi gives a response to Newitz’s review, and Nando Sims says it is “great to see this film — that upholds treason and desertion and armed resistance, at a moment when the U.S. is involved in two distinct colonial wars.” However, Ann Marlowe writing for the conservative Forbes calls Avatar the most neo-conservative movie ever made, saying, “the right-wing attacks on Avatar show a frightening tone-deafness to what most Americans find inspiring, cool or exciting–the same tone-deafness expressed by the tired visuals of the McCain campaign and Web site and the tired dogmas that substitute for a Republican vision.”
The New Yorker says “Avatar gives off more than a whiff of nineteen-sixties counterculture, by way of environmentalism and current antiwar sentiment… Nor is there much point in lingering over the irony that this anti-technology message is delivered by an example of advanced technology that cost nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars to produce; or that this anti-imperialist spectacle will invade every available theatre in the world.”
Courtland Milloy says the film, whether you agree with the criticisms, is good to see for its effects as well as the discussions on race.
Writing for NPR, Adam Frank talks about Avatar and the myth of the noble savage, adding “I was struck by how easily anxieties that began with an older era of European colonialism could be morphed into a future of space exploration and exploitation.”
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3 Responses to Links: Avatar Racist? Anti-Imperialist?
Nick Alvarado
December 24th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Comment Troll here. I saw Avatar and the movies Reappropriate mentions. Two things I would point out. One, I think Avatar is closer to “How The West Was Won” 1962. It was filmed in Cinerama, where 3 projectors cast 3 images on to a special wide screen and 7 discreet sound sources are used. It was the 60′s version of 3D IMAX. It also had a railroad company hiring a soldier/hero who was not happy about lying to the natives that the railroad would be just fine if it went through their hunting grounds. He eventually flees as the war between the two groups erupts. Two, the story reminds me of the Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked in the south, passing through Texas and learning the local languages, enabling others DeSoto and Coronado, to penetrate deeper into the US. There were other conquistadors who took native speaking people and used them to conquer the empires of Central America. Cameron does a good job of recycling plot ideas that are known to make money. Yet at the end he makes Yankee go home and puts the natives back in control of their own destiny. If he had been true to history, he would have nuked the whole place from orbit. It was a good movie to watch. And James Horner did the score, so you can hear a bit of Wrath of Khan in the battle scenes.
Izzy
January 12th, 2010 at 7:28 am
All stories are recycled versions of earlier ones, so similarities to prior films are not surprising. That said, as Mr. Alvarado states, the Avatar theme is not without historical precedent. One of the earliest of New World contacts (1511?) was a shipwreck that left two Spaniards among the only survivors living among the Maya: Gonzalo Guerrero and Geronimo De Aguilar. The latter joined the Cortes expedition when the opportunity presented itself, but Guerrero chose to stay among the Maya and eventually fight the Spanish. I think Nando Sims is right on the money!
ben cadena
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:48 am
Avatar is a new “Wizard of Oz” with religious themes from Catholicism, Unitarianism ,Buddhism and Indian or Oriental animism with the focus on honoring the animals sacrifice. It is a wonderful romp through fantasy as the alien race beats the colonialists which makes it very leftist just as Wizard of Oz storyline and music written by an old leftist.The good guys are the aliens assisted by a few Earth people that realize there will be destruction of the virgin planet. A truly enjoyable fantasy with undertones of progressive thinking, new technology, beautiful artwork and good old fashioned storytelling.