More on Avatar

1. I found myself thinking at one point that the make-up was fantastic. It takes some pretty impressive effects work to make you forget that it's computer-generated.
2. I hated the story, for so many reasons. It's incredibly generic, as far as the mechanical details are concerned. There's the grizzled war-veteran lead-baddie, who is obsessed with killing stuff for no clear reason; the amoral CEO who explicitly notes that he's answerable to the shareholders, not his conscience; the angry young prince who needs to learn that his rage will destroy him; the romantic interest who is at one with nature and must nurture the lead; the main character who is damaged and needs someone to help him put it all back together, but has to find that help in the wrong places before finding it in the right one. And the actors are serviceable - Col. Quaritch is fantastically camp as the villain, though I'm not sure that this should qualify as a 'good' thing, necessarily.
   
3. The two most popular ways to interpret the film are as environmentalist fable (this seems to be how Cameron is pushing it and what most mainstream critics privilege) or a neocolonial narrative, those who seize on the former often doing so to the exclusion, implicitly or explicitly, of the latter. But it's not necessary to separate them out like this - ostensibly primitive people have always been associated with nature and their comparative lack of technology with environmentalism, even if the associations don't hold upon closer examination. But the point is that the two themes have been so entirely conflated that one always implies the other.
   
4. The fact that whole groups of people can be given a symbolic weight that doesn't necessarily coincide with their lived reality is not a new argument, but it's one worth reiterating here. Jan Pieterse's collection of European images of black people over the past 500+ years is particularly good at illustrating how the representation of alien people says more about "us" than it does about "them". He traces how representational strategies of Africa, to focus on a tiny section of the larger book, change dramatically to reflect tensions at home - the 'noble savage' was popular among reformists who wanted to critique their peers indirectly, while the ignoble or devilish savage gained currency in advance of and during periods of imperial expansion. But accurate or not, those representations are read as truthful in some sense, and romanticizing the noble savage is just as problematic as demonizing them.
   
5. Which strikes some people as counter-intuitive, I know. The 'good' stereotype is preferable to the 'bad' one, right? Not so much. Among people who think they know better, the bad stereotype at least has the advantage of being obviously false. But the romantic noble savage, of which the Na'vi in Avatar are a perfect example, is not so obviously fake. Worse, in reality the people who are idealized as noble savages tend to be punished for failing to live up to these impossible expectations. Again, Pieterse notes how the transformation in representations of Africa was also due to the disappointment of the Europeans who failed to find the characters they expected, and so came to assume that the people they did encounter had fallen from a prior grace like Biblical devils.
6. I should also add how annoying it is that these native vs. conqueror stories always feature a parallel romantic story. It ends up making it unclear whether the hero has actually came to sympathize/empathize with the natives or whether that's only a secondary result of having fallen in love with the female lead. And it only contributes to the whole romanticization/exoticization of the natives on the whole - they would be less sympathetic if they weren't also worth lusting after. (And this is another way to think about how their depiction reflects us rather than some other, how they exist for us as viewers looking to be entertained rather than for oppressed peoples striving for liberation.)
   
7. On Facebook, someone asked me whether the native vs. conqueror narrative could have a happy ending and not be problematic. I suspect that it can, though nothing that I've seen comes to mind. A poetry professor during my undergrad once said that he hated how the Toronto Transit Commission placed poems on the subway, suggesting that they weren't invitations to read poetry but, rather, were inoculations against poetry. I have the same feeling about the happy ending in these sorts of movies. Rather than motivate people to action, they console us - rather than encouraging white people to confront their guilt, they forgive it. Avatar is especially egregious insofar as it goes a step further and tries to erase race altogether - unlike the male leads in Pocahontas or The Last Samurai, Jake is literally transformed into one of Na'vi. Similarly, while the return of the Europeans and the industrialization of Japan hang over the endings of those other films like a dark cloud, there's no suggestion that the humans will come back with more soldiers and bigger guns to start what they've finished. Because massive corporations are known for having a conscience, no doubt, and people who fancy themselves civilized have always backed down when the indigenous populationthreatens to revolt. Right. You have a problem when even Pocahontas could be said to be more politically progressive.