Avatar: The Look, Poisoned Jesus and Colonial Empathy
This is my Avatar review. It will probably have spoilers.
First thing's first. Visually, this is your children's 1977 first viewing of Star Wars. It's everything it was cracked up to be. It is gorgeous and doesn't lay the 3D on thick. I can't really imagine watching Avatar in 2D and I don't suggest you do so. Trailers and excerpts and things don't do it justice.
Totally worth it.
Practical plotting was workmanlike, overrode deep character portrayal and weirdly manga-esque in its refusal to explain things that can be inferred (that unobtainium - yeesh - is an antigravity mineral and responsible for those floating mountains, for instance, and some of the final points of consciousness transfer) by nerds. Non-nerds may be lost. If it was a manga, it'd be one of those Masamune Shirow things with technical/worldbuilding footnotes.
Okay, let's get into the hard bits.
Poisoned Jesus
When I first saw The Matrix I wrote a different end for the movie in my head. In it, Neo wasn't the One. Morpheus was. It looked to me like Morpheus was the one who really suffered from self-doubt, the illusion that a teacher couldn't be a personal force, just a guy waiting around for a prodigy. But it was just another Poisoned Jesus narrative.
(Note that I'm not going to get into the magical Negro aspect of Morpheus. It's still relevant, though complicated due to the fact that the W. Brothers. wanted to cast Will Smith as Neo and Sean Connery as Morpheus.)
The Poisoned Jesus is the Jesus of post-Dark Ages Christianity, and especially Protestantism. The Gospels' Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher. He performed miracles, but they were usually teaching miracles, ways to punctuate a conversation with his followers. (Note I'm talking about a literary Jesus, not making a statement that a miracle worker tooled around Galilee back in the day. I think a historical rabbi probably did, though.)
Beyond an inconstant interest by the educated, privileged classes, people lost interest in this Jesus, and the theology of the Cross cast a looming shadow over the rabbi in favour of the grand miracle at the end of the narrative. Jesus as teacher turned into more of a demonstration of Jesus' worth than something useful on its own. Nowadays, John 3:16 is kind of an obscene magic spell that excises the rest of Jesus in favour of a ritual gesture of allegiance. That's the kind of Jesus Neo is, and it's the kind of Jesus Jake Sully is in Avatar.
Sully saves the day with a miracle drawn from tapping into the planet's consciousness/organic neural net thingy at the apex of his hero's journey. All he knows is that the situation sucks and people are bad -- something the Na'vi have, by this point in the film, probably said to the Goddess thousands of times, what with the bulldozers and giant robots fire and everything. The Na'vi aren't magical in the way Sully is, though (nobody is, human or Na'vi - Sigourney Weaver can't get bodily resurrected, and she's more with it than Jake is!)so She pretty much ignores them. This is deeply ingrained, Protestant sorcery at work. Sully is a moral weakling and an ignoramus, but predestination trumps merit and besides, he feels really bad about everything. Jake Sully flipflops between being the Poisoned Christ figure himself and PC's disciple. This is to be expected, since it's about half cultural reflex, which means it wasn't thought through very well.
This leads to one of the film's failings. Jake Sully is a very, very bad man, and only the implied magic of his existence keeps him from meeting justice. He's venal, treacherous and even spouts the "I was here to betray you but I fell in LOVE!" Come on, dude. But he's Jesus and he's kind of white, so that's okay.
Colonial Empathy
Yes, Avatar has the standard colonial fantasy plot where the white dude not only gets accepted by a colonized people, but gets to be in charge. This is pretty bad on the face of it, but gets even worse because Jake is such an awful person and his ascension depends on a variation of using their superstitions against them by taming the big, predatory monster that can only be flown by great Na'vi leaders. I didn't actually mind the way Jake tamed the thing - the idea that he has a sudden insight about what do do is kind of cool - but it undercuts the whole idea that the act of taming the thing has any moral worth. When he returns to the Na'vi, I started writing a different movie in my head. In it, he explains that he did it to provide a symbol, but it was just a trick. He offers himself not as a leader, but as an informant and a unifying sign to be used by the rest of the Na'vi. Instead, he takes charge.
I don't mind him learning their ways. I don't mind him integrating. People really do those things, or occupy the kind of cultural interstices that are hard to align with activist sentiments. Cultural identities really are fluid. But they can't ignore power relations. Unfortunately, it's too easy to justify the cliches as practical storytelling techniques. It becomes Jake Sully's journey because the whole raft of commercial filmmaking talent wants a viewpoint character who belongs to the nerdy white male demographic they figure will adopt this movie quickly. Leaving aside the racism and sexism of White Viewpoint Guy, it's not the only way to get him in without being such an ass. Take a look at Michael Mann's 1992's Last of the Mohicans. Hawkeye is the Cross-Cultural White Badass filmmakers think we need but he doesn't wield more cultural authority than Chingachngook and lives within a complex, multi-polar colonial situation (the Seven Years' War).
I'd say more, but other people have covered this topic better than I have many, many times. The one thing that strikes me hard, though is how bad a person Jake Sully is, the terrible things he does, and the weak, Deus Ex Machina excuses used to divert him from his comeuppance or even moral censure. If I have one unique thing to say it's probably that his narrative disturbs me because it lowers the bar for empathy. Jake gets sold as a praiseworthy, empathetic character for taking charge and effectively sidestepping Na'vi judgment. The Na'vi don't get to be moral actors at all. They simply respond. One way or another, they're subjects. Real empathy isn't benevolent rule, and there's something sinister about a completely artificial colonized people, tailor-made to be colonizers' instruments for moral gratification.
But damn; the movie is beautiful. It really is. Does that make sense?
First thing's first. Visually, this is your children's 1977 first viewing of Star Wars. It's everything it was cracked up to be. It is gorgeous and doesn't lay the 3D on thick. I can't really imagine watching Avatar in 2D and I don't suggest you do so. Trailers and excerpts and things don't do it justice.
Totally worth it.
Practical plotting was workmanlike, overrode deep character portrayal and weirdly manga-esque in its refusal to explain things that can be inferred (that unobtainium - yeesh - is an antigravity mineral and responsible for those floating mountains, for instance, and some of the final points of consciousness transfer) by nerds. Non-nerds may be lost. If it was a manga, it'd be one of those Masamune Shirow things with technical/worldbuilding footnotes.
Okay, let's get into the hard bits.
Poisoned Jesus
When I first saw The Matrix I wrote a different end for the movie in my head. In it, Neo wasn't the One. Morpheus was. It looked to me like Morpheus was the one who really suffered from self-doubt, the illusion that a teacher couldn't be a personal force, just a guy waiting around for a prodigy. But it was just another Poisoned Jesus narrative.
(Note that I'm not going to get into the magical Negro aspect of Morpheus. It's still relevant, though complicated due to the fact that the W. Brothers. wanted to cast Will Smith as Neo and Sean Connery as Morpheus.)
The Poisoned Jesus is the Jesus of post-Dark Ages Christianity, and especially Protestantism. The Gospels' Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher. He performed miracles, but they were usually teaching miracles, ways to punctuate a conversation with his followers. (Note I'm talking about a literary Jesus, not making a statement that a miracle worker tooled around Galilee back in the day. I think a historical rabbi probably did, though.)
Beyond an inconstant interest by the educated, privileged classes, people lost interest in this Jesus, and the theology of the Cross cast a looming shadow over the rabbi in favour of the grand miracle at the end of the narrative. Jesus as teacher turned into more of a demonstration of Jesus' worth than something useful on its own. Nowadays, John 3:16 is kind of an obscene magic spell that excises the rest of Jesus in favour of a ritual gesture of allegiance. That's the kind of Jesus Neo is, and it's the kind of Jesus Jake Sully is in Avatar.
Sully saves the day with a miracle drawn from tapping into the planet's consciousness/organic neural net thingy at the apex of his hero's journey. All he knows is that the situation sucks and people are bad -- something the Na'vi have, by this point in the film, probably said to the Goddess thousands of times, what with the bulldozers and giant robots fire and everything. The Na'vi aren't magical in the way Sully is, though (nobody is, human or Na'vi - Sigourney Weaver can't get bodily resurrected, and she's more with it than Jake is!)so She pretty much ignores them. This is deeply ingrained, Protestant sorcery at work. Sully is a moral weakling and an ignoramus, but predestination trumps merit and besides, he feels really bad about everything. Jake Sully flipflops between being the Poisoned Christ figure himself and PC's disciple. This is to be expected, since it's about half cultural reflex, which means it wasn't thought through very well.
This leads to one of the film's failings. Jake Sully is a very, very bad man, and only the implied magic of his existence keeps him from meeting justice. He's venal, treacherous and even spouts the "I was here to betray you but I fell in LOVE!" Come on, dude. But he's Jesus and he's kind of white, so that's okay.
Colonial Empathy
Yes, Avatar has the standard colonial fantasy plot where the white dude not only gets accepted by a colonized people, but gets to be in charge. This is pretty bad on the face of it, but gets even worse because Jake is such an awful person and his ascension depends on a variation of using their superstitions against them by taming the big, predatory monster that can only be flown by great Na'vi leaders. I didn't actually mind the way Jake tamed the thing - the idea that he has a sudden insight about what do do is kind of cool - but it undercuts the whole idea that the act of taming the thing has any moral worth. When he returns to the Na'vi, I started writing a different movie in my head. In it, he explains that he did it to provide a symbol, but it was just a trick. He offers himself not as a leader, but as an informant and a unifying sign to be used by the rest of the Na'vi. Instead, he takes charge.
I don't mind him learning their ways. I don't mind him integrating. People really do those things, or occupy the kind of cultural interstices that are hard to align with activist sentiments. Cultural identities really are fluid. But they can't ignore power relations. Unfortunately, it's too easy to justify the cliches as practical storytelling techniques. It becomes Jake Sully's journey because the whole raft of commercial filmmaking talent wants a viewpoint character who belongs to the nerdy white male demographic they figure will adopt this movie quickly. Leaving aside the racism and sexism of White Viewpoint Guy, it's not the only way to get him in without being such an ass. Take a look at Michael Mann's 1992's Last of the Mohicans. Hawkeye is the Cross-Cultural White Badass filmmakers think we need but he doesn't wield more cultural authority than Chingachngook and lives within a complex, multi-polar colonial situation (the Seven Years' War).
I'd say more, but other people have covered this topic better than I have many, many times. The one thing that strikes me hard, though is how bad a person Jake Sully is, the terrible things he does, and the weak, Deus Ex Machina excuses used to divert him from his comeuppance or even moral censure. If I have one unique thing to say it's probably that his narrative disturbs me because it lowers the bar for empathy. Jake gets sold as a praiseworthy, empathetic character for taking charge and effectively sidestepping Na'vi judgment. The Na'vi don't get to be moral actors at all. They simply respond. One way or another, they're subjects. Real empathy isn't benevolent rule, and there's something sinister about a completely artificial colonized people, tailor-made to be colonizers' instruments for moral gratification.
But damn; the movie is beautiful. It really is. Does that make sense?