How to Like Avatar Without Being an Imperialist Sympathizer
So Avatar, right? It’s pretty. We can all agree that it’s pretty. So let’s move on.
I nearly refused to go see this movie with my family for my Dad’s birthday because, and I quote myself, “I don’t want to see the Magical White Boy go save the Hapless Ethnics from his own culture.” Because the Magical White Boy (or its corollary, the Magical White Schoolteacher) is a well-known trope of storytellers who feel guilty about their hegemonic dominance but don’t quite understand it nor want to ever actually let go of it. The Magical White Boy is the story of the hero (white and male, from an overwhelmingly white and male background) who encounters a foreign/alien/ethnic culture about to be abused by his own dominant white culture, goes native, and then leads the hapless primitives in a popular uprising against his own culture. It implies, rather disgustingly, that the Hapless Ethnics can only win when they have the Magical White Boy on their side. But it’s a win-win for all the white kids watching the movie: their aspiration-figure is (a) white like them, (b) on the side of right, and (c) still comfortably white like them. It’s cowardly and facile storytelling, and I’m already bored just describing it in this paragraph.
But Avatar isn’t about a Magical White Boy saving the Hapless Ethnics.
(Massive spoilers ensue.)
Sure, the humans in the story are all white and male (I was counting; you know how many non-white soldiers there were, even in the background? Two. Out of a hundred or so.). Sure, the blue aliens created with motion capture are all, under the CGI layer, portrayed by brown and black actors. Sure, the main character, white and male and totally lacking in characterization, does indeed encounter the Na’vi, join them, and fight the big, bad humans. Hell, Avatar thinks it’s a Magical White Boy film, but it’s… well, it’s not.
In Which I Construct My Own Backstory
Consider the following:
- Every animal on Pandora has four eyes, six limbs, and breathes through aspirators in their chest. Except the Na’vi, who have two eyes, four limbs, and noses.
- As Jake Sully says in one of his video journals, the Na’vi don’t want anything the humans have. They are completely self-sufficient and content with what they have.
- The planet features strange stone constructions with no feasible natural cause.
- The entire biosphere of the planet is connected in a data network of staggering proportions.
- Within that data network exists an entity with its own will. The Na’vi call it Eywa; I call it an AI. Sort of a green SkyNet.
- All the animals on Pandora have paired interface-tendrils of the sides of their heads. The Na’vi have one.
There’s no evolutionary reason, even if you’re working under the Gaia Hypothesis, for the entire planet to be networked. Organisms aren’t going to just link up, especially cross-species, to exchange data. Certainly not the entire fucking planet. That’s just too damned convenient for the end-users of this massive network. And who are the end users? The Na’vi, who happen to have some pretty profound morphological disparities with the rest of the planet.
Putting all that together, I come to one conclusion: Pandora is an constructed ecology created by the ancestors of the Na’vi, who modified themselves to be able to interface and control all the incredible biological technology that Pandora comprises. Perhaps the current Na’vi do not remember this; maybe their ancestors created the planet for their children as a sort of paradise. Nevertheless, the Na’vi live on a planet that is perfectly tailored to their needs. Sure, they carry bows and arrows, but they aren’t at a technological disadvantage when compared to the humans - as evidenced by the conclusion of the movie.
Oppression Requires Oppressors and the Oppressed
This puts the Na’vi at a profoundly different footing when compared to the humans. Sure, the humans call them savages. Of course, the Na’vi call the humans savages, too. The humans call them ignorant, and the Na’vi return the favor. Any claim of cultural superiority is pretty specious to begin with, but note that every allegation leveled at the Na’vi is reflected right back.
Also note that the humans, at the start of the movie, are not oppressing anybody. They came to the planet, they started mining their unobtainium (which would have been a great name if it was dropped once, in which case it would have been a funny nickname for an unnamed commodity, but was used twice, so it was confirmed as the actual, unfortunate, name). They set up schools to attempt cross-cultural communication and attempted some sort of trade, which the Na’vi refused. But at the start of the movie, there is no mention of the humans displacing the Na’vi or taking anything by force. So despite the big piles of military equipment, the humans are not starting off the movie as oppressors.
So what do we have left? We have two cultures in juxtaposition. Neither is technologically superior. Neither is culturally superior, whatever that might mean. Neither is oppressing the other. What we have, even if we don’t know it at the start of the movie, is two cultures meeting as equals. Neither of them believes the other culture is their equal, but that’s what we have. The corollaries that you might make between this movie and the real-world collisions of white and black, white and red, crusader and arab, colonist and aborigine… none of them actually hold water. The essential ingredient for a criticism of oppression or hegemony is a disparity between the sides portrayed, and that is profoundly missing once you look at the specifics of the situation.
Even if you don’t accept my little constructed-planet backstory, the specifics don’t change. The humans and the Na’vi are equals in terms of technology and military power - the Na’vi’s tech is just alien and biological, and their military power is unmobilized at the start of the movie. Whether or not the Na’vi are actually an elder race, they’re still entering the game on equal footing with the humans; they can’t cry oppression.
Escalation of Assholery and Jake Sully
These two equal cultures face off. One completely spurns the other, which you’ve got to admit is not very nice. Of course, the other one goes and blows up the other’s home, which isn’t exactly neighborly, either. So what we have is a sort of escalation of assholery. In the midst of it we have Jake Sully.
There’s a lot of bluster about Jake being a “traitor to his race,” but it’s hardly a favor that Jake switches sides and joins the Na’vi. It’s no commentary on real-world race relations or real-world history; most importantly, it means that Jake Sully isn’t a Magical White Boy out to save the noble savages. Jake’s just a guy who chooses between two cultures, one of which offers to gives him his legs back at the cost of being an asshole and the other which gives him a new body, a hot girlfriend, and a respected place in society for the cost of… pretty much nothing at all. What a heroic decision!
To clarify: there are and were profound instances of oppression between races in our history and current events. I am not commenting on those by any means, and that’s because Avatar isn’t commenting on them. It might be trying, but it misses the mark by a wide margin. In fact, you might say that the most telling criticism of Avatar is how poorly it portrays cross-racial and cross-cultural oppression by empowering the “primitives.” Because, by giving them their arboreal internet, green SkyNet, and happy animal friends, the movie erases the disparity of power that would have made the humans real oppressors. It thereby might be construed to imply that the Iroquois, the Gabi Gabi, the Hawaiians, the Seljuks, and every other loser of cross-cultural war lost, not because of massive disparities in military and economic power, but because they didn’t try hard enough. Which, in addition to being offensive, is just stupid.
Instead, I prefer to remember Avatar as the movie about the two cultures meeting, one of them acting like assholes, and the other culture righteously beating the shit out of them with pet dragons, Earthmother SkyNet, and arrows the size of fucking spears.
Mirrored from Kallisti Press.