Point Beyond Pandora

By Jordan Osserman, Staff Columnist

Published on Thursday, January 14, 2010

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For a sci-fi film that is essentially about the struggles of a group of 3-D blue cat people, James Cameron’s “Avatar” has generated a surprising amount of controversy and grossed over $1 billion dollars worldwide.

If you missed it over break (and don’t bother seeing it in Lebanon; they’re not showing it in 3-D), here’s the plot — the year is 2154 and humans have paved over every last scrap of Earth’s natural beauty. On the faraway moon Pandora lives a blue-skinned alien species known as the Na’vi, who exist with their luscious natural environment and worship a mother goddess. A mining corporation wants to exploit the blue people’s land and therefore outfits Jake Sully, a former marine, with a Na’vi body in order to get to know the people and their terrain. Ultimately, Jake finds himself a blue girlfriend and becomes attached to the Na’vi way of life, leading him into an epic battle against his own race.

Although the film received generally positive reviews, its detractors — especially on the Internet — have attacked the movie from every imaginable angle. Some Hindus have accused Cameron of insensitively appropriating aspects of their religion, beginning with the movie’s title, originally a Sanskrit term that means incarnation. Members of the Language Creation Society have complained that Cameron chose someone outside of their ranks to create the Na’vi language. To top it all off, CNN recently ran a special on Avatar-induced depression. (For those seeking help for this debilitating affliction, check out the web forum “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible.”)

Yet for the most part, criticism has focused on the film’s racial subtext; Annalee Newitz writes in the sci-fi blog “io9” that Avatar is just another movie “where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member.”

For anyone who has ever taken a course on colonialism at Dartmouth, this critique will sound familiar. The movie, critics allege, is a visual play-by-play of Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” where a non-white culture is made to appear exotic and alluring in a way that emphasizes their innate difference from “neutral” whiteness. As a fan of masturbatory postmodern theory – hell, I’m practically majoring in it – I can’t say I disagree with the critique. Yet something about the movie strikes me as a profoundly positive step in how we view our society.

Beyond all of the white-man-saves-the-different-colored-people stuff, the central message of Avatar is this: resistance in the face of injustice is good. Specifically, resistance against our militaristic, profit-driven, environmentally destructive culture is necessary for our very survival.

Mainstream Hollywood is less an agent of change than it is a reflection of our cultural imagination. The racist overtones that plague Avatar are the same that have plagued decades of feature films, only because we are a society that has a long way to go with how we understand and treat racial differences.

Yet Avatar is clearly part of a trend of recent blockbuster films —“WALL-E” and “V for Vendetta” come to mind — that espouse progressive, anti-establishment messages. And if that trend means anything, it’s that our society at large is approaching the realization that we’ve allowed unrestrained profit-seeking to go too far and that respect for the environment and aversion towards war are values we must reclaim.

Make no mistake, it’s a tragedy that white Americans fantasize about people from other cultures as a primitive and erotic “others” and that “Avatar’s” predecessors (“Dances with Wolves,” “Pocahontas”) similarly require a white leader to “save” the noble savages. It shouldn’t take this long for a feature film to come out where a non-American culture defeats white invaders on its own — where the audience isn’t assumed to be capable of identifying only with a white protagonist.

But there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the multiple levels on which films operate and the messages they project. After all, mixed progress is better than no progress at all; a movie with racist overtones that warns against the destructive power of imperialism is an improvement over a movie that’s just plain racist.

And so, that Avatar can boast, hands-down, the most stunning visual effects ever to hit the screen and simultaneously continue the challenge against the direction the Western world has taken makes it an achievement for which James Cameron ought to be lauded.