. In short, Avatar has been almost universally praised, lauded, admired and viewed as filmmaking at its finest. But this article isn’t about that. This article is about the ‘almost’.
When a film strikes it truly big, differing groups, both fringe and mainstream, start coming out of the woodwork to use the hit movie in question to call attention to their own philosophies and points-of-view. While the potential for true humor is present in these situations—it’s the reason I’m writing about it here—it’s never intentional, which makes the whole thing that much better. For some reason, these groups never use the hit movies to demonstrate how things should be handled—if you’re looking for a loving embrace of our planet and an example of how we should treat our environs, you’re really not going to be able to do much better than Avatar. Instead, these groups will come out denouncing some element of the film that most rational people will find insultingly stupid or, worse yet, comical enough to mock.
Little did Cameron know when he was making Avatar that it would be hailed as an assault on capitalism, a slap in the face of Jesus Christ, anti-American, supremely homophobic, against the troops, horribly racist against people of color, horribly racist against white people and a sign that Hollywood wants you to die a painful death. This is impressive work for a director who made a science-fiction movie about people on a moon four light years away from earth who are trying to get their hands on a chemical element known as unobtainium.
Adding a slight twist to the proceedings is the way that the groups are often vocal about different sides of the very same issue. Conservatives (and Armond White) are flabbergasted, shocked and chagrined about how anti-white Avatar is. Liberals are flabbergasted, shocked and chagrined about how racist the film is towards, uh, beings of color.
The plot of Avatar is rather simple. 150 years in the future, Earth is a shell of its present self. Thanks to years of neglect, humans have been forced to go out into the universe to scavenge for natural materials that they need. Like unobtainium. A Halliburton-esque company, RDA, has found an enormous supply of unobtainium on a far away moon called Pandora. Pandora is a beautiful, but harsh place that is home to a blue indigenous people known as the Na’Vi. Avatar follows Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as he attempts to infiltrate the Na’Vi. Ultimately, Sully grows to respect and love what the Na’Vi are about and ends up helping them fight back against the imperialistic forces of RDA.
If you’re conservative, this plot can be interpreted as anti-white because Sully is only victorious when he leaves his own (white) skin behind and becomes one of the Na’Vi. Literally.** Not only that but the bad guy, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), yells at Sully that he’s a traitor to his own race. I inferred that Quaritch was referencing the human race—it’s what the entire movie had been about up to that point. Republicans and conservative commentators apparently felt that Quaritch was referring to the white race. This line of thinking is funny because it suggests that if Sully were to turn into an albino Na’Vi, the Colonel wouldn’t have had a problem with it… which couldn’t be farther from the truth. I say this because the Colonel had a problem with everything. A designation that includes his own soldiers, the Na’Vi, members of his support staff who weren’t once Marines, scientists, the atmosphere and trees. The only thing that I can think of that brought the Colonel any joy at all was the thought of killing the aforementioned items. That Wagner was not in any way involved in Quaritch’s theme song is a particularly surprising note. Sure there are voices crying out in pain in Quaritch’s theme, but that’s still not Wagner.
** There’s a body-to-body swap between human and Na’Vi and some other complex futuristic science that goes into growing your own Na’Vi in a pod and then running him by hard-lining your brain to a computer, but this is the simple version of all that. And besides, with a $1.7 billion box office and counting, you know this already anyway.
If you’re a liberal, the plot material is viewed as yet another example of a group of dark-skinned, indigenous people floundering around until they get the help of a white guy. Or you like, you can twist this still further to your advantage by saying something like the following, “I liked Avatar’s special effects, but found the way that Cameron insinuated that people of color can’t survive or even continue to exist without the leadership of white men to be rather racist.”
What makes the latter point so salient is that no one can argue with it. In the context of Avatar, the Smurf-hued Na’Vi are going to get wiped out and do have several enormous cultural setbacks before Sully comes in and leads them out.
