Avatar: Racist vs. anti-American?
Non-starters in this week’s news:
• Why was it wrong for Harry Reid to say that Obama’s light skin and standard American dialect helped him win the presidency? The fact is, our country wouldn’t have elected a man who looked or sounded too black because our country never elects presidents who look or sound too anything, much less anything that is also TOO NEW. (For the record: I voted for Obama.)
• Nor do I understand what’s so shocking about Sarah Palin’s saying she believed that running for vice president had been God’s will. Is there anyone alive who has not yet heard that Sarah Palin believes in God? So wouldn’t it be more interesting to find out that she’d accepted a nomination she believed was AGAINST God’s will? (For the record: I did *not* vote for Sarah Palin.)
• And now, Avatar the movie, one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen recently, is coming under fire, and from weirdly opposite directions. However, anything so wildly popular is going to be criticized, if only to help journalists pay the rent. (For the record: no one is paying me a cent.)
First criticism: Avatar as anti-military. The narrator TELLS us at the beginning that “this was not the military: these were hired guns.” It’s IN THE SCRIPT, people: this is not an anti-military movie, it’s an anti-corrupt-mercenary movie.
And let’s not forget that the Na’vi natives are just as vicious with their knives, arrows and Large Strong Animals as the humans are with their machinery… vicious enough that the Pandorans actually BEAT the humans, after all. And did any of us hate those battle scenes? I rest my case.
Then there’s the “Avatar as anti-American” critique. What interests me most about that one is the way these critics would have us all define “American.”
If “American” equals “Unrelentingly murderous, sadistic capitalists,” then I’ve understood these critics correctly, but few will agree with them. The rogue Jake Sully is the American hero we identify with, not his employers. I would venture to say that most Americans, conservatives especially, believe that America is the land of the free. We LOVE that about ourselves, and when we go to war, the reason most conservative Americans will give – and the principal that most Americans in general are particularly passionate about– is the preservation of freedom and democracy.
Not that Americans are always very good at preserving freedom and democracy when they go to war, but it would be wrong to conclude therefore that the entire country is sadistic enough to make the destruction of freedom and democracy its central purpose.
So if the conservative critics are wrong, how about the liberal critics? Is this movie racist? True: the hero is white, and most of the Na’vi are played by (and resemble) people of color. However, I can’t remember if the other humans in the movie were predominantly white or not, though the American military (my strongest model, as I too am American ) is extremely diverse — in fact, it is one of the most racially diverse populations in the world. Therefore, I don’t remember the human invaders in Avatar as “white” but as “human.” But is even a human vs. Na’vi contest race-neutral enough, given that it took a member of the advanced, imperialist human race to save the naive, native Pandoran one? But were the Pandorans really so naive, were the humans really so advanced, and did Jake Sully really represent “A White Messiah?”
Perhaps it would have been more graceful if Jake Sully had been played by a black actor. I am willing to concede that point: I didn’t pay much attention to Jake Sully’s race, but that alone may be telling. Perhaps we all could use some fresher imagery.
What I did notice was that a 6 foot tall familiarly-colored person fell in love with a 10 foot tall bright blue person, and that seemed pretty multi-cultural to me.
I also watched Jake Sully roll around helplessly on the ground, leaving his Na’vi wife and Pandora’s native deity to make the decisive moves in the final battle. Which, as I’ve pointed out, they win. If Avatar is indeed racist, it seems to be the human race that takes the hardest knocks in this movie.
No matter what some critics are saying, people of all political stripes are flooding the theatres in record numbers to see Avatar. The real question about the movie, therefore, is what makes it so much fun to watch?
