Avatar Review, On the Off-Chance You Haven’t Seen It Yet

And if you haven’t seen Avatar yet, do go see it. It’s good! A bit sobering, a bit of a downer in some ways, but good. It blatantly ripped off Matrix Revolutions, Return of the Jedi, Dances with Wolves, and Pocahnotas, but there are only so many story plots, right?

The best part: visually, it is gorgeous! Plot-wise, the first half of the movie was a little slow, but I didn’t care because I felt like I was, literally, on another planet, and it was beautiful!

The plot itself is also pretty good, if heavy-handedly didactic, and that’s the downer side of this whole movie. The premise of the movie is that the US military (or perhaps the world military. I don’t think the movie specifices) wants to invade the planet (moon?) Pandora in order to mine a valuable metal called “unobtainium.” There is no explanation as to why this metal is so valuable or what it is used for back on Earth. This is a huge plot hole, because (spoiler alert!) the bad guys are willing to die horribly for this stuff. If they’re willing to risk hundreds of lives for this stuff, I want to know what it does and why it’s so important! But because we don’t know what’s so great about this stuff, the bad guys come off as pure evil and lack much characterization. (One of my writing professors back at school would have torn this aspect of the screenplay to shreds in a workshop. One of the best things I ever learned from her is that, no matter how bad your bad guys are, you’ve got to flesh them out. They have to have clear motives. They have to be relatable and understandable in some respects. You can’t just write them off as pure evil and expect that to satisfy your audience.)

 There are many references to Earth that make it sound like Earth has become so polluted and full of greenhouse gases that it is barely habitable. Anyway, the problem with getting the unobtainium is that a settlement of indigenous, cat-like creatures just happen to be inconviently living on Pandora’s largest deposits of the metal. The military wants to just bomb the inhabitants, but a pesky scientist, played by Sigourney Weaver, would rather make friends with them and ask them nicely to relocate. Her plan for befriending them is to put scientists in the bodies of avatars–bodies of the indigineous people that have been grown from a mixture of human and alien DNA and that can be controlled by a human mind. The main character, Jack Sully, inherits the avatar of his dead twin and is sent to take his place on Weaver’s mission. The US military also enlists his help as an insider who can give them information about the weakenesses of the indigenous peoples.

Oh, and by the way, Jack Sully is in a wheelchair. I found this interesting because rarely do we see handicapped heroes in movies. However, as is Lenard J. Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy (the only work of  literary theory I have ever read that deals with ableism) would predict, as quickly as possible within the movie, Sully’s handicap is swept away. For the rest of the movie, we see him primarily as his avatar, which has the full use of its legs. Also, as Davis would predict, at the end of the movie (spoiler warning!) Sully is able to move into his avatar body permanently and leave behind his disabled body. While it was kind of a cool move to have a badass handicapped main character, the movie really does little to attempt to get us to see the handicapped in a new, more understanding, and more accepting way. While it breaks ground for the inclusion of handicapped characters in other action movies, in and of itself, it still seems to still present a primarily ableist view.

So, the plot continues. Sully meets the indigenous people and is taken in by them to learn about their culture. At this point, you could substitute Disney’s Pocahontas. I swear I could hear the indigenous people running through the jungle singing, “You need to paint with all the colors of the wiiiiind!” This is also where the didacticism comes in. The rest of the movie could be seen as one long morality telling us to respect the Earth and stop polluting it so damn much. This is a great moral, I must admit, but I came out of the theater wondering, Exactly how am I supposed to put this moral into pratice? Go live in the Amazon with an indigenous tribe? Granted, I would use less of the Earth’s resources that way, but, to be perfectly honest, I’m not willing to do that, and I doubt that the rest of the audience is either. The movie beats its audience over the head with its environmentalist message but it gives its audience no pratical direction in which to put its message into pratice. And this defies one of the major rules of trying to make people do what you want, which is, If you give people a message that is going to instill strong emotions like fear or unhappiness into them, in order for that message to be effective, it must be followed by direct and easily accomplish steps that your audience can take to eliminate these negative feelings. Otherwise, your audience is just going to ignore your message.

It is also at this point where the movie jumps up and down and starts begging, “Do a postcolonial analysis of me, please! Oh please! Pleasepleasepleaseplease!” So, here goes: There are two ways in which the West tends to view “uncivilized” indigenous peoples. The first is the myth of the barbarian, which views the nonWesterners as savage, depraved, immoral, and violent. The second is the myth of the noble savage, which views the nonWesterners as ignorant of important things like science and technology but somehow the more purer for their innocence. From the latter of these myths, you get poems written by the English that compare the colonization of the Americas to the raping of a virgin. You also get things like the Tarzan stories, which present the African apes (stand-ins for black people) as gentle and loving but ultimately not very smart. You also have Tarzan, the white boy, who is able to master the ape’s world and become the greatest ape there is…until he finds out that he’s a white boy and then grows up into the greatest white man there ever is. This splits the world into a dichotomy of Western men=smart, nonWesterners=good but not so smart. This seems to be the myth that Avatar plays into. Instead of being scientific and rational, the indigenous people (henceforth I will be calling them “The People” because that’s what they’re calling in the movie) are spiritual. (Though their diethy seems to be nothing more than a complex network of communication between The People and the other organisims on the planet such as the other animals and plants and therefore inherently biological.) Their deep connection with nature (they cry when trees are chopped down) are seen as making them superior to the Western invaders. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a deep respect for nature. We need more of that. However, the way in which The People are presented does nothing to break down the Western dichotomy of West=good, nonWest=bad. Instead, it flips the dichotomy upside down.

…Or does it? In playing into the myth of the noble savage, Avatar stereotypes The People. It also elevates them to a status that I’m not sure they deserve. They are cool, I will admit. They are beautifully animated. They are kickass warriors. They are relatively well-fleshed out characters. However, they aren’t perfect. When you flip the West=good, nonWest=good on its head, you still tend to make mistakes. For instance, I recently read a book that extolled the innovations of the ancient Chinese and condemned the technological dependence of the West. Granted, the West is incredibly flawed, but some of the innovations of the ancient Chinese that the book failed to mention included drinking mercury for medicinal purposes. The ancient Chinese were brilliant in many respects. For instance, they invented things like paper and gunpowder long before the West had such things, and their contributions to philosophy are ingenious. However, they weren’t perfect.  My point: every civlization has its great achievements. Its strengths. its flaws, and its failings. Idealizing any culture doesn’t do anyone any good in either party. Even positive stereotypes are limiting. And I’m not sure that The People completely deserve this positive stereotype. For instance, in one scene of the movie, Jake is supposed to bond with a flying lizard. The bonding process is described as a very intimate one, in which Jake will experience the lizard’s physical sensations and also be able to communicate with it telepathically. How does Jake form this bond? By wrestling it to the ground and forcing it into submission. In several ways, this scene actually reminded me of a rape, and it seemed to go against The People’s otherwise harmonious relationship with nature. 

Flipping dichotomies upside-down doesn’t do any good. But, by placing The People into the myth of the noble savage, the movie actually protrays them through the lense of Western colonialism anyway. And just how does it do that? By giving them a Western white boy that can do whatever they can do, only ten times better! Sure, when Jake first meets the tribe they criticize him for being a child-like moron, but he catches on very quickly. In just three months he is made part of their clan. He bonds with a monsterous flying lizard that The People fear and that no one in generations has been able to tame. By the end of the movie, he is set up to become their leader. In other words, The People might be good at what they do, but, according to Avatar, living the tribal life of a hunting society is easy for a White Earthman. He’s better at what they do than they are! 

Yeah right. Please. While the movie certainly does an excellent job of showing how damaging the Othering of people is (the military people refuse to believe that The People are in fact self-aware, intelligent creatures just like humans are) and shows how destructive, unfair, and downright brutal and inhumane colonization and war are, it fails to break out of the usual Western presentations of nonWestern peoples. It does a much better job than a lot of movies. It does portray The People very positively. It humanizes them and makes them relatable. It does a good job of setting up their society, complete with a heirarchy and religious tradition. It makes them the good guys. It sets them up as a model that Western behavior should follow–their environmentalism and their recognition of themselves as part of the universe instead of lords over it–but it doesn’t quite break out of the Western colonial mindset. It gets closer than a lot of movies, but it doesn’t quite go far enough. However, it probably has broken ground that other movies can follow. It shows how far Western culture has come in its attempt to shake off its colonialism ideology, but that ideology still leaves its shadow on the movie.

Where this movie really shines, though, is when feminist criticism is applied to it. For an action movie that would probably be stereotypically called a “guy’s movie” this movie had some wonderfully empowered female characters. Sigourney Weaver, as far as I’m concerned, is the heroine of the movie. Her character is an assertive, confident, and intelligent female scientist. She lets her opinions be heard and she doesn’t let the male leaders tell her to shut up. She also avoids being stuck into the “bitch” stereotype through her love for The People, whom she wants to understand and save from the military. Michelle Rodriguez’s character is also a strong woman who can kick butt and stay true to her values. The princess of The People is probably by favorite, because (spoiler alert!) instead of being saved by the “prince” while she looks on helplessly, it is she who saves Jake’s life at the end of the movie! Yeah, you see a lot of blue breasts on the female People, who are probably mostly meant for the straight male audience members to oggle, but the female characters certainly act like more than eye candy. They take on the male authority figures in the movie. They take an active role in their own destinies. They also control their own sexualities, as seen when (spoiler!) the princess mates for life with Jake, whom she loves, instead of marrying the guy her father has picked out for her. Also, The People worship a female Goddess!

So, as I’m sure you guessed from the previews, the story ends with an epic battle between the military and The People. And the battle is epic! It’s thrilling to watch and the special effects are spectacular. There were also points in it when I even teared up or forgot that I was in a theater. I was drawn in and I really cared about what was going to happen to the characters. And, of course, it all ends happily. Most movies do these days, when you think about it. We seem to have developed an intolerance to happy endings. But, along the way to that happy ending, the movie makes you think. It effectively takes you out of your own world and onto another planet (moon?). While the bad guys could use some more characterization, the good guys characters are well developed, especially those of the female characters. Jake is also a very dynamic character, and though he begins the movie as a bit of a jerk, by the end of it he is truly ennobled. The movie also packs a lot of messages into three hours (which went by very quickly). Environmentalism, colonialism, ableism, science, spirituality (which are not presented as polar opposites in the movie)…there’s a lot going on in this movie, and I would say that it’s worthy of multiple viewings. Sure, it has its weaknesses, but its strengths far outweigh them, and even in its weaknesses, it opens up possibilities for other movies to go farther than it has gone. It is both thought-provoking and entertaining, and there aren’t many movies like that these days.

We All Want to be the Underdog

We all want to be the underdog, the Lone Ranger, the sole voice of truth and right in a world gone mad. And we want to do this alone.

At first, this claim sounds crazy. Nobody really wants to be the underdog. We’d rather win. We’d rather have all of the advantages, and we’d rather have them with a large group of people who agree with us and support us. We’re certainly more comfortable that way. However, I would argue that Western culture loves the underdog more than the top dog. As a culture, we value our independence and individuality more than anything else. They’re two of the few values that we have that we won’t question. We might question our religious assumptions, our standards of beauty, our ethics, our treatment of minorities, or our previously held assumptions about institutions like government, but we never question our worth as individuals and our right to independence. In fact, when we question all of our other values, we often do so on the grounds that they are threatening our individuality and independence. We take them for granted.

So, it might surprise us when we learn that these values are not universal. Traditionally, Eastern culture has valued the collective over the individual. In America, school children are encouraged to express their own opinions and told, “think for yourself” or “just be yourself.”. In Japan, school children are told, “the tallest nail gets pounded down,” meaning that instead of asserting their own ideas, children should conform to the consensus of the group. In the West, we gain a sense of worth based on who we are as individuals and what we as individuals can accomplish. In the East, a person’s sense of worth is based on his or her place in a larger group of people and what the group accomplishes by working together.

Each way of thinking has its pros and cons, which I won’t get into right now. My point is that Western culture often takes for granted the worth of the individual and the individual’s right to be independent. But once we realize just how powerful these values are in our culture, we can explain a lot. Why do Americans drive their cars, even when public transportation is available? We want to be independent. We don’t want to depend on the bus or the subway. Why is Welfare so stigmatized in our country? Because people who are on Welfare depend on government money. Of course, we are all dependent on someone for something. (The middle-class conservative with his or her own car might sneer at a Welfare recipient for being dependent on the government while not realizing that s/he is also dependent upon the government to keep the roads paved and in good condition or that car would be useless.)

Our values of individuality and independence can also explain a lot of the rhetoric that goes on between conservative Christians and atheists/agnostics/deists/de-converts, because even though we might not be consciously aware of these values, we know how to use them to manipulate other people to feel sympathy for our cause.

Conservative Christians do this by setting themselves up against the world or the devil. They claim that they are the force of right and truth in this world, but they are beset from all sides by enemies who want to stop them from spreading this truth. These enemies might be secularists, who want to keep church and state separate. They might be pro-choice advocates or feminists. They might be homosexuals or heterosexuals who believe that homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. These are the people of the world, and Christians try to differentiate themselves from the world. They have to set themselves up against an oppressive norm so that they can prove that they are independent. They do not get their ideas by thinking like everybody else. No, they think differently!

They also have to portray themselves as losing. After all, the best way to prove that you really are an individual is to stand out from the crowd, especially when doing so involves risks, and the greatest risk is losing. (Our culture loves stories about heroes who fight for what they believe is right, even when they know that they’re set up to lose right from the beginning.? And the more risks you’re willing to take, the stronger individual you are. At the Christian middle school that I attended, we were constantly told that life would be different when we went to secular high schools. We would be ridiculed for our faith. Some people might not want to be our friends because we were Christians. Our teachers would teach us about evolution, and we had to be brave and tell the teacher what a lie that was! We had to stand out from the crowd. We had to be different from the secular majority around us, even when that meant taking risks.

By trying to show how they adhere to the values of individuality and independence, Christians, whether they know it or not, try to manipulate people. They want people to think that they are good, and if they can show that they are in line with these values, then the public will perceive them as good.

Secular groups try to use the same tactics. Nearly all the de-conversion stories I’ve read rely heavily on gaining the reader’s sympathy by appealing to the values of independence and individuality. De-converts like to stress how they are in the minority, not only in the country (which, according to the last census, is 76% Christian and 14% atheist/agnostic), but also in their groups of family and friends. They are setting themselves apart as individuals–they are unique in their lack of faith in God. They also often stress how they are independent thinkers. Instead of following the religious crowd around them, they emphasize how they question what everyone around them assumed was given to be true. They try to demonstrate how they put the popular phrase, “Think for yourself” into action.

And, unfortunately, they also sometimes have to set themselves up against an enemy to which they are losing. And often that enemy is Christianity or other religious institutions. Sometimes they do point out things that Christians or other religious groups are doing that are wrong, but sometimes they can sound just as pig-headed as Christians, as though they just need somebody to fight with.

Now, I’m not point this out to place blame on either group. I also think that when both groups try to manipulate their audiences by appealing to the values of independence and individuality, they’re not doing it consciously. These values are so ingrained into us that we often take them for granted without questioning them. They’re givens that we don’t bother questioning. And if we want to feel like we’re doing the right thing, we’re going to look to these values to judge our actions and attitudes.

I am pointing this out, because these values seem to be the reason that these two sides so often set themselves up against each other is to prove how much more independent and individual they are, especially in comparison to the other group. Sometimes, Christians accuse de-converts of giving in to the world’s values–they accuse de-converts of being like everyone else, of not being individuals. Sometimes, de-converts accuse Christians of letting the church think for them–they accuse Christians of not thinking independently.

In reality, both groups are probably each a little bit right and a little bit wrong. Christians certainly do hold beliefs and practices that different from the larger culture, and it takes some individuality to be able to do that. And I know that, as independent as we de-converts often feel, even we need communities of like-minded people. At the same time, though, Christians also need that sense of community, and as much as they try to make themselves seem like a minority, in America, they are the minority. They have their own lobbyists and special interest groups, not to mention their sheer numbers, so they have a lot more sway than they make themselves out to. We’re all dependent on somebody, as much as we hate to admit it. And none of us are quite as individualistic as we’d like to think we are.

So, my question is, if we’re all dependent and we’re all conformists, even though we like to think of ourselves and independent individuals, why do we have to set ourselves up against another group? Why can’t we realize that by creating this opposition between our groups, we’re really just playing into a deeply held cultural myth? What I’m really wondering is, Instead of setting ourselves up as opposition against each other, why can’t we make more efforts towards getting along with each other?