okay so i saw avatar because its like a cultural phenomenon and everything and i guess i am glad i did for the experience (this is how i know it is a cultural phenomenon: i counted FOUR fur coats in the theatre. usually there are NO fur coats in the theatre) The movie itself was actually really, really boring, and if i hadn’t been committed to seeing it through for the sake of tracking all of its uh ideologies, i would have walked out. So what I am going to talk about here is what everyone else has been talking about, which is whether/how the movie is racist. I identified three distinct but related discourses on race and I think I will list them below in order from least to most interesting.
1) This is the most obvious way that everyone has been talking about avatar’s position on race which is in terms of arguing about cameron’s “white guilt” (a phrase i don’t really find productive for reasons I also don’t feel like going into here) and his intentions to make a heavy-handed anti-imperialism think piece. Ho hum, boring, boring.
2) The depiction of the “alien”/native peoples: basically a pastiche of like every indigenous stereotype (tribal african, native american, etc. etc.) which of course sends the message that all non-white people are basically… the same, whether or not they live on this planet. Also, the fact that the person who ends up being the best and leads them to victory and tames their big butterfly horse or whatever is…a white guy. Okay, this stuff is really, really depressing and I wish more mainstream commentators had a problem with thinking about how these stereotypes are played out.
3) This is the thing that I am still trying to figure out: what is Avatar’s position on race itself. i.e., at what point does the protagonist become an indigenous person? How is race/otherness defined? The Na’vi call the protagonist an “alien” when he first appears to them, even though biologically he appears to look exactly the same as them, but because his customs/outlook are different, he is not one of them until he learns their ways. I want to think more about it, but am tired and this is not really the forum for anything but beginning to sketch out my ideas.
Besides, the best commentary on Avatar is that one summary of Disney’s Pocahantas where someone wrote in Avatar stuff instead…
