82 / The politics of Avatar
I watched Avatar a second time – that’s after I read Miranda Devine’s rant (SMH Dec 2) about how it has a left wing agenda. I suppose for someone as rightwing as Ms Devine anything appears leftish.
The story in Avatar is critical of a military force employed by an exploitative company, where the share holders ‘don’t like to see natives killed, but they even less like to see the bottom-line eroded.’ Their pursuits are reminiscent of the USA’s exploits in South America, Iraq and other ‘areas of interest’ – where they secure the resources that ensures the continuum of the ‘American Way of Life’, if necessary with military might.
Ms Devine’s moral compass is stuck on the right wing agendas espoused by the company representative and the villainous colonel, who are quite prepared to rip apart a whole civilisation, if they stand in their way of protecting the company’s interests. In their world you do what you’re told - if you don’t, if you follow your conscience when deciding which side you’re on, you are vilified as ‘traitor’, ‘insurgent’ and ‘terrorist.’
So this is the ‘leftish’ message of the movie: Do what you think is right. In that simple message there probably is no room for Miranda Devine’s ideology.
Comment : by Miss Cris, 2010 Jan 6
Nice blog.
It just came to my mind then, the irony of how doing the morally/ethically/humanely/ecologically 'right' thing, is often damned as being 'left'.
See how deluded the right are?
Update:
Avatar's left-wing agenda is a fallacy
By Hamish Ford, SMH website, 2010
January 6
Avatar belies its left-wing agenda with
a white, American hero saving an indigenous population.
The blockbuster Hollywood movie Avatar
has aroused predictable outrage by conservative commentators such as Miranda
Devine and Greg Sheridan over the film's perceived "anti-American" or
"anti-Western" message. Meanwhile, film critics have almost
universally praised the movie's use of new 3-D technology, if less for its derivative
story. In many ways Avatar is both a childish portrayal of
Edenic paradise with the US Army as evil invader and an unoriginal but striking
and aesthetically beautiful parable about the violent exploitation of nature
and other living beings.
It is revealing, however, that across the Avatar
divide there appears almost universal agreement that not only are its 3-D
textures a wonder to inhabit, but the film's central message is essentially
"left-wing". We need a more precise account of the film's ideology,
which is rather more conservative than both critics and admirers claim: this is
"liberal Hollywood" in three dimensions.
For all Avatar's romanticism
about pre-technological indigenous culture – the blue Na'vi, who dwell in the
film's fantastic jungle – and the unsubtle Bush-era talk put into the mouth of
a clearly evil US Army colonel, not even a simple fable-style critique of
imperialism can properly emerge for the crucial reason that an Anglophone
American (played by an Australian with obligatory US accent) remains the heroic
centre of the story. This seldom discussed but revealing thematic element at
the heart of the film's narrative is familiar to virtually all liberal
Hollywood films that portray US behaviour towards the "other".
Avatar's rendering
of the Na'vi is not only textbook Romanticism, these very handsome "noble
savages" go beyond even Rousseau's fantasies, but its truly patronising
account of indigenous culture is crucially revealed when we witness its lack of
intellectual and creative agency at the moment of truth: in the face of
imperial human power. Towing the familiar liberal line, for the
"other" to be "good" they must need one of us to save them.
When it comes to facing the destruction of their idyllic habitat by the
marauding invaders, the Na'vi have no answer. For that they need US soldier
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington).
As usual, there are enough good men and women of
different ethnicities on screen, both human and otherwise, to tick the liberal
boxes. But the central narrative mover-and-shaker of this
"anti-Western" film is good old white American-English speaking
masculinity (it is virtually always a "he" in the driver's seat, with
female and "minority" representative minions). In the process Jake himself
becomes a victim-martyr who suffers the angst of openly defying his clan.
From the start the Na'vi are portrayed as simple
beings that, although warriors, accept Jake into their circle because their
forest spirits detect that he is "special", provided he can learn
their ways. We are presumably supposed to see as emblematic of a morally
impressive and "trusting" culture their failure to see that Jake is
in fact not "real", or that he might be seeking such cultural
initiation for belligerent purposes. But what comes across is child-like
gullibility and weakness, a people in need of help. (As in Baz Luhrmann's Australia,
the local indigenous people are portrayed as according a coloniser some kind of
spiritual "chosen one" privilege – see, they need us!) For there to
be a "good other" in such films, they must be completely
infantilised.
In his avatar form, Jake – whose secret mission
is indeed to infiltrate the Na'vi so as to negotiate the surrender of their
land for human mining – not only ingratiates himself into their culture, but
also the predictable affections of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a cliched adolescent
computer games-addict's vision of a "hot alien". If the film skates
over the manipulative nature of Jake's ingratiation with the Na'vi, it is even
more revealingly blase about the contradictory advice he inflicts on his
"new people".
At first the more macho Na'vi warriors vow to
fight when the humans threaten to destroy their forest after military patience
with Jake's "diplomatic" mission has run out, but he advises everyone
to leave or they'll all be killed (thereby fulfilling his mission but with a
newly "humanitarian" motivation). Soon coming to his senses, he
decides that fighting is indeed the answer but with a crucial difference: he
shall lead the operation. As in real life, only when the English-speaking white
guy decides to fight does it become a good idea – indeed morally superb. As others have pointed out, Avatar's
narrative and thematic progress is essentially that of Kevin Costner's Dances
with Wolves. But we need to ask why it is that Hollywood
only ever romanticises or extols "benign" non-Western people – be
they clearly ethnically or politically codified, or abstract like the blue
Na'vi – who don't fight back under their own initiative and command, at least not
in the film-familiar version of history.
The most historically and morally significant
rebuttal of Hollywood as left-wing is the fact that it has yet to produce a
film about what we call the Vietnam War – which the Vietnamese call the
American War – where the central tragedy isn't all about "us". By my
count all but two of the many Hollywood films about this conflict are
essentially "liberal", yet the central drama and tragedy of films
such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon
(whatever their other arguable virtues) is always that of the US soldiers
rather than the millions of Vietnamese (let alone Cambodian and Laotian)
civilians killed by them.
The result is that the only cinematic account
familiar to a Western audience of the appalling war on Indochina – thereby
having a huge lopsided influence on everyday historical "knowledge"
of whose tragedy it was – is a repeated neurotic drama about America's
half-repressed anxiety after its military defeat. This anxiety does not usually
include seriously questioning whether US (and of course Australian) forces had
the right to be in Vietnam in the first place. The handling and result, let
alone the usually fudged origins, of arguably the worst military atrocity since
World War II is way too tough for Hollywood to touch.
There is a telling conflicted tone within the
concerned diatribes of Avatar's conservative critics; such
is their default love of all things American. But they needn't worry. In fact,
such folk can easily reconcile being impressed with this wondrous new product
of US capitalism – the most expensive film ever made (apparently comic-book
spectacle is fabulous while a simple "message" to match is not) – and
the film's alleged politics.
Devine, Sheridan and their ilk can sleep soundly
in the knowledge that Hollywood never really extols any dangerous critique of
"America" or "the West". This annoying conflation whereby
the US is the only modernity imaginable is itself shared by Avatar and
its conservative finger-waggers, even as they excoriate the film for simplistic
moralising (at least of the wrong kind).
Hollywood wasn't once called "the little
state department" by the real thing for nothing. Avatar
at best has a simple, surely harmless anti-violence message about environmental
and human exploitation. But far from being left-wing, here Hollywood performs
its traditional function: reassuring us all that the world needs not only the
white man but also one who speaks American English. Even if he looks blue.
Hamish Ford is a lecturer in film, media and
cultural studies at the University of Newcastle.