Avatar as a race relations commentary
Dec. 31st, 2009 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velvetpageBefore I get down to the work of getting my house ready for a crowd of people tonight, here's my
It was a visually-stunning, well-executed, overwhelmingly fantastical retelling of a race-relations story that needs to be supplanted in the popular consciousness.
Seriously, we get it. Noble savages have knowledge of their world that stupid greedy colonialists don't. Our desire to take their natural resources doesn't trump their right to decide how they live. If we just talk to them and learn about them, we can come to the point where we understand them and then we won't want to blow them up. It takes a white guy gone native to protect his native girlfriend by leading the battle in a way they couldn't have done without him. The white chicks will all die in the process, sure, but it's for a noble cause.
Are we done with this story yet? Black Robe, The Mission, Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves, several movies about the struggles in Africa whose titles I can't bring to mind right now - the exact same plot, just different natives, different resources, and usually, it's the colonialists who win. In fact, the only reason for the fantastical setting beyond the cool CG was that, if the setting isn't real, they can make it so for once the natives DO win. In real life, that almost never happens.
I recently watched a video about the concept of a single story - how we in the West tend to develop and expand upon a single view of people of colour, and everything we think we know about them can be reduced to a manifestation of that single story. This is the single story of the Noble Savage. It's a classic character trope that touts the need for tolerance and acceptance without doing anything to further either. We don't need stories about the noble savage fighting to save his territory from the evil colonialists. We need stories about people coming back from colonialism to establish modern lives and businesses that respect their heritage while contributing to the world as it is now. We need stories that don't juxtapose native (i.e. natural) knowledge with colonial (i.e. scientific) knowledge. We need stories that acknowledge people of colour as whole, as intelligent, as multi-faceted, and as empowered.
You know what worried me most about this film, on an ideological level? The vast majority of similar films pit Christianity against Native Shamanism, because the colonialists in our world have traditionally been Christian and much of the work amongst the native peoples was done by Christian missionaries. This movie framed the religious question differently. In this movie, the soldiers laughed at the idea of a deity directing the natives' actions. In this movie, the bad colonialists are anti-religion.
Here's the other reason the fantasy setting was necessary for this story: it allowed the deity of the native peoples to be effective in a way that no historical noble savage flick has ever been able to do. It would seem that the creators want to find a way to not piss off the religious people who come to see the movie. They want the religious folks to identify with the natives, and any level of subtlety the bad guys might have had was stripped in the process.
We're left with a movie that tells that single story in such a way as to strip from it a key element of common identity most Americans are going to have with the people they are most like: the colonialists. We're encouraged to identify with the natives while ignoring the fact that every other time this story has been told, it's been people an awful lot like white-bread middle class Westerners who have been the bad guys. We're allowed, even encouraged to forget that. We shouldn't be.
I'm not advocating racial guilt, though I'm sure it comes across that way. But this is an element of that single story, too: we don't necessarily need to feel guilty over the actions of our ancestors towards people of colour, but we absolutely do need to be aware of those actions and conscious of the fact that they weren't okay and are easy to perpetuate if we're not aware of them. This movie does nothing to extend that needed awareness. In fact it sets it back.
So, I enjoyed the movie. It was beautiful, well-acted, a success on all the levels it tried to succeed at.
I just wish it had tried to succeed at the most important level.
It was a visually-stunning, well-executed, overwhelmingly fantastical retelling of a race-relations story that needs to be supplanted in the popular consciousness.
Seriously, we get it. Noble savages have knowledge of their world that stupid greedy colonialists don't. Our desire to take their natural resources doesn't trump their right to decide how they live. If we just talk to them and learn about them, we can come to the point where we understand them and then we won't want to blow them up. It takes a white guy gone native to protect his native girlfriend by leading the battle in a way they couldn't have done without him. The white chicks will all die in the process, sure, but it's for a noble cause.
Are we done with this story yet? Black Robe, The Mission, Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves, several movies about the struggles in Africa whose titles I can't bring to mind right now - the exact same plot, just different natives, different resources, and usually, it's the colonialists who win. In fact, the only reason for the fantastical setting beyond the cool CG was that, if the setting isn't real, they can make it so for once the natives DO win. In real life, that almost never happens.
I recently watched a video about the concept of a single story - how we in the West tend to develop and expand upon a single view of people of colour, and everything we think we know about them can be reduced to a manifestation of that single story. This is the single story of the Noble Savage. It's a classic character trope that touts the need for tolerance and acceptance without doing anything to further either. We don't need stories about the noble savage fighting to save his territory from the evil colonialists. We need stories about people coming back from colonialism to establish modern lives and businesses that respect their heritage while contributing to the world as it is now. We need stories that don't juxtapose native (i.e. natural) knowledge with colonial (i.e. scientific) knowledge. We need stories that acknowledge people of colour as whole, as intelligent, as multi-faceted, and as empowered.
You know what worried me most about this film, on an ideological level? The vast majority of similar films pit Christianity against Native Shamanism, because the colonialists in our world have traditionally been Christian and much of the work amongst the native peoples was done by Christian missionaries. This movie framed the religious question differently. In this movie, the soldiers laughed at the idea of a deity directing the natives' actions. In this movie, the bad colonialists are anti-religion.
Here's the other reason the fantasy setting was necessary for this story: it allowed the deity of the native peoples to be effective in a way that no historical noble savage flick has ever been able to do. It would seem that the creators want to find a way to not piss off the religious people who come to see the movie. They want the religious folks to identify with the natives, and any level of subtlety the bad guys might have had was stripped in the process.
We're left with a movie that tells that single story in such a way as to strip from it a key element of common identity most Americans are going to have with the people they are most like: the colonialists. We're encouraged to identify with the natives while ignoring the fact that every other time this story has been told, it's been people an awful lot like white-bread middle class Westerners who have been the bad guys. We're allowed, even encouraged to forget that. We shouldn't be.
I'm not advocating racial guilt, though I'm sure it comes across that way. But this is an element of that single story, too: we don't necessarily need to feel guilty over the actions of our ancestors towards people of colour, but we absolutely do need to be aware of those actions and conscious of the fact that they weren't okay and are easy to perpetuate if we're not aware of them. This movie does nothing to extend that needed awareness. In fact it sets it back.
So, I enjoyed the movie. It was beautiful, well-acted, a success on all the levels it tried to succeed at.
I just wish it had tried to succeed at the most important level.