The Return of the (CGI) Native

by Adam Hirsch

Avatar (Dir. James Cameron, 2009)

All right, I’ll say it.

Avatar might very well be the most deeply racist film made in Hollywood since World War II.  The film functions on the basis of James Cameron’s fetishization of the native and never breaks from that original persuasion.  This is nothing new; the West has long objectified and idealized aboriginal and indigenous populations.  Avatar, however, might be the first major piece of Orientalism put out in the last forty years by an author (read: filmmaker) completely, it seems, unawares.  It’s also, at $230 million dollars, the most expensive film ever made.

In the year 2154, Earth has run out of natural resources (surprise!), and a large corporation has flown out to the planet Pandora (a trip of nine months at light speed, we learn) to mine for a rare, expensive mineral that Cameron must have really mined his own creative reservoirs to come up with a label for: unobtainium.  Armed as the company may be (the Halliburton/Blackwater of the 22nd Century), Pandora is such a dangerous place — “a weekend in hell would be R&R,” says the ex-Marine leader of security (the ever gritty Stephen Lang) — that the mining has halted.  The danger comes from the jungle, and the humanoid natives, the Na’vi, are the most dangerous part of it all.  But a scientist (Sigourney Weaver) has come up with a way to link a human to a Na’vi avatar with DNA and lots of special effects in order to study (and spy) on the indigenous society.  So, needless to say, when a paraplegic Marine named Sully (Sam Worthington, in a well played performance) gets a freak opportunity to get his own avatar, he goes for it.  He (in the avatar) gets assimilated into the native society and falls in love with one of the locals (the mesmerizing Zoe Saldana).  Trouble begins when he forgets what side he’s on.

Oh, colonialism.  See, while everyone can smile and nod in agreement with the basic message of Avatar (yea! for nature; boo! for guns), Cameron’s moral parable falls short of saying anything moving or even concrete about the racial clichés of old.  One of the most disturbing aspects of the film comes from the casting: every Na’vi is played by an African-American or a Native American, and the invaders are all white. Even the facial features and hair of the Na’vi smack of African-American sterotypes.  The tribal and hunting rituals are African.  The moral subtext of the film — Sully’s realization that he belongs more with the Na’vi (via the avatar) than with the humans (with their war machines and wheelchairs) — reads as racial wish-fulfilment on the part of a white filmmaker to take a damaged white human and give him the physical strength and sexual prowess of the African native.  Make no mistake: the way Cameron exposits the exoticness of Pandora is interchangable with the Victorian lust for Africa.  Or, more simply, this.

Avatar has much more in common with a film like Up than, say, Up in the Air.  Over 60% of the film is computer generated, or so Cameron and the producers have said in interviews, and most of the performances were created using motion-capture technology.  It’s an animated film in the best sense of the word; Cameron has stuffed (and stuffed and stuffed) each frame like a college kid cramming everything he owns into a tiny roller suitcase.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s an alarming pattern emerging from Hollywood lately, with Transformers 2: The Rise of the Fallen being the prime example.  The cinematography doesn’t so much explore Pandora (also: real deep labeling there, Jim) as it creates a specific idealization of the indigenous bush, and does it all on a computer.  It’s imaginative, but James Cameron would be better to apply it to a medium that deals strictly in digital control and output: video games.

What’s most perplexing of all is that James Cameron already directed a brilliant critique of colonialism in Aliens, and he didn’t do it by trying to combine Dances with Wolves with World of Warcraft.  Aliens featured greed facing unspeakable terror — one that outfoxed the colonial goals and made the visitors fight not to exploit but just to survive.

This is all just food for thought for when you go see Avatar, though you’ve probably done so already, since at the time of writing the most expensive film ever made has already made $2.1 million in profit worldwide.

Globalization.  Gotta love it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 10:57 pm. It is filed under Adam, reviews, writing and tagged with Avatar, Dances with Wolves, James Cameron, Orientalism, Racism, Sam Worthington, World of Warcraft, Zoe Saldana.