Birth of a Planet*
I’ve always wanted to be in an oppressed minority, if only to feel, for once in my life, nobly and genuinely aggrieved. Sure, I’m Jewish, but it’s been hard to complain about being discriminated against in America for being Jewish ever since the Treaty of Beverly Hills, which granted the entire television industry to us as compensation for Dunkin Donuts making bagels.
But now my dream has come true.
I am a human being, and humans are viciously, hatefully, and unfairly depicted in the new hit movie Avatar. It’s species-ism at its worst.
This might seem strange, making a movie in which humans are depicted as greedy, warlike, violent, stupid, brutal and ugly, because, unless alien rubber mask technology has advanced further than we think, every member of the audience is a human. It’s a literalization of the old joke about the guy who’s not a racist because he hates everyone equally.
In Avatar, as everyone knows, humans travel to a distant planet which is an Edenic wonderland populated by amazing beautiful creatures, including the Navi, an intelligent native tribe somewhat like the Native Americans in the Disney movie, Pochohontas, except that movie was more realistic. These Navi are physically gorgeous, albeit blue, the men with abs of steel and the women with swimsuit model figures. They’re so kind they apologize to the animals they need to eat, and although they have warriors, they don’t seem to have war – maybe their Warriors are just their high school mascot. Although we learn a lot about the Navi lifecycle, we never see their excretory function, but I think we can assured, it doesn’t stink.
In contrast – all the humans, with some few exceptions, are venal, brutal and stupid. They travel to another planet, discover life, and all they want to do is dig it up, burn it, and kill it, to make money. The two human villains are a coporate tool and a militarist who leads a gang of ugly lowlifes. I assume the casting notice for the human extras read something like, “We need actors who the audience would enjoy seeing killed.”
The exceptions, of course, are the humans in the movie that either want to be or actually get to be aliens. There’s no human being in the movie who even likes the other human beings, and nobody who ever stands up for them, says, hey, you know, we’re only human.
I generally resent those snide criticisms along the lines of “Would you say that if the person were black or Jewish or Muslim or whatever?” but in this case it seems true: if the human characters in this movie were anything other than generically human – if they were just a different group of humans, Christians or Austrians or left-handed polo players – Avatar would be unwatchable, because our sympathies would be too offended by its “Birth of a Nation” level slanders. But because the movie condemns all of us, and not some of us, it seems fair.
The reason of course, is that it appeals to something deeper than our self-identification as humans, as being just as good or bad as everyone else. Avatar appeals to our secret belief that we’re better than everybody else. It’s a movie designed for our inner misanthrope… the voice inside that tells us that we’re the exception to the brutality and stupidity and greed around us. The part of us that believes that if we got a chance to be a Navi, they’d accept us and think we were one of them, too, because we deserve it, and that would be cool, and it also would be cool to have abs and/or a rear end like that, because we deserve that, too.
In the end, you can say what you want about us humans… you can insult us and tell us we’re stupid and awful and vicious and completely unworthy… and you’ll get away with it, and we’ll pay hundreds of millions of dollars to see your movie telling us that… because deep inside we’re saying, “Yeah, we are… except for me.”
*Yeah, I know, Pandora is a moon. Go away or I’ll start going on about how annoying it is that the Navi are the only creatures on the planet with four limbs. Darwin wept.
PS: One of the commentators makes an interesting point I hadn’t thought about clearly… the bad humans in the movie aren’t actually representative of the human race. They’re all white. And the Navi, although digitized beyond recognition, are played almost entirely by minority actors. Which is… weird. It obviously is meant to refer to and echo historical white vs. other imperialist oppression, but did Cameron have to make it so literal? By 2154, or whenever the movie takes place, wouldn’t blacks/Asians/Latinos have succeeded in society to the point where they, too, can be assholes? Isn’t it, uh, racist to assume that minorities wouldn’t have been right there up front, piloting spaceships/gunships/powered exoskeletons, and despoiling alongside their white brothers? Or sisters? Don’t women also have the right to be rotten? Casting minorities or women in the corporate/fascist roles would have been daring, but then again, it would also have been daring to give the Navi six limbs like every other land animal on Pandora, or have them breath through their shoulders, ditto. And Mr C (who, like all other geeks, I adore, and whose movies I re-watch obsessively) wasn’t interested in being daring, he was interesting in making the highest grossing movie ever. Again.
PPS: Everybody should go see it anyway. It’s so freaking cool.
SOME RESPONSES: Geez, everybody wants to talk about movies.
The limb thing is a problem because as Darwin pointed out, like evolves from like. All the other land animals on our planet are quadrupeds (even the whales, who have vestigial rear limbs.) That’s because we all evolved from a common ancestor, that first lobed fish that clambered onto land, and over the length of time required to evolve an animal of our intelligence many other forms branched off and filled various niches. The learned and talented biologist/artists that Cameron hired to populate Pandora made the interesting choice that on that world, land animals evolved from a hexapod (??) body plan, with the same vast variety of forms and expressions of that plan that we see here on Earth. Cool! I totally dug it. And then Cameron (I presume) decided, well, we’d better not give the Navi a middle pair of arms, otherwise they won’t be sexy. I imagine this is not bothersome except to evolutionary biologists and those of us who love them, but we’re pissed about it.
To Teresa: I grew up reading science fiction obsessively, as I’ve said many times on this blog and elsewhere. So I’m well aware of the tropes of the genre, and even the expectations that come with it. But genre is no excuse for poor characterization and bad writing. Would it have violated sci-fi genre rules to — for example — make the Colonel less insane and murderous? Or to prevent a strong case why the humans needed the unobtanium, so that Jake had a real, and a difficult, choice to make? My critique of the movie isn’t based on an expectation of realism — it’s based on an expectation, even a hope, for a better movie.
To Bob: Yes, Michelle Rodriguez is and played a Latina… and was one of the human good guys. All the “bad” humans are white. And sure, there might be better humans back home, but I’m talking about what the movie presents, and the movie presents: Humans = evil, and Navi (plus humans who like Navis) = Good. I could care less about any slander toward my species — I’m pretty sure the real aliens won’t decide to wipe us out just because they catch this movie someday on PPV — I just wanted, again, a better movie, with less one dimensional characters. And I disagree with your critique of its godliness… at one point, if I remember correctly, Sigourney Weaver makes the case that their “God” is physically real… a global consciousness. The distinction between that and myth is noted, if subtly.
However, I do agree with this interesting critique by Dan Savage — how Cameron may have gone a little too far in imposing human ethics on an alien race.
And David: That great line about “Crash” came from Adam Felber.
January 5th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
From what I’ve heard, the movie is also virulently anti-technology, which I find fascinating, since Cameron spent 10 years and countless millions developing the new technology necessary to make the movie.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
Bam! I concur - the plot was dumber than a bag of hammers.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Personally, I think “Dances with Aliens” sums the whole thing up.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
One of my criticisms was the lack of minorities in the movie. To verify, I checked IMDB, and I was wrong, there were quite a few — the main cast of aliens were all african american or native american. That also seems odd…
January 5th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
This was interesting, and thanks for posting it. And, it’s why we’re big fans of Wait Wait.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Excellent points! I did feel James Cameron came across as anti-multinational corporation (which, isn’t much of the movie industry engaged in creeping economic/cultural globalization?), anti-mercenary/Blackwater, and anti-mining (which is funny, since much of southern California is powered by coal). I was pretty depressed about our future as humans. And of course I’m the exception!
January 5th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
And don’t forget, the noble humans - the non-evil ones - are just like the noble white man in so many allegedly non-racist movies (”Dances with Wolves”, etc) end up being better at being an “intelligent native tribe” member than the actual intelligent native tribe members. So, what’s it really saying about the them? Are they really better than humans since we can out do them at any time?
January 5th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Thank you for being the only other person I’ve met who noticed the limbs problem. But i’m not sure the film was worthy of your talents. No Avatar defenders even try to defend the film on the merits of its plot, ideas, or characters. They just go on and on about visually cool it was. Which it was. But that’s not going to stand the test of time, methinks. Remember when we all thought Jurassic Park was the best thing going?
Oh, and @Michael - I prefer the alt title of “Dances with Ewoks”, to evoke the storm trooper v. Ewoks style battle toward the end of Avatar. I’ve also heard “Dances with Smurfs”.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Avatar Epilogue: The humans come back with nukes and blow the skinny Aborigine-Smurf hybrids off their stupid little moon…
January 5th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Actually, I left the theater thinking, “This is really going to piss off the patriot movement.” Camo takes a beating here. Yes, it’s “Dances with Aliens,” but it ends with “Custer’s Last Stand.”
January 5th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Um, I’m not sure that you’ve paid attention to much sci-fi in the past, oh, EVER. All sci-fi DOES is show us that we need to be careful with our technology, otherwise we’ll end up screwing up our planet, going into space, and screwing up somewhere else, not stopping until we’ve screwed up the entire universe. I think we NEED to take that kind of responsibility and take that kind of indictment, because we ARE that way. And I’m including myself.
Battlestar Galactica - humans created technology that ended up turning on them, destroying their civilization, and causing a war that left them fighting for their lives. Star Wars - rebels fighting against an oppressive regime with better technology. Wall-E - humans mess up the Earth only to live on a cruise ship in space, get fat, and do absolutely nothing productive. Etc, etc, etc.
Avatar is just another in a long list of science fiction stories that make us accountable for the technology we create and the scientific discovery we pursue, very often at the expense of the new places and lives we’re trying to study or make better. It’s interesting that your big complaint is the fact that Avatar “makes humans look bad.” So does “A.I.” So does “Terminator.” So does just about every science-fiction project. Was the story predictable? Of course it was. But there are only about 6-7 human stories that are recycled over and over in different permutations. I thought Avatar was a familiar story told well.
And if anyone else talks about how “racist” it is, I think I shall scream!
January 5th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
actually, this movie is a 21 st century jewish fantasy come to life
go to sleep fat
wake up skinny
no atkins
no south beach
January 5th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Love ya Peter but it’s okay if white people look like the enemy once in a while. Whites have been playing the hero for too long and when roles (heroes) were meant to be played by a minority, Hollywood finds a white guy to play it instead. Don’t see you complaining about the countless movies that portray minorities in a bad way. Doesn’t feel too good huh?
January 5th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Peter,
A few points.
First of all, last I looked, Michelle Rodriguez is Hispanic. So at least one minority will make it to Cameron’s future.
But more importantly, I don’t think it’s wise or accurate to assume that the portrayal of the folks tasked with exploiting (stealing) the resources of Pandora are meant to be representative of all of the humans of that time, any more than a movie about the slave trade would be intended to describe all Europeans of their era. Sure, they’re the only humans in the movie, but can’t we assume that there are better, less greedy, more moral folks who had better things to do than go after the Upsidasium on Pandora?
–Bob
January 5th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
I agree with your PS and noticed it as I was watching. Just painting the aliens blue doesn’t change the white world viewpoint.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
One more thought…
The aspect of AVATAR that bugged me the most was very pro-Deist stance it takes. It doesn’t just stop at portraying the Na’vi as being lovely, spiritual, moral beings; it actually shows that their religion is true, that their god is real. That’s a more outrageous (and to this atheist, offensive) assertion than anything else I saw in the movie.
–Bob
January 5th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
one other thing: for all the millions spent, was there one scene in Avatar equal to Michael shooting Solozzo in the restaurant? What was that made for- 25 cents?
January 5th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Oh Peter… It gets worse…
http://www.geekologie.com/2010/01/youve_gotta_be_kidding_me_foru.php
January 5th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
To be fair, there’s another significant way in which the humans in Avatar are not representative of the human race in general: They are all part of the commercial enterprise that’s got mining rights on the moon. The entire human cast is basically the equivalent of a company’s mining operation, its security guards, and the geologists it employs nominally to prevent it from digging up ancient burial grounds. There is presumably a vast human civilization out there that is not employed by this company or its operation, which is no more representative of the civilization as a whole than, say, the people you’d find at a Weyerhauser clearcutting camp.
January 5th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I’m reminded of a joke I still repeat about “Crash” that I first heard on “Wait, Wait…” several years ago (Charlie Pierce, maybe?):
“You know, I thought racism was a GOOD thing until I saw that movie.”
January 5th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
It’s James Cameron, for god’s sake. Cameron is to deep meaning what Raymond Burr was to pole-vaulting.
I mean really, this movie has cat boobs. I don’t remember any cat boobs in le Quatre Cent Coups.
This is what happens when you go off-meds for too long and have access to lots of money.
Some people re-side all the neighbors’ houses to better color-coordinate with their own, some people make crazy-ass movies.
And yeah, it was REALLY REALLY cool.
January 5th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
[…] in which case he’s the best fucking indigenous person ever.) Go read this. Then this. And this. That’s how I feel about Avatar. Walking out of the theater I […]
January 5th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Like the blog, Peter. Note that Trudy was played by Michelle Rodriguez, though, and her last name, “Chacon”, is patently Spanish. Not all the good guys are honkies!
Also, “Max Patel”.
January 5th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Did you notice that this movie was just “Aliens” in reverse? It even had Sigourney Weaver, a kick-ass Latina, and a guy in a cage-like industrial armature.
January 5th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
James Cameron in an L.A. Times interview:
“This is a movie I would have loved to have seen when I was a 14-year-old kid in 1968.”
So if Avatar is the supreme realization of 14-year-old James Cameron’s writing fantasies, can we please discuss Jake Sully as a Mary Sue?
January 5th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Great post! Keep it up for the new decade
January 5th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Actually, take a look at the scene again where they pan through the military personnel while they are receiving the big pep talk. I definitely saw women and I think there were non-whites in the military scenes as well.
The plot line of Avatar reminded me of Ferngully… special tree, clueless guy who is helping cut down the rainforest, but then decides it’s wrong…
What I thought about while watching the movie was that Pandora was so far away from earth that the other earthlings didn’t know (or wouldn’t find out in time) about the carnage happening on Pandora (they were in cryo in the beginning of the movie for the trip to Pandora, right?). I was hoping the humans on Pandora were not the only humans left in the universe. (as Bill says above - I’m just reading upwards and catching up…)
January 6th, 2010 at 9:47 am
[…] Finally, a semi-bad review for Avatar. From Peter Sagal: ‘It’s species-ism at its […]
January 6th, 2010 at 10:31 am
You just don’t understand. Mankind’s reliance on and need for unobtanium are essential to our national and global survival. Abandoning our efforts to obtain it will have a disastrous effect on our economy at a time when it is most fragile, putting millions out of work world-wide. There is also very little actual evidence that the presence of humans on Pandora is causing any of the ill effects that liberals claim. When measured as an average over the last twelve years, many unbiased scientists say that conditions on Pandora are actually improving. Please, don’t shut down our essential unobtanium industry over unproved junk science claims.
January 6th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
I was more bothered by “only two eyes” than by “only four limbs” but I did notice that.
January 6th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
It’s really more like European colonialism in Africa and Asia than the American treatment of native Americans. Furthermore, the navi have more African have more African physical features.
January 6th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
I just have to comment about the limbs. While in the back of my head, I realize that the Navi being standard humanoid in shape is most likely about not weirding out the paying public, I choose to view it as an part of the world development. I am intrigued by the back story. The Navi are likely not native to Pandora, so how did they get there? Did they somehow engineer themselves to have the USB ports, or did Pandora “change” them. And those arches over the Tree of Souls are very regular and not very organic looking. Ancient ruins maybe? But who built them?
Or maybe I just want it to have a plot to match the incredible visuals.
January 7th, 2010 at 12:40 am
Avatar isn’t anti-technology- it’s pro-technology!! Only through continued technological advancement can anything like Pandora ever evolve
Evolution, Immunolgy and Religion in James Cameron’s Avatar
January 8th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
I just can’t believe you spilled the beans on that whole Dunkin’ Donuts bagels thing!
January 18th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
I’m an anthropologist, and this is what we, thanks to Renato Rosaldo, call “imperialist nostagia.” You hanker for what you have destroyed. Dances with Wolves was a prime example, and figured prominantly in Rosaldo’s explication of the concept in his eponymous essay (which can be found in the excellent 1993 volume “Culture and Truth.” This movie is wrong, wrong, WRONG anthropologically on certain levels, although it does an excellent job of highlighting anthropological themes like rites of passage, acculturation, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, symbolism, environmental/cultural interactions, etc. This move is neither vapid nor clever, but it is to a degree naive in its ideological stance. It’s on solid enough footing though that people can identiry with it, and ambiguous enough that people can argue about it, so I think it’s great. I loved the movie, and pondering the implications of the characters and what is actually says about US as a species and ourselves as individuals- maybe Cameron was onto something after all!