Intentions be damned, Avatar is racist (as is praying for and/or to "JaMarcus Manning").

Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist.  Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists).  Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material.  This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it's that too.  I'll address the racial politics more in a moment, but let me address the portrayal of the military (much bemoaned here) first:

It all adds up to crossing a line that I’ve never experienced in a major American film: drawing the audience to cheer the brutal deaths of Americans who are clearly symbolizing the military.

Blackwater/Xe Services LLC is not the military.  Mercenaries are not symbols of the military.  They are a perversion of the military.  James Cameron has an unabashed love for the military (Aliens, The Abyss, etc.) but that love does not extend to those who make war for profit.  It's obvious that the only authentic military man in the film is the protagonist, Jake Sully, who lost his legs in a legitimate conflict.  He turns from the soulless mercenary-logic like a good proxy for the audience, and this is where the racial politics become problematic. 

The titular "avatars" are genetically designed Na'vi bodies that can be remotely piloted by people like Sully with the intent of studying the natives.  (Think anthropological immersion at its most literal.)  The Na'vi are not merely distrustful of "the space people," they're inherently xenophobic, incapable of trusting any sentient being that doesn't look like them.  If that mistrust is justified for some other reason (like a hairy first contact), the film never mentions it, meaning (in a classic case of projection) the humans assume that the Na'vi will be xenophobic before they even meet them.

But the racial essentialism of the film creates a whopper of an unintended thematic irony.*  The planet and everything on it do not simply coexist in a harmonious balance of the New Age variety: they are hard-wired into a single neural network that makes the entire planet into a single entity and "the space people" less like a colonizing mercenary force than a disease.  The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different.  They do not belong to the planet and therefore there is no possibility for peaceful coexistence.  The only way humans can be accepted is for them to forsake their humanity and become Na'vi.  (Think literal assimilation.) 

This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling.  The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens.  In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible ... and those assumptions are racist.  In football terms, this is a variation of the black quarterback "problem."

For decades, coaches and scouts wished they could find a black body with a white brain in it.  ("If only someone could find a way to stuff Peyton Manning's brain into JaMarcus Russell's body!")  The essentialist logic at play there is obvious: black people are more athletic than white, and white people are smarter than black.  No matter how descriptive these people thought they were being, in truth they were creating the conditions they claimed to describe: black quarterbacks were increasingly valued for raw athleticism, white athletes for their pocket presence and tactical acumen.  That's an expectations game based on racist expectations ... and it works according to the same logic behind the narrative of Avatar. 

*I'm analogizing race and species here because Cameron's space fable encourages me to do so with all the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head.

Comments

[SEK]

First, I should say that I never cheer for Death. The other team, whatever it may be, is mine.

Second, I'll address the other points in the morning, as I'm off to bed now. (I just don't want anyone to think I'm ignoring anything if I don't answer them in the next 10 hours.)

[Karl Steel]

Hard Boiled the Woo film, in which there are a lot of people gunned down, many of whom work as guns for hire. In the context of the film we're supposed to cheer this on. Is this wrong? I'm trying to figure out what the distinctions are for judging certain deaths--in action films or otherwise--of guns of for hire as bad, others indifferent, and others good. I don't think we need to limit this to allegories--or romans à clef--for this question to matter. My sense is that you're defending Blackwater/Xe. I'm trying to figure out what your larger metric is.

So long as we're defending Blackwater though, I'll be very interested to see how this shakes out. From what I've been able to pick up, Eric Price sounds like a religious fanatic w/ lots of politics but no principles.

[mike]

The quickest way to show that you're retarded is to scream "RACIST!!!!!" at anything and everything. This film is idiotic for many reasons, but "racism" against savage people is not one of them.

[Richard Pennyfarthing]

Because that is not always case, as the people hired by those organizations were former soldiers for the American military and want to make a living doing what they do and that isn't any worse as people who join the military to make a living for themselves or get an education.

Like the Wall Street freaks who caused our current economic crisis, loosely regulated mercenaries cause far more trouble than value.

[Karl Steel]

Mike, thanks for your carefully crafted counterarguments. I look forward to seeing what else you have to say. Perhaps you'd like to give the keynote at a conference I'm running on Quick Ways of Showing Retardation? I have no doubt that you will wow us all.

[tomemos]

The mercenary discussion puts me in mind of Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" and McDiarmid's "Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries."

[George]

I think the difference between soldiers and mercenaries is their motive and their reward. They may be doing essentially the same work (though one group generally does more raping than the other) but they do it for different reasons (or at least they are percieved as such) and therefore their rewards are different. The reason soldiers get respect is BECAUSE they put up with the 'mickey mouse' stuff like, you know, not shooting civilians.

Soldiers may sign up for money and college education, sure, but the salary and benefits are pretty meagre so many people assume that the primary motive for joining is some kind of higher calling. They shoot people for a living and their reward for this work is small pay, big respect. Mercenaries on the other hand get huge paychecks, so the motive for joining is obvious to all outside observers. They may have some desire to serve their country but that can't be the primary goal otherwise they would have just stayed in the military. They shoot people for a living and their reward for this work is big pay, small respect. Mercenaries get about the same respect as lumberjacks, crab fishermen and ice truckers because they all risk their lives but they all do it for financial gain, not for some notion of serving their country.

[P.T. Smith]

We are so way off topic at this point, but oh well.

Scott, loved the post. I don't like prejudging a movie, but I was assuming it would head in this awful direction and adding that with other problems I have with Cameron I had no interest in seeing it. Nice to hear things confirmed by someone who's done seen it.

Mercenary. Okay, why are we pretending they are hardly different than the military? Oversight. Laws. Those sorts of things, which companies like Blackwater go, "nuh uh!" to. That's the fucking problem. Stop pretending they play fair.

[Paul T. Lazaro]

and so on that I worked with absolutely were motivated by a desire to serve their country themselves. They just wanted to make better money while they did it, and in some cases to dispense with certain aspects of military culture {that they couldn't adhere to while they were in the service--which caused them to be kicked out}, which I can certainly understand. "Do what you enlisted to do, but with less mickey mouse no adult supervision, and no consequences, and more pay" is a pretty good deal.

Fixed.

[grant]

"I'm analogizing race and species here because Cameron's space fable encourages me to do so with all the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head."

Can you elaborate on this? Your descriptions of the Na'vi as a "neural network" and humans as a "disease" lead me to think this might not be reducible to race. Certainly the movie's narrative progenitors leave us no other choice, but might this be some hamfisted (and utterly wrong) attempt at a "Xenogenesis" type story?

I guess I'd just like to hear how the film wants us to (or invites us to) allegorize the species difference as racial difference (provided we can set aside the "going native" narrative archetype--or perhaps this is exactly the problem--this archetype occludes any interesting narrative possibilities Cameron might have otherwise accessed…)

[Paul T. Lazaro]

Let's not feel sorry for the Big Hollywood crowd; they got their "Whitey and the woolly savage" movie this year.

"Blind Side" was like "Gentle Ben" (without the Ron Howard's goofy looking brother in it) meets "Miss Congeniality"--and football. Too. What more can you ask for in a good heartwarming Conservative Film?

[Paul T. Lazaro]

"Species difference v. Racial difference?" Hmm....

[Dawngreeter]

The movie has obvious problems in dealing with its subject matter and I'm not going to dispute that. For one, actual encounter with an alien sentient species would have tons and tons of relevant recorded material to work with from the Earth's colonial era. But the movie doesn't even have an anthropologist on the science team, counting on a biologist(?) to communicate with the Na'vi. That's less than awesome.

I'm not going to dispute the latent racism. It's there. But it's a cliche. Hollywood is not aware that there might be another way to tell a story, it has to be one of "us" who drives to events forward. That's bullshit, but I knew that's how it was going to be from the moment I first saw the trailer. Maybe I have really low expectations of Hollywood, but that's the kind of thing I just shrug off and focus on other aspects of the movie. I might even make a case that no one parses this information in a manner that even acknowledges racism, but I'm not gonna do that. Because latent racism is still (especially?) racism. And I'm not going to dispute the incredible uniformity of Na'vi tribes but, again, this is Hollywood. I'd be interested to watch a movie which would be just a fictional ethnography of the Na'vi tribes, but I suspect I'd be alone. And the Na'vi would then have to look like they evolved from the same predecessors as the rest of the planet instead of being human "cutesy cat-person dream form" in the middle of an alien world which ontologically seems to have nothing to do with them.

On the issue of "us" having to look and act like "them" because they are xenophobic and we are not, though, I have to disagree. The science team (plus the pilot chica) are an obvious anomaly in "our" camp and are not representative of us as a whole. And even within the science team, only Jake Sully is actually able to bridge the gap. Well, him and Neytiri. But the movie isn't about them being in our environment so Neytiri isn't as important. With Sully, though, the Na'vi form is crucial to the movie. This is the same issue District 9 raised and it is awesome. A member of "us" can no longer be "us" if he, in any way, helps "them". He is transformed, unable to function as a member of "our" society anymore. He is permanently tainted by "them". District 9 does this better, of course, because Avatar is essentially a movie for kids. But if there was one redeeming point of Avatar, it's exactly this. And at this point, certain aspects of latent racism actually begin to work for the movie - it's a culture clash and the bastards will not tolerate "otherness".

Not to mention that the idea of a networked planet makes me all warm inside.

[Peter Erwin]

The only way humans can be accepted is for them to forsake their humanity and become Na'vi. (Think literal assimilation.)

That's not entirely true -- at the end, there are several humans who are allowed to stay behind (basically, the surviving members of the science group). I don't think there's any clear indication that they will "become Na'vi", certainly not to the extent that Jake Sully does (for one thing, they either don't have avatars, or have lost theirs -- if I'm remembering things correctly).

[Wax]

But the racial essentialism of the film creates a whopper of an unintended thematic irony.* The planet and everything on it do not simply coexist in a harmonious balance of the New Age variety: they are hard-wired into a single neural network that makes the entire planet into a single entity and "the space people" less like a colonizing mercenary force than a disease. The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different.

[my emphasis]

I think this bit is incorrect. What's wrong with The Company is that its people are committed to unsustainable behaviour - and though they've met the Na'vi and seen the alternative, they refuse to embrace it. Avatar is a movie about enlightenment; Jake becomes enlightened because he's able to see the possibility, not just of communication/sympathy/pity across species boundaries, but of kinship and compatibility. Of (literal) interchangeability. All the film's shortcuts aim toward that recognition on Jake's part (and Grace's, and their wised-up compatriots'); by becoming desireless, he's free to It's a familiar movie about colonialism/blahblahblah layered atop an unfamiliar, much more troubling film about the irrelevance of humanness.

Remember that in the end it's not Jake and his bandits who defeat the army - like the ghost army in Lord of the Rings, the rampaging quadrupeds and bird-dragons sweep down and do the job the Na'vi couldn't. Indeed the incompetence of the Na'vi was one of the movie's biggest frustrations, to me: you get to Act Three and it looks like the Na'vi are going to try to defeat the mercs on their own (Na'vi) terms. Then they fight an impressive battle that's nonetheless wholly without intrinsic-to-Pandora style or substance. The movie chickens out. That bothers me. But then the animals sweep down and kill the Bad Guys. They're part of the whole planetwide network - a different organ doing the job the Na'vi organ couldn't, i.e. expelling the disease. It's a fine point that's lost amid the by-the-numbers noble sacrifice stuff.

(On the other hand the finale does give us that gorgeous scene, marred by atrocious one-liners, of Michelle Rodriguez dancing that helicopter among the floating mountains - capped with a wholly unsentimental death in battle that shocked me with its matter-of-factness.)

The Na'vi are not merely distrustful of "the space people," they're inherently xenophobic, incapable of trusting any sentient being that doesn't look like them. If that mistrust is justified for some other reason (like a hairy first contact), the film never mentions it, meaning (in a classic case of projection) the humans assume that the Na'vi will be xenophobic before they even meet them.

I took from the film that initial attempts to communicate had 'broken down,' i.e. the humans were assholes. They'd been on Pandora long on enough to demonstrate that. And the Na'vi aren't xenophobic in the sense of 'fearing others' (or Others) - remember that the female lead's initial reaction to Jake is disgust and boredom - he's too stupid to survive. The planet's intelligence detects that he's more robust than she detects; she doesn't kill him; and she sees that he's a hardy microorganism. Then she's cool with him, and can enjoy fellowship.

She's also perfectly fine with teaching a 'sky person.' The rest of the tribe is distrustful but hops on with Jake when he shows a willingness to invest (e.g. coming back to ride the big dragon or whatever).

The Na'vi just know how to live - and how difficult it is to do so - without destroying the planet. Killing Pandora slowly is still killing it; there's no reason for the Na'vi to invest in humans obvious devoted to consumption rather than cooperation. Their sense of time is different from, uhh, ours. The film is ballsy enough to depict the illusion of narrative time (e.g. by presenting vaguely biological 'ancestors' existing in the cells of the trees) and expect the audience to at least try and empathize with that understanding. I admire that risk-taking.

This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling. The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens.

Where does Jake display, in the end, anything like 'rationalism'? As I recall he barely comes up with a plan - it's just 'let's get lots of us together and fuck 'em up,' right? - and his apotheosis is to become one with the planet, not 'becoming a person of _____' but unbecoming a person. In the end he displays not honed ego but just less of it - and is rewarded by great power that other 'people' can't understand (a version of Neo's transformation to egoless being in the Matrix movies, right?).

I see all the boring human politics stuff in Avatar as the pop-film cost of telling a story about the inadvisability of holding on to human 'identity.' And I see lots of people responding negatively to the 'politics' (variously defined) while dismissing the rather riskier story - about egolessness and the ongoing experience of inescapable morally-neutral interconnectedness - as...well...

The planet and everything on it do not simply coexist in a harmonious balance of the New Age variety

I can't decide whether you're invoking 'New Age' aesthetics/spiritualism to denigrate the movie by association or actually praise its more biologically-minded literalism. I'll assume the latter and just say this: if the Na'vi were not willowy cat-people but slime-covered mole/turtles, we'd be talking less about the 'racial logic' of the film and more about the weirdness of an ex-Marine falling head over heels in love with a slimy mole/turtle, even sharing an interspecies kiss after the film's climax! Seeing the movie through racial terms because it's about bipeds is an unfortunate byproduct, I suspect, of the need for 'relatability' and so forth.

***

I guess I'm just saying here that the movie beneath the movie is haunting me, days after seeing it, and I don't see other people talking about it - except to denigrate it in passing as 'New Age' bullshit or equally predictably, 'trite' Hollywood pap. Yet its limitations are obvious and and unsurprising. Instead of fighting a rear-guard action against deniers, why aren't we insisting on readings of the film that go beyond its generic trappings? Because it seems the 'Dances with Smurfs' problem is that: a generic feature. I think the movie is - and offers - a bigger deal than that.

[Picador]

Chetverikov:

Read this and then tell us how people who work for Xe, aka Blackwater, should be treated by the populations of the countries where they operate.