More on race and racialism in Avatar.

While the Na'vi may be blue, the people who played them are not. Consider:

1. Neytiri
2. Tsu'tey
3. Eytukan
4. Moat
5. Horse Clan Leader

It could be the case that all the other models for the Na'vi are white, but it seems clear to me that Cameron chose these actors for the central Na'vi characters according to racialized criteria; i.e. while he didn't necessarily choose them because they weren't white, his vision of a primitive, native culture didn't include white people. The representatives of humanity, however, were not only overwhelmingly white, even the exceptions played to stereotype: Dileep Rao played an Indian scientist and Michelle Rodriguez played a Latina tough.  My point in the previous Avatar post about the film indulging in the white fantasy of becoming the proverbial other is, then, made literal by Cameron's casting decisions: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver and Joel Moore play three white characters who inhabit bodies otherwise occupied only by actors of color. I'm not normally one to invest much of anything argumentative based on what happens on a casting couch, but in this case, Cameron tipped his hand with all the subtlety of an overconfident drunk: the purpose of the avatars is to place white brains in blue bodies that would otherwise be inhabited by black ones.

Stop howling already: I know that, within the film, the purpose of the avatars is to allow humans to breathe on Pandora; however, the humans have masks that can and do fulfill that function. I also know that another purpose of the avatars was to allow human anthropologists to interact with the Na'vi, which is why the xenobotanist played by Sigourney Weaver establishes a planet-side school. For now, set aside Cameron's confused notion of what a botanist does, because while it suggests that his script is, at best, ignorant of departmental niceties or, at worse, internally inconsistent, it could also be the result of the Gaia metaphor, in which the population of the entire planet are semi-conscious functionaries of a fully-conscious tree.  (I kid!)  Focus instead on 1) the fact that the film is called Avatar, and 2) the likelihood that Cameron spent years developing this technology in order to avoid the throwaway line about terraforming required to account for the astonishing frequency of breathable atmospheres on far-flung planets. 

In short, if you believe that the existence of the avatars can be justified on the basis of inhospitable environs, you've not simply placed the cart before the horse, you've put the invention of the wheel before domestication of animals.  Because, as the title indicates, the avatars aren't incidental to the film: they're its raison d'être.  The whole point of the film is to stuff brains in those bodies, so which brains are stuffed into which bodies is not a minor point, it is the point. Moreover, within the narrative, the bodies they were being stuffed into were utterly infantilized: the Na'vi don't think for themselves, as even animal husbandry is beyond them. They require a direct neural connection in order to domesticate an animal.

That they teach humans to be similarly dependent upon a necessarily benevolent planet is, I understand, the point—but it is a terrible one if, as many claim, Cameron wanted to press a message of ecological interdependence.  The Na'vi possess all the agency of a leukocyte: they may respond individually, but they are not, properly speaking, individuals.  As progressive propaganda goes, this rises to the level of what conservatives believe our nefarious motives to be.  That the quasi-coherent leftist politics of the film are intended to be inspirational only makes this incoherence and, more importantly, its dubious racial politics all the worse, because "inculcating dubious racial politics in the next generation of environmental and anti-war activists" doesn't count as a victory for the forces of democratic freedom.  (Or only counts as one in that hilariously limited sense.)  Even in the film, as my friend Aaron argues, the result of such thinking is also infantilizing:

Jake Sully, in other words, is a Western fantasy of spoiled childhood: pure id, he revels in the toys that the world has provided for him without understanding that someone had to make them, without ever questioning his own right to have them. I think that’s why I don’t feel contempt for him, but visceral, gut-level, and troubling disgust. I recognize his desires, because we not only have to get past them to be adults, but because they stay with us. Perhaps we still are, on some level, the sociopaths we were when we were children (that I type this while home for the holidays, in the bedroom I occupied when I was seven, only seems appropriate). Yet it’s also one of the worst aspects of the American cultural tradition that going back to childhood is somehow the fountainhead of political virtue (see, for example, Jefferson, Thomas and Roosevelt, Theodore) because it’s so rarely the childhood of curiosity, games, and sociality that the tradition extols, but rather its reverse, a very particular fantasy of careless anti-social boyishness that tends into misogyny so easily because, to again refer us to Nina Baym, it feminizes the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” that we American boys must seek to be free of by lighting out for the territories.

Finally, let me clarify a few minor concerns about my previous Avatar post:

1. Just because I didn't remember every last detail drummed into my head over the course of three dull hours doesn't mean I didn't see the film.
2. Just because you do remember every last detail doesn't mean that your take on the film is more correct than mine.
3. I chose "JaMarcus Manning" as the figure of the white-brained, black-bodied quarterback because I'm from Louisiana and graduated from Louisiana State University.
4. I know the name "JaMarcus Manning" is racist, not because you told me it was, but because that was my point: the "black quarterback problem" is the result of racist expectations that were only ever operative because they were self-fulfilling.
5. If you take issue with a point I make, fine. If you accuse me of treating you like a student when I defend a point I make, you have issues. Leave me out of them, please, and just argue with me as you would any other stranger on the internet.

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

you've put the invention of the wheel before domestication of animals

I tell my students all the time: it's not the exact dates that matter, it's getting things in the right order, and putting the right things together.

[SEK]

I'm glad someone liked that line, as I was inordinately proud of it before realizing its probable origin was in the months of my life lost to playing Civilizations.

[Richard Pennyfarthing]

I think Jake Sully "revels in the toys that the world has provided for him" because in "real" life he's paralyzed.

[P.T. Smith]

I tell my students all the time: it's not the exact dates that matter, it's getting things in the right order, and putting the right things together.

Awesome lesson, seriously. I am the absolute worst at numbers - the second they appear I get confused and a little scared - and I am terrible at any sort of memorization, but I always did really well in any social studies/history course because I never bothered trying to remember dates, just understanding what events had to happen before others to make them possible. No one taught that to me though, good that you are doing it.

[P.T. Smith]

I'm glad someone liked that line, as I was inordinately proud of it before realizing its probable origin was in the months of my life lost to playing Civilizations.

Did that realization diminish the sense of pride, or the feeling that the pride was inordinate? Because if I were you, I'd opt for the latter.

[Karl Steel]

great post, Scott. I'm glad I watched me some Herzog and some McCarthy adaptation on Xmas instead of Cameron.

[Karl Steel]

I think Jake Sully "revels in the toys that the world has provided for him" because in "real" life he's paralyzed.
And the easy take away from that is that we have a straightforward mind (Jake)/body (Na'vi) split dynamic, with all that implies.

[zunguzungu]

When I wrote "revels in the toys that the world has provided for him," I was thinking of the way he discovers that the planet has all sorts of fun inside-a-pinball-machine plants to play with, and (as if they are like a pinball machine) he goes around slapping them. The thoughtless viciousness of it reminded me of nothing more than a 9 year old, convinced of his centrality in the universe, walking around smashing stuff with a stick because he can. But surely a marine on an alien world would have more sense? apparently not.

[Ahistoricality]

But surely a marine on an alien world would have more sense?

Known many marines, have you?

[Jack]

Hey Scott,

Have you seen kvond's (Frames /sing) series of posts on Avatar? They're something of a sideways take on the issues you're discussing here. The concluding section of the second post is perhaps the most relevant:

"Indeed the ideological and plot-character layerings work to dis-fuse the viewer in any number of directions, sending her or him into sweet spots of recognized cover, core inter-relation. But this is only a means for the potential to remove the “remote” in remote control. To assume the avatarship of one’s life. For this reason the racial component is an interesting aspect of the plot telling. There certainly is a “white” amid the ethnicity (and animality). But I think we should be careful not to polarize this into an essential binary (there is a “male” as well, and also a “class”). Instead what the experiments of technological achievement suggested by the film imply is something of the order that anatomy IS destiny, or rather, anatomy is possibility. Sully must take on the anatomy of another species in order to perform their world. Ultimately though, our anatomy is our technology (and not just our signification). Our bodies are made of the fibres, and switches, and tempos of all that extends us into the world. “White” is simply that which consciously refuses this dis-location as a mode of its own affect control. In this way there can be said to be something “white” in the Na’vi as well.

We must transmute our anatomies before the alien of the world. For those viewers that granted innocence to the film, Cameron already has performed a first transmutation. And sometimes those who have not logged hundreds of hours in the technology are better suited for the avatarship."

Here's his last post which links to all the others: http://kvond.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/the-becoming-woman-of-machine-in-avatar-a-comparison-with-the-fist-of-white-lotus/

[Kvond]

Headless wrote: "The whole point of the film is to stuff brains in those bodies, so which brains are stuffed into which bodies is not a minor point, it is the point."

Kvond: I have to say that this is precisely NOT the point. The point is that WHEN you stuff a brain into a body, it is transformed by that body, that there is no brain (really, mind)/body pure split. Instead, once Sully's brain is stuffed into the Na'vi form, it becomes altered (it does not direct that body like an superior instrumentality), sculpted not only by that body, but the entire body/environment interface. Remember as well, the "body" that Sully enters is not some "other" body, but rather a body woven in part from his own body's DNA (well, his twin brother's).

[Ahistoricality]

Tell it to Poul Anderson, Kvond.

[Chet]

The Na'vi possess all the agency of a leukocyte: they may respond individually, but they are not, properly speaking, individuals.

I think this is an unjustifiable interpretation of their ecology. They're only "online" with Eywa when physically in contact with it, and even while doing so they're not lost to it, like Picard in the Borg. It's really more like the planet acts as a collective, but passive, memory silo for the Na'vi. They're no less individuals as a result than you or I might be as we use the internet, and participate in collective knowledge projects like Wikipedia or blogging.

If they have no agency it seems strange for them to gather in supplication of their deity, but they do that in several scenes.

What I was curious about is why they have a ritual for the transfer of a consciousness from one body to another. Who did they have to do that to before the introduction of the humans and their empty avatars?