I recently took my boys to see the film ‘Avatar’ at our local Island Bay cinema, the ‘Empire’. Sam who is seven years old became very excited at the end and danced around under the screen when the film ended firing imaginary arrows. My younger son Theo was a little more circumspect and had spells hiding behind the seats in front.
When we came out, I talked briefly to the young girl who was behind ticket counter. ‘Wasn’t it great?’ she said. ‘I found myself shouting “Die Humans - Die”.
My personal take was that it was, a la Kevin Costner and the Sioux, a kind of ‘Dances with Viperwolves’, in which a young warrior from the US Cavalry / US Marines gets marooned with some brightly painted indigenous people, eventually turning against his fellow troopers in the belief that they are destroying a noble way of life lived in a dramatic and ancient landscape.
As the ‘Movie Scrapbook’ explains:
‘A lot of things on Pandora look scary until you get to know them better and see just how amazing and beautiful they are ... Few animals embody this idea more than the viperwolf. They look scary but they are fiercely intelligent animals. They hunt in packs. Their heads are shaped like a snake’s – with rows of very sharp, transparent fangs that look like dirty icicles. Viperwolves talk but not in a language you can understand’.
Maybe James Cameron weighed up the possibility of Jake Sully forming a relationship with an ageing, rogue viperwolf but eventually decided that a tantalizingly half-nude female Na’vi named Nevtiri would ultimately be better cinema.
In any event, I had not anticipated the whirlwind of interpretations of the film’s ethics and intentions.
As Dave Itzkoff noted in the New York Times:
‘If you thought that “Avatar” was just a high-tech movie about a big-hearted tough guy saving the beguiling natives of a distant moon, you might want to check the prescription on your 3-D glasses.
Since its release in December, James Cameron’s science-fiction epic has broken box office records and grabbed two Golden Globe awards for best director and best dramatic motion picture. But it has also found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).
Over the last month, it has been criticized by social and political conservatives who bristle at its depictions of religion and the use of military force; feminists who feel that the male avatar bodies are stronger and more muscular than their female counterparts; antismoking advocates who object to a character who lights up cigarettes; not to mention fans of Soviet-era Russian science fiction; the Chinese; and the Vatican. This week the authorities in China announced that the 2-D version of the film would be pulled from most theatres there to make way for a biography of Confucius’.
I can easily add to the list.
Here in New Zealand a Maori academic Rawiri Taonui of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch has denounced the negative stereotypes that Avatar portrays in the Na’vi, claiming that the ‘rhythmic body swaying’ of the indigenous people during a ceremony only appears in B-grade movies and ‘just doesn’t happen in real life’(sic).
Rawiri was also upset that ‘The white guys and the neo-liberals save the people rather than the indigenous people saving themselves’. However, he was encouraged that the film gave recognition to the ‘negative impact of colonisation on indigenous people from a historical point of view’.
Even stranger is Carl Mortishead’s article apparently directed to American readers (but published in The Times) with the title‘: Yet again, big business plays the bad guy’. This claims that ‘’beneath the popcorn layer, Avatar has a curious message. The film tells us that big business is sinister and in league with a malevolent state’.
‘It is Hollywood fare and that is the point. Scores of recent Tinseltown dramas tells us that big business is up to no good in league with if not in control of government and the guiding mind in a military industrial complex that will destroy the world’ ... ‘In the dream factory, the enemy is no longer Nazis or Commies, organized crime or bug-eyed monsters. It is big business’.
Mortishead mixes his message with some doubtful observations about differences in the characterisation of American and British heroism, the influence of lawyers in the Old West, affirmative action and the changing racial composition of the USA. But what he really seems to be seeking is a Hollywood lead who, fleeing persecution, embraces capitalism and Americanism, finds true love and sings soulful and grateful songs to the stars for his good fortune.
This is certainly the promise of ‘An American Tail’, in which a young Russian mouse gets separated from his family and must find them while trying to survive in his new country. The trouble is that corn that works for a cartoon mouse is not likely to rise above melodrama in most human story lines.
And, for the record, Mortishead may have forgotten that most ordinary people do not distinguish between industrial Exxon and financial Lehman Brothers, with there being at least $120 billion outstanding from recent related dramas in which big business has been proven to be up to no good, - and, to the dismay of people at large in such cases, the government appears to act tortuously in introducing penalties and regulatory constraints.
Anyhow, moving along, I got to thinking about why the Chinese Government has reacted so strongly against Avatar, with it being keen to promote its substitution with a state-backed biography of Confucius in Beijing.
As those of us who followed the addictive TV series ‘The Water Margin’ will know:
‘The ancient Chinese sages said "do not despise the snake for having no horns, for who is to say it will not become a dragon?"
‘So may one just man become an army’!
Set nearly a thousand years ago in ancient China, at the time of the Sung dynasty, the Water Margin series documents the inexorable rise of an effective opposition to an authoritarian, cruel and corrupt government, starting with individuals who stand out and stand up to tyranny.
This it appears has been a longstanding and recurring theme in Chinese politics – the heroic Long March of a few who eventually mobilise an army from among the neglected and dispossessed.
Perhaps the Chinese Government has a much more prescient understanding of the message behind Avatar than any of its rainbow of special interest critics in the West.
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