Yesterday, after reading Annalee Newitz’s thought-provoking analysis of Avatar (the new James Cameron sci-fi/CGI spectacular), I went and saw it.
Wow.
I’m not saying “wow” because I thought the special effects were so fantastic. Maybe they were, but I was pretty much aware the whole time I was watching it that I was watching special effects. Some people say they were totally immersed in the world, but perhaps reading has handicapped me when it comes to the moviegoing experience. To become totally immersed in a world, I need to read about it.
Anyway. The point is, Newitz’s article,“When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?” was spot on. The movie is totally about white (male) guilt.
In case you aren’t familiar with the premise, it’s about a white guy, Jake Sully, who goes native and then saves the natives from white guys. The blinding clarity of this story line was a little shocking to me. The whole time I was watching it, I was thinking: Did nobody tell James Cameron what he was doing?! It was as if every single cliche about “natives” was resurrected in this movie: exotic feather headdresses; earth mother/goddess-worshipping; great-spirit-connectedness to nature; weird tribal rituals involving chanting; strange battle cries; primitive weapons. I could go on, but you get the picture.
This was more hilarious to me than offensive, because let’s be honest here: the story is totally about how evil white male invaders are. Yeah, it’s ridiculous that the natives are saved by the white man, but frankly, the overt (and I mean super overt) message is that white male colonizers suck. Big time. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and theorize that James Cameron actually is trying to send the right message in this respect. (It just happens to be a message for white men, not people like me. But that’s OK; white men need stories, too.)
However, one line particularly stuck in my craw. It happened after Jake Sully passes all his tests of manhood among the native people. After the chief’s daughter—the alluring, exotic, strong yet recognizably sexy (as in, she has breasts) Neytiri—teaches Jake all the tricks of being a hunter, she turns to him and says, “You are a man now. So you may choose a woman.”
Jake Sully in avatar form (left) and Neytiri
WTF?
You may choose a woman?!
Even worse, Jake then kind of laughs at her and explains that he has already chosen a woman, but this woman must also choose him. As if he’s giving Neytiri a little lesson in feminism. How patronizing, on top of ridiculous.
Neytiri
Up to that point, there had been absolutely no indication that the Na’vi, Neytiri’s people, envisioned women as chattel to be selected as prizes by young men. Yeah, there was the wise woman/voodoo priestess archetype in Neytiri’s mother, but there were also women as hunters, doing the same things the male Na’vi did. Where the hell did this “you may choose a woman” crap come from? It was like Cameron just wanted to insert that line to give a dorky thrill to the guys in the audience. It didn’t make sense, and someone should have cut it.
I can stomach a reenactment of colonialism in sci-fi. Science fiction, in many ways, is about exploration, and exploration—at least in our history—has been about colonialism. I understand why we as a culture would want to atone for those wrongs through metaphorical space operas.
But stop it with making native women into trophies. Really, stop it.
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{ 16 comments }
Oh vile vile too many levels of ew to count, I SHALL NOT watch this movie.
Be in touch with nature, raffle off your women. WHAT.
Ha! Hahaha! OK, well, it wasn’t that evil — I mean, mostly it was kind of funny, but that one line did get to me.
I see where you are coming from with this. I acknowledge the fact that the “women as chattel” theory came from left-field, but let’s be real, it was only there as a plot point to initiate the alien sex scene. And their hair-gonad-spirit stick-things kind of freaked me out. When I was watching it, I was disappointed at how cliche the story line was: man gets what man wants (NOT), natives are not savages, yadda yadda yadda. I do think that because there really hasn’t been anything this original or spectacular on film recently, that this movie will SWEEP the visual and technical awards at the Oscars…
Oh, ha, “hair-gonad-spirit stick,” that’s hilarious. I just see no reason to use women as chattel as a plot point. It’s like throwing in a gay joke to get an easy laugh. It’s sloppy.
I thought exactly the same thing! I couldn’t believe it, it just seemed so incongruous with the rest of the society he had presented. Ridiculous.
Yes, “incongruous” is exactly what I thought. That line made no sense in the context of the movie. It was just out of left field.
I love this post more than I can express. Hilarious, and yet, pointed.
I was SO excited to see this movie! I still intend to see it but I’m glad to have been forewarned.
I have Cherokee on my mother’s side of the family. I’ve spent frustrating years trying to find out more about that part of myself because my grandfather was always taught NOT to talk about his heritage and just pretend he was white, so there are nothing beyond spoken records to go on. On top of that I’ve had people outside my family tell me that trying to research my American Indian heritage was just an ‘attempt to single myself out and fixate on something that makes me special’ which is about the dumbest crap I’ve ever heard, and is just such a WHITE thing to say.
I am CONSTANTLY annoyed by these sorts of movies. The random caveman approach to things does not help. I don’t know who to slap, the guy who wrote the line, or all the women involved in production who let it lie…
Thanks for your comment! Sorry to hear about the weirdness you’ve encountered with your own family research. That is frustrating. We all should have the right to research whatever we want about ourselves! Argh.
I shouldn’t be startled by the continued objectification of women, even in small ways or in single lines of dialogue, but somehow, I always am. It just seems like we should know better by now. Shouldn’t we?
Fantastic post.
I understand what you are all saying and understand why you might have a problem with the ‘choose a woman’ scene but you have to remember that they are aliens and not native Americans. Their world is made up. On pandora that’s how the Na’vi do things. Thought the film looked great but the story and dialog were slightly lacking. I don’t care though cause I found Neytiri very sexy for some reason. To be honest I think I’m in love. Why aren’t human women blue, 9 feet tall and cat like?
Thanks for your comment, Will. Storytelling is about metaphor, and the metaphor in the case of Avatar is unfortunate, but not a catastrophe. The “choose a woman” line is unnecessary, and an affront to women of all kinds — alien women included.
First of all that entire act of the movie focused on Jake and Neytiri’s relationship and bonding more that the cultural norms of the Na’vi.
Yes you can interpret the term “choose” as a possessive – however it would make sense that a tribal culture it that violent and dangerous a world would have a prerogative to choose mates and produce offspring quickly.
Also that doesn’t take into account that Neytiri was speaking english not na’vi.
Really we should ask what was James Cameron trying to show us?
1) Neytiri had excepted James into the tribe and as a Na’vi
2) That she loved him and wanted to see to his needs even if it made her unhappy
3) She tells us what qualities Na’vi men would find desirable
I have some other questions:
Why did Neytiri say that they were “mated for life” and why didn’t this surprise Jake?
Granted it was suggested that they were soul mates, but one night of love under a a glowing tree and we’re life mates? More over there was no indication that Na’vi formed pair bonds – no split off dwellings, no pairings in any of the group scenes etc.
Why did Jake start calling Tsu’Tey “brother”?
None of the other Na’vi men seem to refer to each other in that way and there was no event that would have formed a bond between them.
This review of Avatar gives to much credit to racialist concepts. I saw a lot of non-white male in the colonizers.
The archetype behind Avatar isnt original, but it does offer a place for reflection. As two civilizations meet, the strongest begins to build the extinction of the other, specially motivated by a precious resource that can maximize the wealth accumulation of the first civilization. In Human History, we had european colonialism taking slaves from around the globe as costless workforce that built and served the europe’s elites interests. Now we have the main capitalist multinationals forcing the governments to engage in declare and hidden wars against third world countries filled with energetical resources like oil or natural gas.
This last case is quite visible in the movie, a private company, RDA, that probably earned the rights of exploration of the moon Pandora, or just settled there, researches resources that can be turned into merchandise, such as the Inobtainium they mentioned, that, if I’m not mistaken can be transformed into an energetical good.
Avatar could be a perfect metaphor for the economical exploitation behind the wars and geopolitical games now existent in the Middle East.
If one looks out of the “race issue” box, one can actually fathom a curious act of remembrance of a period, acknowledged as tragic, of a social group’s collective memory. And while the almost extinction of native americans is a stain which belongs to white european colonizers, the mass murders existent in the Middle East today belong to the collective memory of all american population.
I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I will probably see if for the visual effects. I agree that the you may choose a woman line was a bit unnecessary and offensive, especially if there was not indication that the Na’vi culture viewed women and men as unequal.
Good post; I had a similar reaction to that line.
I think that the line was meant to echo the other recurring thread about two beings choosing each other, regarding the bond with the flying creatures.
But that makes the line about choosing a woman perhaps even more problematic, because I don’t think the flying creatures were fully sentient; I think the movie treated them more like horses (smart animals, but still animals to be used and controlled by people) than like people. So drawing an analogy between that and two people choosing each other as mates is pretty unfortunate.
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