Avatar (2009)
The longer self-isolation has gone, the more my itch to rewatch Avatar has grown. This week I could almost feel myself breaking out in hives. I needed something with a basic plot and bright colors, something to make my over-charged brain quiet down because I knew where the story was going, and because I’d be overwhelmed with rich images. I got the visual feast—even though the CGI imagery looks more plastic and clean than I’d remembered it, the design is gorgeous—but I wasn’t able to turn my brain off completely. Once the story and the world were introduced, and the plot slotted neatly onto its rails, there was no other place for my head to go except critique. Avatar is beautiful, but it isn’t much of a distraction from itself.
My problem with the movie isn’t with the simplicity of the plot. I don’t need intricacy: elegance is good, too. (Mad Max: Fury Road remains my personal high-water mark for economical storytelling.) My problem is that Avatar approaches the problem of eco-colonialism from an inherently colonialist viewpoint. For all its imaginative work in developing an entire ecosystem—six-legged creatures who breathe through chest spiracles, bioluminescence, vivacious colors, floating mountains, networked trees—the movie’s script displays a disappointing lack of imagination. The film explicitly denounces corporate strip-mining for resources without understanding the systems that allow the exploitation at the heart of the conflict in the first place. For a tale set on a moon covered in a neural network of trees, and populated by a communal alien society, Avatar is framed by remarkably American thinking.
The film ostensibly centers on Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) growth from human Marine to Na’vi warrior, from a lone paraplegic who wants his legs back to a member of a society that values life and nature more than his ever did. (I’ll leave the ableism on the table. I will only say that I love the scene in which Jake is able to run for the first time in years, thanks to his avatar body; I love that he’s disabled and a whole human being and someone who desperately wants to be able to walk again, all at once. But the plot’s implication that Jake isn’t fully whole until his consciousness is transferred to his avatar body gives me pause. That critique is better suited for others who swim in those waters more than I do.) Jake’s infiltration of Na’vi society, and his ensuing romance with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na’vi woman, leads him to reject humanity and fight alongside the Na’vi to drive the human miners off their land: as others have called it, Ferngully in Space, or Dances with Blue Aliens.
The plot leans on a hero’s-journey model of storytelling, and in so doing, falls back on a highly individualistic understanding of the world. The worldview is myopic: each personal choice acts as stepping stones for character development and action, but in which those choices have no bearing on the rest of the story beyond their immediate moment in time. Jake chooses to join the Na’vi and fight the humans, not because he’s bought in to their culture, but because he’s fallen in love. Colonel Quatrich (Stephen Lang) chooses to firebomb the Na’vi home tree because his job dictates that he must.
Neytiri, too, acts according to the dictates of the plot, not out of a coherent sense of her character. She chooses Jake as her mate, first despite his status as a “soulless demon,” then again, even after his actions directly result in the genocide of her people, because he’s proven himself to be hero material. She refrains from killing him on sight the first time they meet because she interprets a floating seed as a sign from Eywa, the Na’vi deity; signs from Eywa are treated as mysterious, simple things, seeds floating on the wind, a reductionist version of pantheism, with no sense of the complex interconnectedness of either the Na’vi belief system, nor of the ecosystem that informs their beliefs.
Jake’s own betrayal of the Na’vi—his providing Quatrich with the intelligence necessary for the firebombing of Hometree—is presented as a grave personal mistake, paved over when he co-opts a Na’vi legend and returns to their camp on the back of a flying monster. The monster had been a strategy used in Na’vi history to unite their clans, but here, Jake uses it to earn Neytiri’s forgiveness and to win back her people’s trust: a rallying cry, but also a bald plot device, meant to mobilize a tribe of people who throughout the story have only ever been plot devices.
The Na’vi themselves function as an amorphous society, acting the way “savages” have long been presented in American movies. Their society is presented as a “primitive” one: a chief, a shaman, and warriors, all in touch with nature, all a conduit for colonial white people to come to a better understanding of themselves, rather than people in their own right. Neytiri at least has a personality, but she functions primarily as an entryway for Jake to accept Na’vi life, and later as a romantic prize. Avatar rings hollow because the Na’vi are blue-skinned Others. If the Na’vi had been allowed their own culture—beyond “blue people who live in the trees,” as they’re dismissed by a corporate overseer at the human camp—the film would feel so much more rich. Instead, the only fully developed society in Avatar is the patriarchal, eco-imperialist world that Jake Sully comes from. The Na’vi become a fetish object, idealized and unreal, a tool for Jake’s personal growth and a resource he can lean on in the final fight against the invading humans. A more richly realized world would have taken a step back from Jake’s own worldview, and would have developed a culture more alien than caricature. The Na’vi are presented as pseudo-matriarchal, worshipping a female deity; the movie almost worships Neytiri for her alienness, her connection with nature, and her ability to fight, but it never fully realizes her as a person in her own right. She’s a blue cat person, in a long line of space cat people: a shorthand for alienness, and not really a person at all.
There are nods to a richer, wider world; it is unsurprising that James Cameron has been developing sequels in the years since Avatar’s release. As I’ve said before, the ecosystem and production design are both stunning, and I would love to see more of the flora and fauna than the hints we get in the movie’s long runtime. I appreciate that Neytiri’s clan is not the only one present on Pandora; there is at least room for growth in future installments. I love the thought and care that went into the development of the Na’vi language. (Even that language has its limitations; it was developed to sound unlike any human language, but to be pronounceable by human beings. It’s complex, but falls into the trap of equating free word order and ejectives with exoticism: another method of Othering non-European cultures.)
The setup for the film introduces us to an imaginative world, seen through familiar eyes. The finale resolves the conflict with familiar beats: arrows against gunships, nature against industry, with the focus always on the actions of individuals taking part in the conflict, on the horrible deaths of the participants, and forever centered on Jake as both outsider and leader. Jake wins the battle against eco-imperialism by rallying the Na’vi to the humans’ own tactics. The movie embraces the tools of colonialism while at the same time trying to reject the results of colonialist expansion, and the result is a movie at war with itself.
I don’t need art that functions as a dialectic/critique of society and The Way Things Are. I can think of nothing less interesting than art that preaches and prescribes how its audience must think. What I do need is art that demonstrates imagination—in all areas, not just audio-visual effects. Don’t give me the same story over and over: I want to see something new. Give me an alien society that has a completely different set of values and morals from human beings, and show me that conflict, rather than reinforcing the same simple heroes’ journeys I see over and over again. Give me something that isn’t warmed-over stereotypes. Give me something that tells an unfamiliar story, told by unfamiliar people, that was never developed to appeal to all four key quadrants. I don’t want art that’s easy to swallow. I want art that challenges the way I see the world, in a way that doesn’t tell me what to do with it.
