Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

“What a stinker,” my friend said as we exited the theater, and I was relieved to know it wasn’t just orneriness or hormones that had turned me against Avatar. My friends and I spent the rest of  evening critiquing the film, but then the next day I opened my laptop to rave reviews. Were we the only three people in the world who found Avatar insulting? Apparently not, and I have gradually become aware of others out there who didn’t become instant Avatarphiles. Despite how gorgeous it is. But more about those other critics later.

Yes, it’s gorgeous. A technical and aesthetic marvel. The plants, the blue indigenous people, the textures, the colors, the light, the planet hanging in the sky of the moon Pandora. Sumptuous. Seamless. No pixel left unedited.

It’s been called “revolutionary.” I assume this adjective refers solely to the digital effects, because if we’re talking plot, memes, politics, or history, it’s not even close.

Ostensibly, the film’s message is anti-imperialist and anti-corporate. The army boss is the epitome of the ugly American invader, and the corporate boss is the epitome of the ugly American capitalist. They are clearly “baddies”: uninformed, insensitive, greedy to win. Their attitude evokes the Bush administration, even down to their use of phrases like “preemptive strike”. One dimensional characters, to be sure, but I get it that they stand for something bigger.

Ostensibly there is a “conversion”. The jarhead (Jake Sully) who is sent to infiltrate the indigenous people, comes to love and respect them. (He also happens to be a “wounded healer” – a new age cliché if ever there was one). Okay. Love and respect are good things.

Ostensibly the indigenous folks drive out the invaders. Now that’s a message I can get behind.

Except that it is undermined in so many ways.

That evening when my friends and I picked Avatar apart, I kept thinking about how it could have been soooo much better. For instance, imagine an Avatar in which it’s not a foreigner jarhead who unites the indigenous people and saves the day, because the indigenous people have the wherewithal to save themselves! Or, to be even more revolutionary, they save the stupid invaders and ALL of them “go native”. And imagine if they solved the problem of their invaders not through Massive Violence, but through cunning. Or playful trickery. Or even diplomacy!

And imagine an Avatar in which the hero doesn’t automatically get the girl. She was, after all, betrothed before her tribe and her god to another, and when she and jarhead hook up it’s really a massive violation when you think about it. Which sorta matters, because folks get mad for a bit, but they don’t have time to be permanently mad or banish her or anything, because they need the violator to save them from ones like himself. Even her formerly-betrothed conveniently comes around after about three minutes of speechifying by the jarhead, and the formerly-betrothed even obediently agrees to translate the jarhead’s further speechifying for the masses. Which struck me as odd because the jarhead by then had managed to pick up the language quite well, I thought.

The formerly-betrothed conveniently dies during the Massive Violence, as does his father, the chief. This leaves a power vacuum into which the jarhead will naturally step. And the indigenous people are down with that because they are in awe of him because he rode the red dragon. And up till then nobody had ridden the red dragon. So he is automatically awesomer than any of them. Even though he had to learn dragon-riding from them. And even tho’ he boinked the chief’s daughter. (Or maybe because — ?)

Which brings me to the dragon-riding. Which starts out with dragon-subduing, because those beasties do NOT want to be subdued and ridden, thank you very much. Like my friend said, it looked a lot like rape. This is how it works:

1. to prove your manhood, you have to subdue and ride a dragon.
2. you and the guys approach the dragon hangout.
3. the guys tell you to go in among the dragons and find the one that will become “yours”. As in “you choose it and it chooses you”. Mutual choosing. Very nice, okay. So you ask how you’ll know when one chooses you? “It will try to kill you,” you’re told. Not so nice after all, but here goes…
4. You go into the dragon hangout. The dragons are pissed. Some leave. One stays and tries to kill you. In a violent struggle you mount it and connect your hair filigree stuff to its hair filigree stuff. A jolt runs through you both, and there’s a glazed look, a grunt. The dragon falls quiet. You feel triumphant and you whisper, “You’re mine now.” to the dragon.
5. The guys, who have been watching, are proud of you. Even the one who is betrothed to the woman you’ll eventually steal from him is grudgingly proud. (Funny how he was right to be suspicious of you all along.) The guys tell you to fly the dragon. “The first flight seals the bond.”
6. You take flight. Awkwardly at first until you realize the dragon is relying on you to control it with your thoughts.
7. Then you and the dragon are flying around gloriously. Awesome. Who doesn’t want to fly a dragon by controlling it with their thoughts? (Well, maybe me, but I’m just generally scared of big animals.)

Now this dragon will be there for you whenever you need it. It’s yours. (Except when you ride the other dragon, the big red dragon – which makes me wonder, did the jarhead’s chosen dragon feel hurt when he abandoned it for the bigger, nastier one? So much for the lifetime bond…)

Anyhow, my point is that considering how beautifully connected the indigenous people are with every living thing around them, couldn’t James Cameron have come up with a way to get them flying dragons without all the struggle, dominance and subjection? Me, I’m tired of that shit. It is so time we moved on.

So why have a jarhead infiltrate a tribe, go native, then save them, anyhow? Avatar is a textbook example of what Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence call the American Monomyth, a variation on the classical monomyth as proposed by Joseph Campbell.
Jewett and Lawrence define the American monomyth as:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

Except jarhead hardly renounced temptations: he bagged the betrothed girl. But enough about that. Oh wait, I did want to say something more about that. About the indigenous bodies in general. The indigenous people were quite animal-like in some ways. They’d drop to all fours, hiss and spit, leap from branch to branch. But interestingly, they weren’t animal-like in any ways that might make the audience feel uncomfortable.

For instance, they had prehensile tails. Did they ever use them? No. That would make them too monkey-like. But if you watch animals with prehensile tails, they use them all the time, like a fifth limb. And the sex. When jarhead and betrothed-girl hook up it’s all tender and slow and gentle. Very human, actually. But I wish they did it more like bonobos – that would have been funny. Oh and what’s with the bits of necklace artfully stuck to betrothed-girl’s boobs no matter how much she moved? A la Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon, thanks to wardrobe tape there was glorious natural wild nakedness, but not really. Those noble savages have to seem decent, after all. No bouncy bits, please.

And as for the ending. Nice! The bad invaders slink away with their tails between their legs! (Wait, no, they’re not the ones with the tails.) But anyway, all chagrined, the human survivors of the Massive Violence get back on their space ship under the watchful eye of the indigenous people and the few humans who went native and gave up their human bodies for the tall blue bodies. They happen to be brandishing machine guns to make sure the bad humans don’t retaliate again. Peaceful living-in-harmony-with-nature beings still gotta have machine guns, JIC.

But there’s a 500 pound gorilla in this ending. The unobtanium. It’s still there. Under the destroyed home tree. As if the humans won’t be back for it, this time with massive firepower and reinforcements and the taste of vengeance in their throats. Because during the whole course of this movie, NOTHING REALLY CHANGED. NO ONE LEARNED A THING. HISTORY WILL REPEAT ITSELF, and the blue people will be toast when the humans get back. A few leftover machineguns and some fast obedient dragons will be no match for whatever weaponry the humans will unleash.

James Cameron, if you’re such a genius, surely you’re smarter than this?

How much more spectacular it would have been to take us to the fabulous moon Pandora, let us dwell among the fantastic flora and fauna till we fell in love with it, have our expectations of the inhabitants delightfully, inspiringly raised above the level of humdrum response of violent revenge, and watch them solve a massive problem, with multiple stakeholders with conflicting desires, in an ingeniously non-violent way. You could still do it with tension, danger, and excitement. It needn’t be Pollyannaish or preachy. It could be thrilling, with plot twists, shifting alliances, and surprises. It could still be truly entertaining. But, you fell back on the American Monomyth.

Is there software for that? Like you open up a template and do a find-and-replace so all the ‘hero’s become ‘Jake Sully’? And where it says ‘Rise Up In Revenge Speech’ it gives you ten lines to write it because there’s a time limit to what audiences will tolerate?

Making that film must have been enormously challenging. Hard, you could say. It must have been a hard film to make. But how hard would it have been to make it conceptually so much better? You already solved all the technical and aesthetic problems: a better plot should have been relatively easy. All you need for that is a pencil, some paper, and the will to be truly revolutionary.

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What others say:

New Zealand blogger Tom Goulter’s series called The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar.

Avatar…spends two hours talking about how beautiful it is to be peaceful and in tune with nature and what-all and then has a final hour in which the killing of people is fetishistically rendered up for our delectation even as elegiac choral music plays to provide the token suggestion that said killing might be a bad thing.

NYT Columnist David Brooks’ piece, The Messiah Complex,

[Avatar] rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

From British blogger Jon Brown’s 1000 Tiny Things I Hate

If there’s one thing we can be absolutely sure of the day we finally “make contact” it’s that the extraterrestrial civilisation we encounter will have developed its own uniquely shitty brand of world music.