Avatar
If you haven’t seen Avatar, there are a lot of reasons that you should. It’s technically and visually spectacular. It’s made a billion dollars (not like, “Haha — it made like a billion dollars!” but actually, literally, a billion dollars). So that means it probably is some kind of cultural touchstone now so that if you haven’t seen it you have to have some good reason like “I’m blind.”
Anyway, I saw it. Naturally. Me and my $18.50 saw in the Cinerama dome, actually. Before I went to a Christmas party with Kevin Sorbo but that is a totally different story. My opinion on it? Meh. Yawn. Oh, that was pretty but man was that story lame and isn’t it time to start drinking yet?
Over at iO9, they’re asking “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”?” where “like Avatar” means “white guilt fantasies.” It’s a rhetorical question (hopefully) since the answer is obviously never. And after $1,000,000,000, it really wouldn’t make sense to stop. Though the racial aspects of Avatar were certainly…weird (are these Na’vi people analogies for Native Americans? are they African? They seem kind of African…) the gender implications are also necessarily complex.
Our protagonist (”hero” if you must) is Jake Sully, a former Marine who is paralyzed from the waist down. When his goody two shoes twin brother is killed, he takes his place solely on the virtue of his DNA, on a highly skilled mission to the remote planet of Pandora with the hopes of using avatar surrogate body technology to infiltrate and study the native people there: the Na’vi. All of this takes place within probably the first 3 minutes of the movie.
Once on Pandora, Sully meets up with Dr. Grace Augustine (Siguorney Weaver) who has spent years studying the Na’vi via avatar but whom they have never truly accepted. Boy does Sully show her! The first night he’s there he ends up trapped alone in the jungle and is saved by a hot Na’vi chick. She’s tentative but he convinces herbto teach him the ways of the Na’vi. Take that science! Take that woman who has given up her best years to study this culture! In your face! Um, yeah.
So then, Sully goes on to accomplish everything that Grace never could. She actually ends up dying for the cause, but he has his soul transferred to his avatar (a process that is much faster than backing up my work computer to the server) and lives happily ever after as a totally kickass member of of the Na’vi with the hottest wife around. Which just goes to show, white men can do anything they set their minds to as long as they are not crippled!
I get that it’s a fantasy, a technological touchstone, visual spectacle at its finest. But, like it or not, messages matter. I don’t like to be that person, I really don’t. That “I am woman” “male gaze” “otherness” spouting person. But really? We can’t do any better than this? “Escapism” doesn’t mean that we forget or ignore the fact that words and stories and movies — especially movies that make a billion dollars — have MEANING that we pay attention to and learn from, whether we want to or not.