So Part I of this ranting was stuff that bugged me about District 9's lazy little allegory. In this post, I shall complain about Avatar, which I saw in December, which showed me just how bad the allegory shtick can get. I'm going to avoid spoilers, though I'm not sure why--after seeing the first 35 minutes of Avatar, you'd probably be able to put together the rest of the plot on your own. Especially if you've seen Disney's Pocahontas.
First, the good bits: The physical worldbuilding is great. The biology and linguistics clearly had plenty of expertise going into them. If you're going to have a remarkably earth-like planet with remarkably earth-like flora and fauna, this is the way to do it. The visuals are stunning; the N'avi fall somewhat into the uncanny valley, not because they look fake--they don't--but because they're 12-foot blue-skinned lemur-goat-people. So on looks, the movie is total awesomeness.
Then there's the plot.
The Bad Guys are one part Europeans-in-Africa, one part Manifest Destiny, one part Blackwater, and one part Napalm in the Morning. The Good Guys are every single Noble Savage cliche to ever rear its head in western literature since the 18th century. The Bad Guys are on the Pretty Alien Planet to mine unobtainium. Literally. That's what they call it. What does unobtainium do? We don't know. A huge megacorp spends billions and sends people light-years from Earth to get this stuff, so it must be pretty fricking useful, but in two and a half hours of running time the film doesn't bother to tell us exactly what it's good for. Why? Because James Cameron doesn't really care about the humans in the film. He just wants to show us the pretty planet and the pretty blue lemur-goat-people and their awesome wonderfulness.
Lest you think I'm reading too deeply into this, here's James Cameron's own take on the movie:
"[T]he N’avi represent that sort of aspirational part of ourselves that wants to be better, that wants to respect nature. And the humans in the movie represent the more venal versions of ourselves, the banality of evil that comes with corporate decisions that are made out of remove of the consequences."
Does he not see the issues with this?
First: if you're doing something as an allegory about humanity, and you have aliens represent Good!Humans and humans represent Bad!Humans, how can you even hope to attempt to escape the whole thing having a humans = evilness slant to it? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. That's mixing a metaphor with itself.
Second: the N'avi are only good and wonderful because we're told they're good and wonderful. Their society is drawn in the laziest Noble Savage shorthand ever. All we know is that they're all Connected To The Earth (and there are some cool ideas here--verging on decent science fiction--that the film brings up and more or less ignores). They're all into their traditions and whatnot, which I think is supposed to show how wonderful they are; this completely ignores the serious issues most deeply traditional societies have with, for instance, rigid social hierarchies and gender roles and whatnot (see, for example, the problems faced by countries that have laws protecting both traditional society and women's rights). Would it be cool if the N'avi, for whatever reason, didn't face any of these issues? Of course. But then we'd need them to be actually alien, and we'd need the film to explore precisely how they're different from humans in this respect. Which the film can't do, because they're not alien. Which brings me to...
Third: You know how I was irritated about the non-alien aliens in District 9? The non-alien aliens in Avatar are the same, but worse. The shrimp-bug-people in District 9 are basically humans. The lemur-goat-people in Avatar are Good!Humans. They're less than human, because they're utterly and totally flat. Even the Evil!Humans in the movie are more interesting. As a matter of fact, by the end, I found myself chanting "Die, goat-people, die!" in my mind just because I was sick and tired of having their wonderfulness crammed down my throat. At least the bad guys had some amusing one-liners, a bit of attitude to them. Plus, I felt bad for them. I mean, the poor guys clearly don't stand a chance. Who can hope to win against SuperBluePeople?
That, basically, is why Avatar is the worst kind of allegory out there. The whole point of good people and bad people is that they're all people, for crying out loud; how am I supposed to care about people who are just innately good? Who don't even have to try? Avatar has a less nuanced view of morality than Star Wars. It doesn't stand for anything remotely human; it stands for a bunch of half-thought-through idealized abstractions, rendering its message utterly pointless.
Okay, so that was my rant. Um... I'll do something less irritated in my next post?
James Cameron completely disagrees with you on this movie. Not just as the director of course, but as a person. The real human kind with good and bad and emotional responses to events that make sense.
ReplyDelete"Things are really thought out in this movie to an almost ridiculous level."
Hear that? Ridiculous. Well said James Cameron.
It sounds like he was surprised when he saw how "well thought" out everything was, almost as if he was not really the one who put the thought into it.
Still, I enjoyed watching the movie by telling myself that it was not one big allegory, but that it was just a story that made no attempt to comment on humanity with a writer who lacked originality. So yes, you are reading perhaps a little too deeply into it. At least more so than James Cameron, who was probably more interested with making something that looked cool and stayed in the theaters for a long time.
Ok, so after taking almost no stance whatsoever on the movie or your disembowelment of it, I'll say you certainly tore it apart wonderfully, and that yes people credit it with more than I think it deserves, but it was still fun to watch. Oh, also, I think that it was almost a rip-off comedy to anyone who has played Starcraft. It seemed so to me at times.