What began as the low rumble of Internet navel gazing has grown into something of a fever pitch over the last few weeks as Avatar’s box office continues to climb to record worldwide levels. Currently on the precipice of shattering what has long been thought of as the glass ceiling of Titanic’s $1.8 billion worldwide gross, Avatar is the word on everyone’s lips as the letters ‘A,’ ‘V,’ ‘T’ and ‘R’ are getting dull and worn on the keyboards of bloggers the world over. But as its legend continues to grow, so too does the cacophony of claims that Avatar is a racist work of fiction. And while no one has yet gone so far as to call James Cameron a racist, the best one can surmise is that those who see racism in the film mean to say that he was subconsciously racist in his writing, directing and producing of what might soon be known as his magnum opus.
Of course, backing up those claims requires taking a very specific perspective, being at best willfully ignorant of — or at worst deliberately loose with — the facts for the sake of an agenda. Let’s, for the moment, assume that it is the former rather than the latter and allow the same sort of “ignorant unknowing racist” claim to befall the accusers as it seems to fall on the accused. In order for those claims to hold, you have to bend the facts a little. You need to use the word “most” every so often while hoping the audience buys it as meaning “enough to infer always,” and you also need to choose how you divvy up the cast, define the natives and ultimately cast the actions of the hero. But while it is quick and easy to simply say that this is a tale of a great white savior delivering a native people from the evil white man while drawing a few poorly cast allusions to Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai, dumping the sheer volume of evidence out against such claims takes a bit longer, so this will have to be in two parts. The first part, will deal with the argument about the racial breakdown of the cast and the identity of the Na’Vi while Part II will focus on the “Great White Hype,” Jake Sully.
The first and seemingly most damning part of the racist argument is that MOST ALL of the human characters are white while MOST ALL of the Na’Vi are played by people of other varying ethnicities . This is mostly true. In order to make this true, however, you must qualify this by discussing only the main characters with major speaking parts. You cannot include Na’Vi motion-capture models nor any of the mercenaries working for the mining corporation. This math nets five white characters, one Hispanic and one Indian human character with three black and one Native American major Na’vi characters. Pretty convincing, huh?
Of course, what happens when, instead of drawing the lines down the Human/Na’vi sides, we begin to look at it as a screenwriter would? In terms of the heroes and villains. Jake Sully and his group of cohorts are five strong — three white (one Jewish character played by a goy), one Latino and one Indian — and team up with four other main characters, three black and one Native American, making for what is one of the most racially diverse casts of main characters in blockbuster history: three whites, three blacks, one Hispanic, one Indian and one Native American. They are pitted against two white characters. But wait, why is it only two villains versus nine heroes? Because in order for the racist argument to have any weight, we have to ignore the Pandoran Corporate Mercenary force made up of men and women of seemingly every race, color and creed. When Col. Quaritch looks out over the sea of faces that he is rallying to battle against the Na’vi, he isn’t marshalling an army of white soldiers. He’s commanding an army of mercenaries reflective of today’s American Armed Forces. That is to say it is as diverse as our cast of heroes.
So when one breaks down the races of the actors and pits them along the film’s battle lines, we see a director who has found actors from many nations, representing the many peoples of Earth, and pitted them against one another to showcase a battle between the wanton consumption of resources and the whole-Earth notion of self-sufficiency. Cameron uses the corporate-versus-native archetypes because it is a metaphor that even children can understand. The film isn’t about the guilt of our American past as much as it is about our present and future. To believe that the wholesale slaughter, displacement and enslavement of a people are practices confined to our distant history is to be both naïve and blind to the world we live in. And to think that the Na’Vi could only represent Native Americans and not the African tribes of old or the Mayan civilization or even the uncontacted, hidden tribes of South America that we keep sheltered from our existence even today, is to peer at this film through a very narrow lens.
This argument becomes even harder to substantiate when you realize that Jake Sully is not the great white savior that these arguments also make him out to be…Click Here for Part Two of ‘Is Avatar Racist’?
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The second half of the argument is that Jake Sully is the great white savior who comes in and saves the Na’Vi because they cannot save themselves.
Jake Sully is not a savior. Anyone who thinks Jake is anything more than the film’s protagonist didn’t quite understand the film or is remembering it framed against the handful of similar movies they are trying to bend into shape to compare it to. Jake Sully doesn’t actually save anyone. Sure, he is instrumental in bringing together the confluence of events that lead to Pandora’s ultimate salvation, but he does not actually save Pandora. Pandora saves Pandora. Awa does, not Jake. Jake does three key things in the third act that lead to the film’s ending, but none of them directly saves Pandora.
The first is that he thinks outside the box and finds a way to win back the trust of the Na’Vi. The Na’vi hold that the rider of the great winged dragon, Last Shadow, is a sacred post chosen by Awa to bring together the tribes in times of “great sorrow.” This is what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jake knows that as the rider of this beast, he can gain the respect of all of the tribes, and as they seem to be in the midst of great sorrow, he can align the tribes to fight with him as well as win back the respect he had lost. Of all the truly heroic things Jake does, this is the one he can really be credited with doing entirely by himself. But if you want to pin “white savior” on him here, you have to get around the fact that it was only by his place as an outsider that he could see past the spiritualism of the post towards the practicality of the situation. Whereas a native Na’Vi would not think he or she was worthy to ride Last Shadow without being chosen, Jake can see that the rider chooses for himself. This is basic Will to Power stuff, not rocket science.
The second thing he does is orchestrate the ill-fated counterattack on Col. Quaritch’s bombing run. While Jake is successful in stopping the bomber from reaching its intended target, his air forces are culled and ground forces completely routed, leaving Jake with a grounded girlfriend, a dead chieftain, a dead pilot, a wounded buddy and no one talking to him on the comms. The Na’Vi are almost entirely defeated while executing Jake’s plan, and his role as General is what some might call catastrophically successful. In fact, were it not for what happens next in the film, the Na’vi resistance might have been destroyed altogether and the humans successful despite the loss of their bomber.
Jake’s big play — the decision that saves the Na’Vi — is to pray to Awa and ask for her assistance. While told it is foolish, since Awa does not take sides, he does what humans have always done and prays anyway, only to discover that Awa actually will pitch in when her own hide is on the line. So a pissed-off force of nature shows up and works together to crush the human opposition, tearing choppers from the sky and crushing the metal walkers on the ground. Only Col. Quaritch seems to escape the wrath of the angry Pandoran goddess and finds himself in a mano-a-mano throwdown with “White Savior” Jake Sully. Spoiler alert: Jake loses. After a spirited battle, Jake lies gasping on the floor, lungs full of chlorine gas, while his Na’Vi girlfriend puts an arrow into Quaritch and puts a gasmask over Jake’s pale, gasping face.
Jake hasn’t saved the day any more than the sick kid who asked Babe Ruth to hit a home run actually hit those home runs. Babe Ruth hit them, and Awa saved herself from destruction with the help of the Na’Vi who were inspired by the “Great White Savior.” Sure, Jake was instrumental, but to say that he saved the day is to ignore the efforts of the planet Pandora and the natives in their own salvation. It’s kind of like Bill Pullman taking responsibility for stopping the aliens in Independence Day because he gave a great speech. He didn’t fly that plane into the ship, and he didn’t upload the virus. He gave a speech and led the assault. That’s it.
Jake Sully didn’t save Pandora; Pandora saved Jake Sully. That’s what the movie is about. Jake Sully comes to Pandora a broken man in a wheelchair with seemingly nothing to live for; by the end he has found a new passion for the simplicity of life and love. He becomes one with a world from which he didn’t come but belonged to all along. It isn’t the moral of white guilt; it is the dream of all children who feel different and wonder if there is somewhere out there where they can be accepted for who they are, not what other people want them to be. THAT is what Avatar is all about. It just happens to tell it within the framework of the readily identifiable and easy-to-understand struggle of Imperialism vs. Indigenous Inhabitants. I can see why some folks have gotten hung up in that, but they’re wrong if they think this is the theme of the movie. It is a storytelling tool.
Avatar is not racist. It is about the human experience and the fear that we are killing our chance at species immortality and happiness. James Cameron didn’t want to spend $300 million to make people feel badly about themselves and their history. He made a film about a future we might be headed towards and the dream of an untouched world in which we can start again. He made fantasy, nothing more.
One has to wonder why so many are picking up on the story and stirring the pot of unrest. Is it merely a meaty topic to draw traffic, or is it indicative of a white guilt prevalent in many of the writers?
