Now this is not your ordinary movie review. I am not going to address the plot holes in Avatar, two of which you could fly a phalanx of Bell choppers through. I am not going to praise or damn the movie, as I have previously made it obvious that I liked it. What I am going to do is re-vision this work in the context of a bilious question that was posed on io9.
When are guilty white people going to stop making movies like Avatar?
What a f)cking stoooopid question. Sorry to be so blunt, but it is a stupid question. The short answer is we like, or need, or resonate with the story. Annalee Newitz, the author of the post, thought through the first part of the question, which was noticing that it’s happening; that it’s happened lots, and that it keeps happening, and that for a genuine SF fan it’s a pain in the brain to watch this lame ass excuse for a plot get a bigger and bigger budget while the intellectual premise fades to two empty quotation marks on a bubble gum wrapper. She traces the story back…. but not far enough.
This movie, so her premise goes, doesn’t show us aliens, it shows us an idealized version of a bunch of people we already know, being Hollywood Injuns. It shows how we (and sure, I can lump myself in with guilty white people for the purpose of that discussion) keep trying to take over the foreign narrative to make it white, to never drop the privilege.
Yeah.
Why can’t we get off this crazy train? What about the narrative (the primitive other who must be consumed) is so compelling, and so entwined with human life, that we can’t get over, around or under it? Sure, it’s the ‘dominant culture’ that is reprising the narrative. We just happen to be white. But honest to goodness folks, it wouldn’t have mattered who was currently running earth into the resource deficits that will define us (should we hap’ly survive) for the next two or three centuries. Whatever culture it was would have been dominated by men, and whether we ended up with feudalism, steam driven capitalism, free/slave/militaristic cultures, one warlovin’ group would have hunted another warlovin’ group (with fewer resources, fewer immunities and less technology) and exterminated the babble talking brutes, screwed their women, desecrated their shrines and ripped jewels and gold from their idols. Or the local equivalent. It’s, uh, us. In this continuing human dyad, we get to have soldier boys on top (some of whom are killed) or boys getting slaughtered in droves defending what’s theirs. And the women suffer on either side, but c’est la vie, kids. It’s not exactly fun to be a soldier either, and someone’s got to do it. (So the dominant global narrative says, over and over again.)
Gilgamesh tried to kill Enkidu and then lost Enkidu. He lost what was helping him understand what and who he was, separated from both his chattering gods (religion) and his magnificent city (his responsibilites). That’s what Avatar is about to me. It’s about the tremendous conflict and unhappiness and the BIG LIE of a dominant culture AFTER it has destroyed something human. There is a flicker of guilt in a few, but it’s really about the blood guilt of the whole dominant culture. Not just white people, don’t be a f)cking moron. IT’S ABOUT EVERY SURVIVING PERSON ON EARTH.
I am going to make a claim I can’t possibly prove, but I am making this claim as an artist, not as a scientist or cultural anthropologist. Every person alive now, every SINGLE person, has an ancestor who participated in the extermination of the Neanderthal. Every single one. Every person alive now is the descendent of OTHER cultures who participated in a genocide. Every one; I mean it, no kidding. We’ve descended from people who in some cases survived and in some cases perpetrated genocide. That is part of what it means to be human.
You can run into the jungle and say, here is a beautiful indigenous person in his beautiful folkways, and doesn’t he tell pretty stories around his campfire? Yeah, right. That’s white guilt to a T, infantilizing adults with a cognitive hat trick. He doesn’t speak English, he doesn’t possess the rudiments of science, he doesn’t understand what is important in ‘real life’. Ooh, what a cool loincloth; ooh, what a cool bone you have in your nose.
Oho, but he does understand, and just as well as you, within a different set of cognitive constraints. He’s living his real life, and you can go screw yourself. He still sets fire to the forest when it suits him and he still kills every jaguar he can; like us, he cannot picture that we as a species could fence, cut, kill, burn, monocrop, erode, dig holes into, pull all the water from and poison every square meter of earth until it was uninhabitable to humans entirely. I can’t picture it either; I acknowledge it as possible, maybe even likely, but I cannot see the reality of it. I don’t want to see it. My bad.
Gilgamesh tried to kill Enkidu and then lost Enkidu. The oldest surviving human story is not just about the guilt, grief and shame – and perplexity – that one man feels when he survives his brother. It’s about the whole society’s collective guilt for not just participating in a genocide, but doing it cheerfully, knowing that it’s the right thing to do. Just like the Israelites. Over and over and over and over and over in the Old Testament, God tells the Israelites KILL KILL KILL.
Do you know why that monotheistic God is so popular? Because he showed up on the human scene in time to rescue us from our blood guilt, not by showing us another way, but by rationalizing genocide. The Jews committed genocide at God’s behest dozens of times in the Bible. They got their asses kicked by the Babylonians. There was a diaspora. They got their asses kicked by those cheerfully genocidal Nazis. There was a movement back to their ancestral land. Now they have their own country, and what are they doing? They are making it clear that there are two classes of people. Citizens, and animals. Expendable animals. The whole culture has PTSD, folks. Ours, theirs, indigenous cultures. Some of us are more comfy than others, some spin stories about how aliens will save us, or the earth will get smacked by an angry god. And why not, at this point more tides of human blood sacrifice can’t save us, and Jesus is late for his appointment, at least according to some millenarians.
Gilgamesh tried to kill Enkidu, and then lost Enkidu, who lived in peace with the animals, who asked him not to cut down the forest. (Any of this sound familiar yet?) Gilgamesh felt really shitty afterwards. He had to learn to live with the guilt of being unable to save his friend, of having wanted to kill him in the first place, of having survived him. Do you remember how he learned to do that?
He mourned his friend (and in the story remained with his corpse until a maggot fell out of his nose, one of the funniest and saddest depictions of how artists ‘stay with the story’ even when it needs to be buried, stat). He tried to become immortal. He tried to get his friend back from the underworld. And in the end, all we have is the story. Too bad we can’t learn from the damned thing, and keep recycling it, even unto this last, half billion dollar CGI blowout.
One of the titles for Gilgamesh was He Who Has Seen the Deep. So why would we be surprised that James Cameron (who really has seen the deep) is re-writing the epic of Gilgamesh so that it has a happy ending? (Sully loses a twin, and then gets another twin in the form of the Avatar, and then is merged with the Avatar. Coinkidink? Enkidu is the ‘twin’ of Gilgamesh.) If it looks like he’s assuaging his white guilt at the same time, sure, that can be one layer of it if you like.
I’m sick and tired of having to step in the same dogshit question, why are white people so lame, when a turn of the hourglass could have put somebody else in the driver’s seat, and we’d be asking the same thing about another human group whose skin is different from mine. We are all, every single one of us, descendents of the winners of genocide, and that story underlies all human narrative. White folks may be on top right now, or it may look that way; there may be people who consider it the natural order of things, and get freaked out beyond words at the prospect they could be getting feathered arrows through their chests. (Avatar is getting KILLED on right wing blogs in the States, because the stench of white liberal guilt is very offensive to the social conservatives … one can profitably wonder why.) The hourglass will turn again, and Fortune’s wheel keep rolling. If James Cameron wants to end his version of the genocide story by inserting himself into the narrative, winning the war and kicking the imperialists out while conflating a deity with the earth itself, maybe we should ask him to do better next time rather than berate him for being in the grip of the most persistent story since we humans started writing things down.
Happy Solstice. May the dark time bring a peaceful contemplation to you.
In the interests of political equal time, here is a pre-Avatar essay on race and culture by an Indian sf fan.
By the way, there is currently no definitive archeological evidence that Neanderthals were exterminated by Homo sapiens. I predict that we’ll find some soon; a smoking gun that links dead Neanderthals to Homo sap weapons. There’s a reason why we have legends. It is sometimes difficult to grasp the true lessons therein.
So, humans are just another of gaia’s failed experiments, like the dinosaurs.
In archeological digs, it has been found that wolf/dogs were found at the sights of Homo sapiens villages but not at those of Neanderthals. It seems that these early predecessors to today’s dog alerted the members of Homo sapien communities to possible intruders and allowed them to better prepare their defense. I find this co-evolution of man and dog amazing. I will find the reference later, it’s late and I’m going to bed. Jim is driving back from Syracuse as I write with Jenny in the car. Happy Holidays everybody!!!
So my brain immediately jumps down to the bottom of the page. Homo sap domesticated dogs, Neanderthal didn’t.
Wow. That puts a whole’nother perspective on why the Neanderthal didn’t make it.
Evocative. Resonant. First evocation: STTNG episode Darmak, in which there is a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh, by Picard, to a member of a spacefaring civilization which communicated only by metaphor. Shaka, when the walls fell. (I had trouble with the premise – hard to communicate science in metaphor, I would think – but the story was wonderful – the second-best episode of the series in my view…)
Second evocation: Current anthropological research seems to be heading in the direction of the non-culpability of Cromagnon in the extinction of Neanderthal. I wouldn’t go for NON-culpability myself. I think they had a role – but so did climate change, and the better tools therefore the more effective hunting of the Cromagnon, and maybe better communication. And perhaps, as Debbie suggests, the domestication of dogs. Earlier the Neanderthal were held not to have a language, but the recent identification of the FOX2P gene in Neanderthal DNA says they probably DID have a spoken language.
Third evocation: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. He tries to explain why the Inca didn’t come after Philip of Spain, instead of the other way around.
And – more are roiling around in my head. Your essays are inclined to have that effect.
“Scientists who study evolution are often puzzled by the fact that scrawny, flat-faced primates, with little hair and weak jaws, that we call Homo sapiens are the dominant species on this planet. In the distant past, Homo sapiens’ most significant competition was a race of more robust, powerful, hairier primates with strong jutting jaws. The strength and ruggedness (and intelligence and utilization of tools) of Neandethals certainly seemed to give them the early survival advantage. The surprising answer to this evolutionary co-nundrum may actually lie in our ancestors’ relationship with the ancestors of our pet dogs.” taken from Chapter 2 (Why Neanderthals Don’t Rule the World), The Modern Dog — How Dogs Have Changed People and Society and Improved Our Lives by Stanley Coren.
Yeah and it certainly does put a whole new spin on why Neanderthals didn’t make it!! I will try to scan and send you the pages from this chapter over the break in case you want to dig deeper.