Avatar: Is it Racist?

My writer friend, Kellie, and I are riding down Sunset Blvd when she asks me if I think the movie Avatar is racist. I have to tell her I’m one of the few people who hasn’t seen it. Well she is dying to talk to someone about “all the racist images” and demands that I put it at the top of my viewing list.

Later that weekend, I made my way over to the multiplex, snuck in some goodies from 7-Eleven (hey, I’m a struggling artist), and settled down to see the much-hyped, 3D spectacle.

If you have somehow found a way not to be sucked in by the blockbuster Avatar hype, here is the basic plot: A paraplegic marine dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home.

I got to give it to writer/director James Cameron, he put everything he had in this movie (not necessarily good storytelling, but you can’t hit every ball out of the park). Avatar is a perfect example of a filmmaker not letting go of an idea and finding the right time to execute it.

Before I answer Kellie’s provocative question, here are the things I can easily answer about Avatar.

1. Avatar is the perfect 3D movie to see if you have never seen one before. This was my first.
2. Avatar is boring --according to the two guys who started to snore twenty minutes in. One of them eventually left.
3. Avatar takes movie making to the next level. Once again, Cameron has set the bar for big and huge and spectacular.
4. Avatar is visually beautiful. Cameron gives us all the bells and whistles.
5. Avatar has ridiculously shitty dialogue. Cameron, I know you are heralded as the tricked out technology director, but would it kill you to take a script writing workshop?

Now back to Kellie’s question: Is the movie Avatar racist?

I suspect if you feel your racism alarms going off it’s because Cameron intends to ring it. In many ways Avatar is a textbook example of how indigenous people and their communities are taken over and destroyed. The colonist find something valuable that the locals are sitting on and they try every trick in the book to get them to give it up. If not by offering cheap trinkets, then by good old- fashion force (and smallpox- infested blankets).

In his heavy handed way the director means to be clear that this is a story of “us” and “them” In the “us” column is Giovanni Ribisi’s character, Parker Selfridge, whose disdain and impatience for the “monkeys” of Pandora grows by leaps and bounds as the story progresses. He makes Bill O’Reilly look like a super liberal in comparison. And a story of colonist gone wild would not be complete without a benevolent soul, Sigourney Weaver’s Dr. Grace Augustine, who only wants to learn from the Nav’is (and if time allows collect some samples).

The “them” come in the form of the fourteen-feet tall, bright blue Nav’is. They are a not so subtle mash up of all the people who have ever had their land and culture stolen and left out on the margins. With their spears, flying Pterodactyl and spiritual connection to their ancestors, they are a hint of Aborigines, Native Americans, Zulu Nation, and magical.

Thrown in the middle of this cultural stand off is our reluctant hero, Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, who eventually finds himself “going native.” During the montage where Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri teaches JakeSully the way of the Nav’is, I found myself thinking of the 1995 Walt Disney animated film Pocahontas. So, my mother is right again; there is nothing new under sun.

For all the bells and whistles, Avatar, at least in part, is a story that has been told before, in fact, many times. Here the story is being played out on the gaseous planet Pandora (and please, don’t wreck your brain on why he calls the planet that). It is a retelling of how people, who believe they have more right to something, will go about getting it, regardless of the cost – often to the indigenous people.

So, is Avatar racist? No. Just a flimsy, but visually spectacular allegory older than time.


Screenwriter Michelle Sewell wonders if it would be wrong to sneak a turkey leg into the movies next time?