Continuing the Debate on “Avatar” and “The Blind Side”

December 31st, 2009 · 9 Comments

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to our thoughtful conversations about Avatar and The Blind Side. Based on what everyone has been saying, I’ve found myself seeing both movies from a similar angle, so rather than respond in the comment threads for either review, I’ve decided to do double-duty in a new post. I’ll reiterate a few arguments, and I’ll adapt a few arguments to reflect what your comments have made me consider.

If you haven’t read the discussions-in-progress, then you may want to go here for Avatar and here for The Blind Side.

And once again, be prepared for many spoilers.

Before I begin, you should know that I’m working from this basic, highly personal question: Both Avatar and The Blind Side engage familiar questions of cultural guilt, and they both do it in cliche ways, yet while I was irritated by The Blind Side, I was quite taken with Avatar. Why?

Avatar first: Despite the well-reasoned arguments made by my readers and put forward in this article (that Jesse M called to my attention), Avatar still does not strike me as yet another story about assuaging white guilt.

Remember, though, that I do think the movie is primitivist, which is certainly the troubling perspective adopted by “white guilt” movies like Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai. I absolutely see Avatar rehashing tropes about a developed person falling in love with a more “primitive” culture, getting accepted by that culture, becoming its leader, and thereby reaffirming his own worth. In the way that you can say Dances With Wolves is really a movie about white people, I can also see arguing that Avatar is really about the human characters proving their worth and not about the aliens at all.

Furthermore, I can see how you could interpret Avatar as being exactly like Dance With Wolves. I can see how you could read the Na’vi as “ethnics” and the human characters as “whites.” In short, I can see how you could read Avatar as a movie about race. (After all, every major alien character is voiced by an actor of color, and all but two of the major human characters are white.)

Yet I don’t see it that way. Watching the film, I took the premise at its word, and I read the Na’vi as aliens… not as human substitutes. Primitivism usually frustrates me because of how racist it is, but in this context, in which I didn’t read the “primitives” as being human, the technique spoke to me.

And that’s because of the cultural guilt that I’m dealing with. I usually don’t feel guilty for being white, but I constantly feel guilty for being human. In my darkest hours, I’m mortified by how absolutely my species has fucked up the planet; by how we have spread across the globe like a gluttonous virus, consuming everything around us; and by how we seem incapable of actually doing anything to curtail our globe-destroying behavior. I don’t think of those as white behaviors or wealthy behaviors. I think of them as human behaviors. We’re all fucking it up together. Nobody’s off the hook.

When I see a movie like Avatar, which berates and punishes humanity for its avarice, I get the satisfaction of having my guilt called on the carpet. In a way, I feel the movie is giving me, a human, what I deserve.

But being nothing more than human after all, I want to be forgiven for the sins of my species. So when I see human characters like Jake Sully and the Doctor living nobly, I feel better. When I see Jake end the movie by fully entering an alien body, when I see him escape his guilt-ridden humanity altogether, I feel better.

And you know what? That feels good. I know that the best way to alleviate my species-based guilt is to go out and try to repair some of the environmental damage humanity has done, but I can’t deny the allure of escaping into a movie that does the work for me, that imagines a scenario in which humanity receives grace.

Until we started this conversation, I didn’t realize the depth of my need to have something forgive me for being human. But there it is. I acknowledge but don’t use the racial reading of Avatar because my alternate interpretation speaks to me more powerfully.

And here’s another thing: This experience makes me more sympathetic to people who are comforted by primitivist narratives. If you are carrying white guilt (or heterosexual guilt, or first-world guilt, or any other guilt that comes from realizing you have power in ways that others don’t), then it’s comforting to absorb stories that simultaneously punish and forgive you.

Now, does that mean I have no problem with primitivist stories? No. Not at all. Like I said, the best way for me to alleviate my “human guilt” is to try and undo some of the problems that humans have caused, and if I let Avatar soothe me into believing I’ve changed or that there’s really nothing wrong, then I’ve failed. Similarly, I can see a movie like Philadelphia, in which the gay character is a “primitive” saint and the straight lawyer gets to connect to him and “save” him in court, and I can feel sympathy for straight audiences who love the movie for both acknowledging and forgiving their homophobia. But that doesn’t mean I can overlook the movie’s reduction of gay people. It’s my job now to keep pushing the notion that gay people are real and complex humans, and it’s the straight audience member’s job to keep examining her own prejudices and not assume that seeing Philadelphia actually counts as taking an action.

So there you go: I still like Avatar. I like it because it addresses my guilt in a comforting way, and while I see the validity of the “aliens as minorities” reading, that’s not how the movie reaches me. But is the film making things too simple, with its “now you’re an alien, all is forgiven” conclusion? Yes. Is it filled with cliche writing? Yes. Is it offering escape from a problem that actually requires challenging work? Yes. But again: I like it.

——

As for The Blind Side, Linda’s comment really clarified what frustrates me about the movie. If it just took more time to tell the story from Michael’s point of view, it would feel less enamored of rich, white, southern, Christian, Republican politics. As it stands, though, the movie is tipped toward this perspective. It barely develops Michael’s character, and it certainly doesn’t develop any other black characters in the film: They’re all one-note threats, thugs, and druggies. Meanwhile, the Tuohys are the only characters who get to be complex in the film, who get to really express themselves in interesting ways, and they are RWSCRs. There may be RWSCR characters who are terrible, but they are balanced by the Tuohys, who are richly drawn. There are no richly drawn black characters to counterbalance Michael’s gentle-giant sweetness, and there are no complex Democrats to offset Miss Sue’s lightweight presence. And so the movie, for all its good intentions and inclusive messages, becomes fundamentally biased toward a particular type of person. It creates a scenario in which RWSCRs are the only people granted the dignity of a full journey. If you see this movie and you are a RWSCR, then you can feel guilt and pride and all sorts of things about yourself. If you see this movie and you are anyone else, then you can mostly feel that you are being reduced to a cog in another person’s machine.

And I know many of you are arguing that this movie is “true,” that it’s based on real-life events, and that even the people represented in the film are saying it tells the truth of their lives. But I can’t accept that. Fictionalized stories are inevitably shaped and simplified. They are inevitably given a point of view. They can never tell the “truth” of a person’s real life, because they will always leave something out. Instead, fictional stories must strive for a different kind of “truth,” one that seeks to embody larger concepts about the world and how it works. By telling its story so dominantly from Leigh Ann’s point of view, The Blind Side becomes literally untrue and artistically untrue. It leaves out actual facts, and it leaves out important perspectives on how the world works.

I know it may seem like my demands will lead me to declare that almost every fictional story is “untrue,” and I admit I’m creating a tough standard. But still, there are movies that strike me as “true” or “authentic.” And furthermore, my standards won’t be the same as yours.No one can be right or wrong about this, but that doesn’t mean the conversation is unimportant.

That’s where I’m leaving it for now. What do you think?

Tags: Movies

9 responses so far ↓

1 Jesse M // Dec 31, 2009 at 2:44 pm

I appreciate your struggle with the issues in Avatar (until I see The Blind Side, I trust your assessment). My experience of the movie was strongly biased by my previous experience reading Science Fiction… with authors like Card and Ian Banks writing truly some truly bizarre, unfamiliar alien species, I couldn’t help but see the Nav’i as a thinly-veiled stand-in for tribal cultures, “more human than human” (as Rob Zombie might say).

Nonetheless, I can’t deny that this film was built on some universal, genuinely positive messages about the momentum of hatred and xenophobia and the need for strong, open-minded people (like Sully, Neytiri, etc.) to stand up to it. In a way, I’m falling into a trap that I’ve always struggled to avoid: I’m judging the movie by external standards, asking it to deliver a certain socially-informed complexity that it never promised.

Also, I’m not sure I’ve ever read a defense of white/human/etc guilt as a motif. It was an interesting angle, perhaps underrepresented in discussions of race relations.
2 Destiny // Dec 31, 2009 at 5:13 pm

I love to see such intelligent debate! I have to reserve comments on the Blind Side because I can’t bring myself to see it and I won’t unless Sandra Bullock nabs an Oscar nod. I saw Avatar on Christmas day with my family, and as I walked out told my brother that it was a sci-fi re-telling of “Dances with Wolves”. Now, as I look at it more deeply, I think the conflict in Avatar is not so much about race, but more about religion and faith. The humans are completely without faith in this film: the humans are all soldiers, profiteers, and scientists and none profess any sense of religious conviction (as far as I can recall), but the Na’vi all have a firm belief in their goddess (whose name escapes me, but she is female, and just before her death Sigourney Weaver’s character confirms that she is real). I think the film is saying that the crumbling of religious beliefs and ethics on earth has caused the destruction of our planet, and that a lack of morals and spiritual connection to the earth is what has created evil men like the Colonel (Stephen Lang) and Selfridge (I mean, they might as well have called him “Selfish”, played by Giovanni Ribisi). The Colonel and Selfridge have no qualms about destroying sacred land to get closer to the unobtanium. They even relish the idea of weakening the Na’vi by desecrating the symbols of their faith.
In the end, the Na’vi are only able to win the battle royale when Sully’s prayers to the goddess are answered and the animals take up the fight. The ceremony through which Sully is transformed can only be accomplished by a communal chant in which each Na’vi unites as one through faith in the goddess. In the final moment, it is through the grace of the goddess that Sully becomes a true Na’vi. Is this not like the symbolism of baptism in the Christian church when a person emerges from the water born again?
I think the racial arguments are completely valid, and I tend to view many works of art/ entertainment through a racial lens, but in this case it is the religious overtones that caught my attention.
3 Sheila // Dec 31, 2009 at 7:01 pm

I agree with you about the “truth” of the movie, and I will also offer this thought — for me, the book was about Michael Oher. The Tuohys were characters in his story, and they were really interesting characters, but my reading of the book is that it was about the wildly complicated person Michael is, and not about a saintly white family who rescued him.

Didn’t see the movie, don’t expect to spend any money to see it, so obviously my take on the movie is necessarily third-hand. But I have heard that, in the movie, Sandra Bullock has to teach him about how his position is all about protecting people — like the Tuohys! — when, in the book, it is made explicit that Michael never needed any such intervention and had in fact scored off the charts on his protective instincts since he was a child.

As to “Avatar,” I have to admit that I got none of that and in fact never managed to get past the one-dimensional characters, and the hamfisted dialogue, and the tribal swaying, and so forth, so my reaction to that movie can fairly be characterized as: “Oooh, pretty. Hee. Hee hee. Heeeeeeeeeeee hee hee — oh, pretty — hee hee HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.” (That last part being the moment when the giant robot exoskeleton proved to be equipped with a giant knife in a giant hip-holster. A KNIFE. For giant-robot-exoskeleton street-fighting, one presumes.)
4 Ron // Jan 1, 2010 at 5:30 pm

Destiny’s post reminded me about Hayao Miyazaki’s films and there are lots of similarities there with AVATAR in terms of spirituality and environmentalism. Isn’t there a prototype of the Mothertree in MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO? And the invocation of the goddess and–unless I’m conflating with another movie–the incorporation of the goddess-spirit within animals are in PONYO as well.
5 Mark Blankenship // Jan 1, 2010 at 10:31 pm

Ron! Yes! PONYO totally has the goddess-spirit within in animals motif.
6 Jesse M // Jan 4, 2010 at 7:25 pm

Loved Ponyo. It’s proof against the people who claim that “motifs inevitably recur” is an acceptable excuse for unoriginality. Ponyo took a number of tropes — the mystical child, the absent father, the female nature spirit, etc — and moved each one in an entirely original direction. It was brilliantly suspenseful, beautifully sentimental, completely experimental, and refreshingly non-violent. Nobody who saw any part of that film — even the trailer — would ever have said, “It’s clearly just a retelling of [...]“, even if it was inspired by Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

Thinking about Miyazaki’s originality and general obscurity, and then thinking about Avatar and James Cameron… it just makes me sigh a little louder.
7 Rachel // Jan 6, 2010 at 4:47 am

RE: The Blind Side (I just can’t stop!) Michael is the only major black character in the movie because he is the only major black character in his world — part of the point is that he’s set down in this extremely strange white world. So to richly depict the world of West Memphis is to undercut precisely the discomfort that Michael himself feels at living in a white world. Imbalance is part of the point.

This particular take on the true-life story focuses on the power of maternal love (at least for me), and so the main character is the mother. It’s a star vehicle for Sandra Bullock, and that’s what it is and I don’t think the movie makes apologies for that. There’s not a ton of focus on the father either (though if you read the real stories, he was far more integrally involved than what we see here). So in a story about the effect of nurturing, a choice was made to focus on the mother rather than the son. But I don’t think there was a choice to focus on white people rather that black people. There are just more white people in the environment being depicted.

It would be false to give Michael bunches of eloquent dialogue to make him fully drawn, because that’s not the way the character would express himself. His expression is physical not verbal, and that bodily expression is manifest not only in athletics, but just in the way he holds himself, the way he moves in the world. I think you need to give the actor more credit for all that he communicates through his posture, his walk, the look in his eyes. A writer and a dancer are both expressive, but in different languages.

But yes, fine, it’s Sandra Bullock’s movie because it’s a Sandra Bullock movie, but I don’t feel like I don’t know this kid.

And finally, I think it still needs to be sussed out whether the movie embraces Republican politics just because it embraces a Republican.
8 Amanda // Jan 11, 2010 at 11:10 pm

Destiny- I LOVE your interpretation of Avatar! Though my immediate reaction was more like Sheila’s, I really enjoyed reading what you had to say about the film’s commentary on faith. I especially like the fact that Sigourney Weaver’s character insists that there’s a measurable spiritual/biological network that the Na’vi can “tap into.” Which is a powerful concept that is really in line with my own beliefs, and it’s the one part of the movie that actually made me tear up, as stressed-out-science-nerdy as the scene was. Your comments definitely gave me something new to consider about the film. Awesome!
9 Amanda // Jan 25, 2010 at 11:19 pm

I know this may be too little too late in terms of this conversation, but I got a newsletter from a local grassroots organization last week that created an analogy between Avatar and Appalachia–the conceit, of course, being coal vs. “unobtainium” mining. I thought it was pretty interesting. I think you could make the argument that lots of Appalachians live close to the land (and unfortunately are seen as ‘savage native’ types by many) and feel a deep connection to it, and have seen it destroyed in countless ways through the past couple of centuries.

We’re not blue down here, though.

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