‘Avatar’ and the racism of virtue —Hagai van der Horst

The Na’vi are a dream realised only to its dreamer, a metaphor whose goal is its own source. Put plainly, the Na’vi are Americans, only in a reverse mirror image

James Cameron’s film, ‘Avatar’, offers its viewers one of the most morally fulfilling journeys, an empathy of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, or indeed, everybody. However, Avatar’s ideology can be at times puzzling and unsettling. Put simply, the film invokes colonial and imperial tropes under a cloak of ambiguity, with the wrongdoers appearing overtly virtuous and those wronged seeming implicitly lacking in moral sense. Through such moral inconsistency, the Na’vi (the oppressed indigenous population in the film) feature as an empty parable to Nature, outside of history, unproductive (they merely exist), incapable of organisation or unity, pure (like the flora and fauna), animalistic, chauvinistic and potentially murderous (like Nature itself: beautiful yet dangerous). In stark contrast, Americans/Westerners (the Na’vi’s oppressors), appear as sole moral agents in a universe of rigidly moral creatures. It is the Americans alone who are capable of realising both salvation and/or damnation for Pandora (fictional world of the Na’vi), of both granting and/or denying rights as they see fit. 

The Na’vi then, are not a metaphor for Iraq’s 2003 occupation, First Nations Americans since 1492, or current day dispossessed indigenous populations. Rather, they are merely the embodiment of Western nostalgic yearning to its own benevolent, pre-sin self. The Na’vi are a dream realised only to its dreamer, a metaphor whose goal is its own source. Put plainly, the Na’vi are Americans, only in a reverse mirror image. The more rational, technological, calculative and materialist the Americans/Westerners are, the more irrational, spontaneous, mystical and backward the Na’vi are.

Cameron’s Na’vi, then, are reduced and stigmatised (along with their metaphor’s suggested key sources) through regimes of representations comparable to those that prompted white Europeans to occupy such places as Pandora in the first place. 

The evidence is plentiful: 

1) Na’vi society is clannish and based on nepotism and monarchy, not meritocracy or democracy. Throughout the film, a centralist, heritable authority appears intrinsic to the Na’vi’s nature.

2) The Na’vi’s matrimonial rites resemble a stereotypical, Eurocentric view of non-Westerners. The Na’vi hold arranged, not free, marriages and consider copulation as an act of matrimony.

3) Individual inclinations appear to be rare as the Na’vi take their elders and handed down traditions unquestionably. The Na’vi appear to merely exist (like life itself or daylight), that is, outside of time, history, or societal structures. Western anthropologists too used to think of the Arabs as existing inseparably to their desert and ecological environments. 

4) As opposed to the technocratic ‘Westerners’ who control their environment to excess, the Na’vi create very little. Congenitally passive, illiterate and un-adaptive, they are incapable of generating or inventing anything beyond random decorations. The Na’vi female heroine in the film, Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana) shows no interest to learn about her lover’s world or culture, and years of violent clashes did not stop the Na’vi from using arrows against metal shields.

5) The film’s messianic ending crystallises that the Na’vi people indeed exist for the redemption of a few Americans, not vice versa. The more savage the aggressor (‘Bad America I’) the more the need for a saviour (‘Good America II’). The Na’vi are a mere therapeutic prop caught in this internal dialogue. Hence the duality of Dr Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver). On the one hand, the scientist who invented the Avatars’ technology; on the other hand, “Grace”, meaning the Christian belief in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Christianity, then, is used both as a subliminal virtue narrating the film as well as being, incidentally, one of the key motifs of European cultural imperialism. Think of the Avatar-run Augustine School, named after Grace. On the one hand, the image of Grace surrounded by Na’vi children, staring at her in awe, is reminiscent of similar pious imagery of Christ. On the other hand, it is reminiscent of the horrific church-run, forced boarding schools for native populations (the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, noted in his 2008 formal apology that such so-called residential schools indeed were meant to “kill the Indian in the child”).

It is only after the planet of Pandora “samples” Grace (using Grace’s own term), that it answers the prayer of its “chosen” one, Jake Sully, the all-American Salvationist Messiah. Indeed, Jake’s first encounters on Pandora include a form of baptism and standing illuminated in a near crucified position. Only a white American, so it seems, can unite the Na’vi warring tribes who are incapable of doing so on their own, even in the face of great peril.

The saviour complex reappears in the environmental message of the film. Apparently, the polluters who cause the razing of rainforest communities are not the million viewers of the film (since they are invited to experience being the mythological saviours of “the people”). Rather, it is the unexplained, impenetrable evil of a maddening general and a few mercenaries.

Yet, for the cinematic fantasy to work (of the destroyer invoked as a saviour), all stories, places and circumstances must be interchangeable. The Na’vi appear as the ‘universal-prototype’ oppressed indigenous population. Being a generalised template of one-size-fits-all victimhood, no particular culprits need to be addressed (apart from the usual generalised templates of corporate greed, chauvinism, small-mindedness and of course, pure evil itself). The Na’vi may connote First Nation Americans (bows and arrows, body decorations), or Iraq’s 2003 occupation (through wording such as “hearts and minds”; fighting “terror with terror”; “martyrdom”; fighting for “freedom”; or Pandora’s oil-like lucrative minerals). However, these metaphors are a mere rhetoric, a play between symbols, not between symbols and a specific people, reality or history. Such poetics tell us that suffering, either in 1492 or 2003, in Southern Iraq or in the North, in Palestine or Israel, can be lumped under a general application of the ‘human condition’ (that is, the American ‘human condition’): de-historicised, ready for mass consumption.

In the final analysis, it seems that the virtue presented in the film is too often an Avatar (that is, an incarnation or embodiment) for the vices it sets to confront. 

Hagai van der Horst is a PhD student at The Centre for Media and Film Studies, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. He can be reached at hagaivdh@gmail.com