felis_ultharus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
felis_ultharus) wrote2010-06-08 08:56 am
felis_ultharus) wrote2010-06-08 08:56 am
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So I became the last person on earth to see Avatar this week. Probably the last person on earth. The indigenous Dongria Kondh people of India are using the film to draw attention to their plight. Poor Chinese folk are using the theme song to protest the demolition of their homes. So it seems to have made it out of the bubble of well-to-do West.
And this movie has had a lot of resonance. And that's because it is brilliant as a work of art, and - just as importantly - touches some important nerves.
I'll tackle the flaws first, in my usual bitter and misanthropic way.
And the really obvious problem is the racism. There's going to be racism any time you take a faux-First Nations group and do the noble savage thing, and this movie ups the ante by having the white guy learn their ways in a week and come to lead them.
(TV Tropes calls this trope Mighty Whitey.)
I don't want to pretend that the racism isn't there. It is. Throughout my academic career, professors wasted large amounts of time explaining how a sexist, racist, or anti-Semitic passage was really "irony," when it really wasn't. You could almost see the desperation in their eyes: "I want to like this. Please let me like it. I can't like it if it's bad."
And I've encountered this again and again outside academia. The base idea that unless a work is morally perfect, it cannot be read and enjoyed. So the solution is to defend it against such charges if you like it. Just check out any of the "unfortunate implications" entries on TV Tropes for the justifying edits sometime.
At the same time, if we reject anything with nasty elements - particularly if it means jettisoning brilliant works that are aesthetically perfect and otherwise have something valuable to say - we restrict ourselves to an dour, ahistorical bubble, and restrict our list of good and pleasurable cultural intake to Margaret Atwood, John Steinbeck, a handful of South Asian writers like Bapsi Sidhwa. Down that road lies the death of Shakespeare (sexist) and Chaucer (anti-Semitic and homophobic) and Swift (sexist).
I don't want to live in that world.
So all I can say is that Avatar would've been a perfect movie if it weren't for its portrayal of a culture that is obviously supposed to be First Nations people living on the American plains (judging by their outfits). Which is a shame, because they didn't really have to do that. 100% of all our ancestors were tribal animists, depending on how far back you want to go. Any one of them could've been substituted.
Next time they make a movie like this - and it will be made again, what with the popularity - may I suggest my own ancestors, the Celts? Our druids had top tree-hugging credentials, a warrior culture, a rich set of myths and goddesses to draw on. Get rid of the mohawks and feathers, and give them torcs. The braids can stay. Shift out the faux Mezoamerican "Omaticaya clan" to something 300 letters long with 150 W's (for Welsh) or with lots of GH and EI sounds (for Irish). Make them look like Scottish wildcats instead of tigers, and you're good to go.
On that note, religion. I'm always mildly amused by the portrayals of "native religion," because it's invariably a mother-earth creator-goddess.
Ever read First Nations creation stories, as they themselves tell them? Nine-tenths are male sky-gods. Women have very passive roles (like the Iroquois Sky-Woman who has to be rescued by animals). The Ojibwe have a Mother Earth, but her main role is to give birth to a male creator. Among the ones that I know, only the Cree seem to have an active, creating Mother Earth.
You know what Na'vi religion really looks like? Mine. In fact, pretty much every First Nations person in Hollywood is practising Wicca. When the Na'vi pray, it looks more like one of Starhawk's spiral dances than anything I've seen the Coast Salish do back in BC.
Hollywood and Los Angeles love my religion when it comes to anything ecological. But they seem to hate actual Wiccans. We're invariably portrayed as empty-headed losers, if not actually crazy and dangerous. My beliefs are apparently sacred, but my religion is idiotic. I still haven't figured that one out.
But don't get me wrong. I loved the religious aspects of this film - it's the most beautiful evocation of my spiritual life on either the big or small screen, and scenes of it made me cry. Religion onscreen is 99% Christian even when it's called something else, and I see my spirituality reflected so rarely.
I'm just amused that these kinds of things always have the space-Ojibwe practising space-Wicca, is all.
As a whole? It's brilliant. And it's beautiful, and beauty in art is always its own justification.
But more than that, it's important. A strange thing to say about a Hollywood movie, but there it is. People are killing themselves because they can't live in the Na'vi world. People are abandoning their homes to live in a Na'vi-style tribe in Florida.
I've been part of the environmental movement for eighteen years, and I'll tell you: the biggest problem hasn't been lack of knowledge (we've had that since Rachel Carson), or lack of organization by hard-working individuals, or even lack of interest by the political class - we had an ozone treaty in the Reagan-and-Mulroney years, for fuck's sake. It hasn't even been the corporations, because we can control those if we care. It's been the total failure of the ecological crisis to claim a piece of real estate in our imagination.
We can't imagine the problem, so it slips from our minds and memories between every new report. We can't hold it there - or we couldn't until recently. Politicians and newscasters didn't think we cared, and overall they were right. Or more precisely, we cared when we remembered.
Al Gore made a space, but there had been Al Gores before. Only fiction can carve a permanent place in the psyche, and previously all our eco-fiction was dumbed-down stuff for kids.
Now? Now the environment is in every conversation and heads up almost every newscast. Now even the most right-wing politicians have to pay lip service to it. That would not have been conceivable to me just ten years ago.
And Avatar is one part of that shift in consciousness, nudging us just a little closer to actually fighting the most important battle the human race has ever faced. That alone - along with its beauty - means that everybody should see it.
So in short, if there's one person left who hasn't seen it, they probably should. Its only seriously flaw is the racist implications of being Dances with Wolves in space. But there's so much else there, just in terms of its sheer beauty, and its ecological and its spiritual themes, that I have to recommend it.
In more immediate political news, please call up your MP and ask how they're voting on bill C-389 tomorrow. That's the bill to give a small number of basic equality rights to trans people - on-the-job and as-a-customer stuff at airports, at banks, and with the federal government. It's minimal, but it's a start. Currently it's legal to discriminate against trans people in pretty much everything.
If you don't know who your MP is, you can use your postal code here to find out. The real risk is apathy. Most MPs probably don't think you care, and they have a nasty habit of playing hooky from the House of Commons when they think the public doesn't care.
The transphobic, meanwhile, will be in the House for sure to vote against it.
And this movie has had a lot of resonance. And that's because it is brilliant as a work of art, and - just as importantly - touches some important nerves.
I'll tackle the flaws first, in my usual bitter and misanthropic way.
And the really obvious problem is the racism. There's going to be racism any time you take a faux-First Nations group and do the noble savage thing, and this movie ups the ante by having the white guy learn their ways in a week and come to lead them.
(TV Tropes calls this trope Mighty Whitey.)
I don't want to pretend that the racism isn't there. It is. Throughout my academic career, professors wasted large amounts of time explaining how a sexist, racist, or anti-Semitic passage was really "irony," when it really wasn't. You could almost see the desperation in their eyes: "I want to like this. Please let me like it. I can't like it if it's bad."
And I've encountered this again and again outside academia. The base idea that unless a work is morally perfect, it cannot be read and enjoyed. So the solution is to defend it against such charges if you like it. Just check out any of the "unfortunate implications" entries on TV Tropes for the justifying edits sometime.
At the same time, if we reject anything with nasty elements - particularly if it means jettisoning brilliant works that are aesthetically perfect and otherwise have something valuable to say - we restrict ourselves to an dour, ahistorical bubble, and restrict our list of good and pleasurable cultural intake to Margaret Atwood, John Steinbeck, a handful of South Asian writers like Bapsi Sidhwa. Down that road lies the death of Shakespeare (sexist) and Chaucer (anti-Semitic and homophobic) and Swift (sexist).
I don't want to live in that world.
So all I can say is that Avatar would've been a perfect movie if it weren't for its portrayal of a culture that is obviously supposed to be First Nations people living on the American plains (judging by their outfits). Which is a shame, because they didn't really have to do that. 100% of all our ancestors were tribal animists, depending on how far back you want to go. Any one of them could've been substituted.
Next time they make a movie like this - and it will be made again, what with the popularity - may I suggest my own ancestors, the Celts? Our druids had top tree-hugging credentials, a warrior culture, a rich set of myths and goddesses to draw on. Get rid of the mohawks and feathers, and give them torcs. The braids can stay. Shift out the faux Mezoamerican "Omaticaya clan" to something 300 letters long with 150 W's (for Welsh) or with lots of GH and EI sounds (for Irish). Make them look like Scottish wildcats instead of tigers, and you're good to go.
On that note, religion. I'm always mildly amused by the portrayals of "native religion," because it's invariably a mother-earth creator-goddess.
Ever read First Nations creation stories, as they themselves tell them? Nine-tenths are male sky-gods. Women have very passive roles (like the Iroquois Sky-Woman who has to be rescued by animals). The Ojibwe have a Mother Earth, but her main role is to give birth to a male creator. Among the ones that I know, only the Cree seem to have an active, creating Mother Earth.
You know what Na'vi religion really looks like? Mine. In fact, pretty much every First Nations person in Hollywood is practising Wicca. When the Na'vi pray, it looks more like one of Starhawk's spiral dances than anything I've seen the Coast Salish do back in BC.
Hollywood and Los Angeles love my religion when it comes to anything ecological. But they seem to hate actual Wiccans. We're invariably portrayed as empty-headed losers, if not actually crazy and dangerous. My beliefs are apparently sacred, but my religion is idiotic. I still haven't figured that one out.
But don't get me wrong. I loved the religious aspects of this film - it's the most beautiful evocation of my spiritual life on either the big or small screen, and scenes of it made me cry. Religion onscreen is 99% Christian even when it's called something else, and I see my spirituality reflected so rarely.
I'm just amused that these kinds of things always have the space-Ojibwe practising space-Wicca, is all.
As a whole? It's brilliant. And it's beautiful, and beauty in art is always its own justification.
But more than that, it's important. A strange thing to say about a Hollywood movie, but there it is. People are killing themselves because they can't live in the Na'vi world. People are abandoning their homes to live in a Na'vi-style tribe in Florida.
I've been part of the environmental movement for eighteen years, and I'll tell you: the biggest problem hasn't been lack of knowledge (we've had that since Rachel Carson), or lack of organization by hard-working individuals, or even lack of interest by the political class - we had an ozone treaty in the Reagan-and-Mulroney years, for fuck's sake. It hasn't even been the corporations, because we can control those if we care. It's been the total failure of the ecological crisis to claim a piece of real estate in our imagination.
We can't imagine the problem, so it slips from our minds and memories between every new report. We can't hold it there - or we couldn't until recently. Politicians and newscasters didn't think we cared, and overall they were right. Or more precisely, we cared when we remembered.
Al Gore made a space, but there had been Al Gores before. Only fiction can carve a permanent place in the psyche, and previously all our eco-fiction was dumbed-down stuff for kids.
Now? Now the environment is in every conversation and heads up almost every newscast. Now even the most right-wing politicians have to pay lip service to it. That would not have been conceivable to me just ten years ago.
And Avatar is one part of that shift in consciousness, nudging us just a little closer to actually fighting the most important battle the human race has ever faced. That alone - along with its beauty - means that everybody should see it.
So in short, if there's one person left who hasn't seen it, they probably should. Its only seriously flaw is the racist implications of being Dances with Wolves in space. But there's so much else there, just in terms of its sheer beauty, and its ecological and its spiritual themes, that I have to recommend it.
In more immediate political news, please call up your MP and ask how they're voting on bill C-389 tomorrow. That's the bill to give a small number of basic equality rights to trans people - on-the-job and as-a-customer stuff at airports, at banks, and with the federal government. It's minimal, but it's a start. Currently it's legal to discriminate against trans people in pretty much everything.
If you don't know who your MP is, you can use your postal code here to find out. The real risk is apathy. Most MPs probably don't think you care, and they have a nasty habit of playing hooky from the House of Commons when they think the public doesn't care.
The transphobic, meanwhile, will be in the House for sure to vote against it.
no subject
Even if I have my own issues with the film (simplistic treatment of stone age cultures, Mighty Whitey, thoughtless appropriation of various real cultures' aesthetics and dress, etc.) this alone makes the whole thing worthwhile. If the film brings attention to the plight of real oppressed peoples, it will have been worth it.
On a less grounded note, Avatar may well be a case study for the power of fiction -- I can't think of any other film that made people go found communes in Florida. Not in such numbers, at least.
no subject
Avatar can actually be of use to indigenous people, because it opens the issue up as current, and resistance as not futile.
If it can help one group with its land claims, maybe it can redeem itself? I wonder if more Canadians have warmed up to First Nations' concerns now that they've seen the movie?
It sounds silly stated like that, I guess, but that's how fiction works - that's its value. Looking through someone else's eyes builds compassion for their position.
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But the real fear isn't that the MPs will show up and vote against the bill, but that those who aren't transphobic won't show up at all.
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And also, there are six-legged horses in it, with a biological USB port for telepathy.
Best to see it in a good mood, though. Otherwise coming back to the world can be too depressing.
no subject
"It's the most beautiful evocation of my spiritual life on either the big or small screen, and scenes of it made me cry."
It was so beautiful, wasn't it? Watching those scenes was a powerful experience for me because it evoked feelings I hadn't had since I stopped practicing.
"We can't imagine the problem, so it slips from our minds and memories between every new report."
This is why I continue my crazy-old-man-esque crusade to make it about food sustainability. Anyone with high school knowledge of biology can understand that life can only be perpetuated by other life. If we strip the Earth of its ability to sustain life for plants, animals, insects and birds, that translates to an overall reduction in its ability to sustain life for humans. Framing it this way makes the problem of ecological destruction directly relevant to anyone who enjoys not starving to death.
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The problem is that we think in stories, not in facts - not even in facts related to our self-interest. Jung was right. I've always been amazed how fast you can make someone really understand with a well-told story.
I sometimes forget that, and then something like Avatar comes along to remind me. It humbles me.
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And my MP is Dr. Carolyn Bennett - I'm fairly confident she's a supporter.
no subject
As for Avatar, it's worth it. As a science-fiction connoisseur, you'll know all these plots and tropes. But some things revel in originality, others in taking something old and polishing it, and Avatar's genius is mostly the second. That and it's sheer visual beauty.
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