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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Avatar and Disability
Writing at Open Salon, Bill the Lizard (guesting for Chauncey DeVega) puts disability front-and-center in a reading of Avatar:
What many people seem to forget is that Jake Sully, the main character, is established early on in the story as being both an ostracized and emasculated character. Thus, he does not fall into the classic white privilege archetype that you see in white guilt fantasy.
Jake Sully is emasculated in a literal sense because of a combination of physical injury, financial inadequacy and family tragedy. Not only is Jake Sully a Marine who cannot walk or fight, but more tragically he knows that there is a cure for his injury, but cannot afford it. Further, Jake’s closest relative, his twin brother, has been killed in a meaningless act of violence that Jake could not prevent, and now Jake is now forced to step forward into a position that he does not feel he is smart enough to handle.
Thus, he compares Sully to Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Bill the Lizard goes on to point that, because of his disability, he did not enter the Avatar program from a position of privilege and entitlement. He was determined to “to apply his knowledge and skills towards his own self-care and development” had is “forced to operate outside of the two dominant spheres of influence at the Hell’s Gate facility on Pandora: the soldiers and the scientists.” That is to say, he entered the program as an Other. Thus “while the scientists are slowly accepting him, it’s very apparent that Sully would rather immerse himself within the Na’vi culture through his interactions with Neytiri.”
Furthermore, by deciding to become fully Na’vi at the end of the film, Jake makes a decision that is very similar to someone who may elect to have sex reassignment surgery. He is changing his outside in order to better fit what he knows is correct for him as an individual. Many people who have gender identity issues refuse to accept what is increasingly a dated notion of “medical normality,” that those in the “trans” community have a disorder. Here, gender is a social construct that is completely unrelated to biology. Similarly, while Jake Sully may be biologically human, it does not change the fact that he knows that he belongs with Neytiri, his life-mate.
Bill the Lizard moves on to compare Sully to Hugh Thompson, Jr., the US Army helicopter pilot who attempted to stop the 1968 My Lai MAssacre. Thompson became a pariah within the military for his efforts.
In conclusion:
Ultimately, while Annalee Newitz and others may see Jake Sully as that “white guy [who] manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member,” I would argue that she is missing the mark. Jake Sully already feels that the Na’vi are his family. Given his background prior to the climax of the movie, is it all that surprising that he would fight to protect them?
When you read the whole post you should read the comments as well.
Comments
You’re right about the comments. I like the way he completely agrees with the first commenter who demolishes his argument from a disability perspective.
His description of Avatar makes me even more certain that Poul Anderson’s estate is due royalties.
He agrees with the first commenter’s specification that Avatar should not imply disability as intrinsically negative.
However, the original point, that the hero’s disability sufficiently establishes his outsider status and therefore challenges the superficial reading of the film as an imperialist fantasy, stands.
(As for Poul Anderson, I read him for many years with great enjoyment before I learned he wasn’t a pseudonym of Isaac Asimov as I had thought.)
This is ridiculous.
So, being handicapped makes one incapable of being an imperialist? A culture’s outsiders cannot contribute to its imperial spread across other cultures? Tell that to the Scots who spread the British Empire in part because they were the victims of English imperialism.
Being “an oppressed Other” for one reason doesn’t mean you cannot oppress others for another reason. Gay sexists, black racists, Jewish imperialists . . .
Jake is set up to be the outsider from the outset with his rejection by the scientists. On the other hand, his initial allegiance with the mercenary military turns him into a plant, to that extent, he’s something of an insider.
Then again, the main point of almost every James Cameron movie is that giant corporations are evil.
Then again, the main point of almost every James Cameron movie is that giant corporations are evil.
That’s not actually the point of “Terminator”, “The Abyss”, “True Lies” or “Titanic”, four out of the nine non-documentary films that Cameron has directed. Giant corporations don’t really appear in “Terminator” and “True Lies” and are morally neutral in “Titanic” and “The Abyss”. (Does the White Star Line even count as a giant corporation?)
Tell that to the Scots who spread the British Empire in part because they were the victims of English imperialism.
Suggest you rely on sources other than “Braveheart”.
"Giant corporations don’t really appear in ‘Terminator’...”
Um, Cyberdyne Systems, the defense contractor responsible for creating Skynet? You know, that little scene in T2 where Sarah Connor and Arnold bust into a corporate office building, steal the chip and the cybernetic arm?
That’s not to say that the point of the movie is that “giant corporations are evil,” but let’s not fight inaccuracies with inaccuracies.
ajay, I’ve never seen *Braveheart*. That the Scots were victims of English imperialism is a historical fact. That many were then complicit in the spread of the British Empire abroad is also a historical fact.
"So, being handicapped makes one incapable of being an imperialist? A culture’s outsiders cannot contribute to its imperial spread across other cultures? Tell that to the Scots who spread the British Empire in part because they were the victims of English imperialism.”
This has no relation to what happens in Avatar. Jake doesn’t contribute to the spread of Earth’s empire, he halts it. Your analogy would be valid if the Scots had fought on the side of the Sepoys in the 1857 rebellion.
tememos—exactly. The point about disability has nothing to do with the plot of the film, which does not require the disability to save itself from an accusation of simplistic imperialist ideology.
But a more subtle critique of the film might situate it within the context of Said’s analysis of *Heart of Darkness*, where an overt opposition to colonial violence is complicated by the fact that Africa simply becomes an empty stage for the dramatization of a white guy learning about himself and about human nature. This is what John McClure calls the genre of the late imperial romance, and that is precisely what *Avatar* is.
And no amount of handicap or outsiderness can balance out the film’s basic idea that this other world is more or less a place for the white guy to discover his true self—even if that self is an other. In fact, the other world is little more than a simplistic mythical boon that rewards Jake for learning what’s really important to him (and the blue lady is little more than Jake’s sexual reward).
My concern with the film’s portrait of disability is this: Jake’s paraplegia is clearly aligned with the “unnatural” empire that produced it. Jake’s broken body functions as a synecdoche for the broken, technological, capitalist society that broke it. The only cure for him is a return to the romanticized natural world of Pandora--only their “natural” or “organic” lifeworld can heal him, making him “natural” and whole again. And it’s this very imagining of Pandora as a world of noble savages that is, at its core, racist. So, the way disability works in the film highlights its racist underpinnings rather than otherwise.
Um, Cyberdyne Systems, the defense contractor responsible for creating Skynet? You know, that little scene in T2 where Sarah Connor and Arnold bust into a corporate office building, steal the chip and the cybernetic arm?
Yes, that would be in “Terminator 2”, a different film.
That the Scots were victims of English imperialism is a historical fact.
Please supply details of the conquest of Scotland by England, and its subsequent inclusion into an English empire.
Not all colonies are conquered; some simply lose independence and are absorbed into a larger whole, whose center is not there. And a Google search of “scottish imperialism” will give you plenty of links to the details: Highland clearance, emigration to the Americas, India, Africa, along with a tendency to see work in the British army as a noble continuation of the martial clan tradition.
But a more subtle critique of the film might situate it within the context of Said’s analysis of *Heart of Darkness*, where an overt opposition to colonial violence is complicated by the fact that Africa simply becomes an empty stage for the dramatization of a white guy learning about himself and about human nature.
I think Joseph Conrad had that idea before Edward Said.
Luther, can you give us an example of a good film set in the agonistic context of the clash of cultures, with a majority culture protagonist, or do you think it is categorically impossible for any such film to be good?
The artist’s intentions, James Cameron at Davos:
After two days of mulling nightmare scenarios of sovereign debt default, over-regulation and protectionism, those lucky few who managed to get into the Cameron talk were able to lay back with their oversized 3D glasses and take a trip to planet Pandora.
“This is by far the best session I’ve ever been to in Davos,” said one delighted audience member in between watching a few clips from the film.
. . . .
“Ultimately, the take-away message from the movie is the stewardship of our planet,” Mr. Cameron said, urging everyone to “stop and smell the roses.”
Chinese response to the film.
Laufeysson—
Some people read Conrad that way, but few, if any, did so before McClure and Said criticized the novel from that angle. But even if *Heart of Darkness* is in fact a novel about how white people go to Africa and are blind to the actual existing people and ways of life there, it *still* remains a novel in which Africa signifies nothing more than an empty stage in which white people learn something about themselves.
As far as movies such as you describe, I cannot, but that’s only because I’ve not seen very many films, comparatively speaking. I can think of few culture-clash films right now to begin with. *Enemy Mine* is a decent sci-fi film that does a better job than *Avatar* with this sort of scenario.
But *Avatar* isn’t a bad film because it’s an imperial romance. It’s a bad film because the dialogue is terrible, the plot flimsy, the characters hollow, the acting ineffective, the special effects cheesy, the images bathetic, the score ridiculous, the editing clumsy, and the pace enervating.
’I think Joseph Conrad had that idea before Edward Said.”
I disagree. “Heart of Darkness” is like “Apocalypse Now” in that it is anti-imperialist yet racist. It critiques and even ridicules the imperial venture - mainly because it’s expensive both materially and spiritually - for white people. Or more specifically it imperils good white souls and leads them down the dangerous path of greed, tyranny and irrationality etc. (I guess dark continents will do that to you.)
In other words, it’s all about white people and their incredibly precious and all-important internal struggle writ large, because they are innately fascinating and an avatar for all that is human and interesting.
The fact that Africans are dispossessed and dehumanised by imperialism is incidental, even negligible. Even if Conrad was actually conscious that treating someone else’s land and culture as a colourful backdrop in order to make A Very Important Anti-Imperial Statement is somewhat problematic - in the end he can offer no real literary alternative or solution to dehumanising Africans and stereotyping the continent. In the end whatever his intentions may have been, he replicates the logic of imperialism by turning Africa into little more than a shoddy, exotic platform in order to dramatise white moral angst.
The ins and outs of white moral angst is riveting for some, but I’ve seen it played out in books and films so many times that I find it as interesting as documentaries on Hitler.
The likes of Edward Said and Chinua Achebe identified and articulated what Conrad was either blind to in his own work, or was actually cognisant of but was unable to address or remedy. Frankly, I suspect it was the former.
Anyway, even if this most recent and tiresome imperial romance ("Avatar") had been well-executed, I wouldn’t have cared less. Some tropes really need to be critiqued, subverted, analysed from a different perspective (for once) or skilfully deconstructed. And if that’s not possible than just put the old horse to rest. How often are they going to revisit the same stupid, mouldy, smelly story, all the while pretending that this is something shiny and new?
Seriously not impressed.
Luther: But *Avatar* isn’t a bad film because it’s an imperial romance. It’s a bad film because (list of qualities of the work)
OK then, awesome! I have no more complaints on this topic.
Some people read Conrad that way, but few, if any, did so before McClure and Said criticized the novel from that angle. But even if *Heart of Darkness* is in fact a novel about how white people go to Africa and are blind to the actual existing people and ways of life there, it *still* remains a novel in which Africa signifies nothing more than an empty stage in which white people learn something about themselves.
The nuanced reformulation is much appreciated. I have a belief that any artist qua artist is greater than any critic qua critic, that’s why I objected to the first version. (Treating critics as more important than artists is a sign of cultural decadence which leads to despair. No joke here.) Nobody in Conrad’s time was able to articulate any of these issues openly in public political or social discussions—and yet the artist, Joseph Conrad, wrote a book that ate away at people’s sensibilities for generations and continues to do so. I believe it was so powerful, in part, precisely because of the ambiguity which supports the reading later made explicit by very good critics.
I can think of few culture-clash films right now to begin with.
What do you make of “My Fair Lady”?
Nykinora: Anyway, even if this most recent and tiresome imperial romance ("Avatar") had been well-executed, I wouldn’t have cared less. Some tropes really need to be critiqued, subverted, analysed from a different perspective (for once) or skilfully deconstructed. And if that’s not possible
What about the new need for films about the way technological change is undermining all established forms of life? Films that suggest technology can be used for good or evil, and that small groups of people will need to humanize its application in the face of the blind demands of large corporations, which, nonetheless, are unavoidably here to stay inasmuch as they produce the technology with which we are now symbiotic?
Obviously this is my reading of James Cameron’s films in general.
And one might say that as a result of technology there is one culture now. Everybody with a cell phone today belongs to the “empire”. And everybody needs stories about heroes. Since technology is what brings us all together for good or ill, everybody can or should be able to identify with heroes who struggle with the meaning and consequences of technological change.
I don’t quite know what I think of Avatar. By the time I got around to seeing it—only in 2D—I was familiar with the LIR (late imperial romance) reading. And, yes, it’s there. And I was content to regard Sully’s disability is being thorougly subordinate to the LIR. But I’m no longer sure.
For one thing, the LIR reading is an OTS (off the shelf) reading. You don’t have to think to affix it to the film. That doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. But it’s not a recommendation either. For another thing, it’s a reading that effectively ignores Sully’s disability, and that mirrors a standard social attitude toward disability: ignore it and it’s not there. That’s not so good. Is it really proper simply to treat Sully as a symptom of the larger society of which he is a member? Is it proper to deny him agency, the ability to make decisions about his life?
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking that any literate society is likely to tell stories about alienation from the natural world and a desire to become reunited with it. What’re the full range of such stories? How often do they involve some population that is, by definition, closer to nature? Where does the LIR fit into it? What about the good old pastoral?
And then there is the instability of the text—which is more or less where I entered this entire business of literary study. If the meaning of a text is indeterminate, then, sure, the LIR is one meaning for Avatar. But there are other meanings, other pathes through the patterns in the Jamesian carpet. One simply needs to make an argument. How do we give privilege to one pattern over another?
Laufeysson looks at all the technology on display in this story. Rather than treating it as an elaborate form of costuming of no more consequence than the bush jackets, pith helmets, and elephan guns of a Rider Haggard African adventure, he suggests that we take that technology seriously. We’re going to have to make decisions about such technology—not necessarily any of the tech in the movie, but tech as challenging and foreign to us. Maybe this film is actually serious about that possibility (cf. Spielberg-Kubrick’s A.I.).
Finally, what ultimately matters is what people actually make of the film, what they do with it. We have no way of assessing that, & precious little interest. Some Chinese seem to reading the film as an allegory of the practices of development in contemporary China, where people are kicked out of their existing homes so that new structures can be built on the land. I see no reason to deny them such a reading. How else can Avatar be used?
Laufeysson writes, “Nobody in Conrad’s time was able to articulate any of these issues openly in public political or social discussions.”
That’s patently wrong. There was plenty of overt Western criticism of imperialism pre-dating Conrad’s generation. In the American tradition, we have Emerson, Thoreau, William James, and others.
And Bill, the film deserves an “off the shelf” reading because its plot and characters are ultimately so typical, so patterned on other late imperial romances. And the fact of the handicap does nothing to change this reading, any more than than Adela’s being a woman in turn-of-the-century Anglo-Indian society changes her accusations of rape against Aziz in *A Passage to India*.
Laufeysson writes, “Nobody in Conrad’s time was able to articulate any of these issues openly in public political or social discussions.” That’s patently wrong. There was plenty of overt Western criticism of imperialism
Please, let’s respect one another’s good intentions. Do you really imagine I think that everybody in the 19th century was in favor of imperialism? By “these issues” I meant the Said-McClure formulation of colonialist denial of the “Other” which by now is reflexive to undergraduates.
The 19th-century critiques of imperialism knew it was wrong in terms of what it meant for the conquerors. The native cultures being largely unknown, the victims of imperialism were poor objects of Christian charity. Which was ethically correct. But there was no way Conrad could have said, “hey, we’re treating these people like ciphers and let’s examine what we are missing as a result ...” However, he wrote a chilling book in which the natives indeed were ciphers which was the backdrop to Kurtz’s free-fall.
The 19th-century critique of imperialism was not to my knowledge very far from Jack London’s: “It’s wrong to kill and exploit these people. Also, they are dangerous cannibals who are very very different from us.” No doubt you could dig up a quotation from Kropotkin or something, which reflects a subtler view, and we could argue over whether it was an outlier or not. But my main point is that I want Joseph Conrad to get credit for building the strangeness of treating the natives as cyphers into the emotional effect of his most famous work.
I brought up the film “My Fair Lady” in part because it demonstrates something very interesting about the multivalency of the situations in which all these myths operate. Henry Higgins likes to think of himself as a liberal, which he is, since—despite his upper-class birth—he is a technocrat who believes in merit, and therefore it is clear to him that the class barriers are an inefficiency. (Note again the theme of technology eroding the old problems if not the old prejudices.) But Higgins is also a sexist.
James Cameron deserves if nothing else a lifetime achievement award for, taking his career generally, his astonishingly powerful female characters. One need only compare Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor to an example from Joss Whedon’s generally admired work ... in which a “powerful female character” is someone like River Tam, the psycho superninjabunny.
There are some comments (on “Avatar” and identification)to the following post that are relevant here:
http://www.onfiction.ca/2010/02/fiction-and-human-rights.html
And a Google search of “scottish imperialism” will give you plenty of links to the details: Highland clearance, emigration to the Americas, India, Africa, along with a tendency to see work in the British army as a noble continuation of the martial clan tradition.
Yes, well, doing a little more work than a Google search would inform you that the clearances were not part of “English imperialism” but were largely inflicted by Scottish landlords on Scottish tenants - frequently by clan chiefs on their own clansfolk. (Ronald Mac Donald, for example, who sold his own people as slaves in the West Indies.)
On “Avatar”, here’s a question: to what extent does the same critique apply to “Che”, which is also a film about a privileged white guy who goes to a mysterious jungle and leads the peaceful natives in revolt against the oppressor?
The Scottish Jacobite defeat at Culloden resulted in an essential outlawing of the clan structure, which left Scottish peasants with no legal protection in the period of the clearances. An subordinated nation’s complicity with the imperial center does not make the subordination any less present.
1. Jacobite /= Scottish. There were more Scots on the Government side than there were on the Jacobite side. And there were, of course, English Jacobites as well. The Jacobite rising was not a Scottish revolt against English empire, but the end of a long series of British civil wars.
2. The Clearances were part of a process of expulsion of poor tenants that was happening across Scotland - including the Lowlands, where the clan system did not reach - and England.
Ajay, this pointless debate started when I argued that an outsider can still be a tool in a nation’s power plays. His or her status as an outsider does not mean that s/he cannot oppress others.
You have a problem with my Scottish example. I’d agree with you that common Third World models of colonialism do not fit the situation of what Hechter calls “the Celtic fringe”. This is why sociologists, historians, and political scientists have developed models of internal colonialism, as in the pioneering work of Michael Hechter.
So yeah, we can argue about diction. But regardless, there is ample evidence that the rural Scot of the 18th and 19th century was an outsider of sorts, even as he was employed in the colonizing of India, the Americas, Africa, etc, and that rather than being some coincidence, these two historical situations (outsiderness and foreign colonial escapades) are causally linked.
As far as your numbered points above go, I’d reckon there were more Irish supporters of the status quo than there were Irish rebels in the Easter Uprising. I’ve never seen poll figures, but I’d likewise surmise that at the start of the American Revolution, more Americans probably thought of themselves as subjects of England than as Americans. To number two, I’d just say: of course. That’s why colonialism—or better put, oppression—is part of a general trend of concentrating wealth and power in as few hands as possible.
Regardless, none of this has to do with *Avatar*, which is a crap movie.
No, Luther, this pointless debate started when you decided that “the Scots were victims of English imperialism”. Your attempt to retrospectively have a different debate, in which you start off being right, is noted.
Scots were heavily involved in the British imperial project - yes. The British imperial project was largely an English one - yes (well, Britain was largely England). Poor rural Scots were outsiders, and were badly treated by the British authorities (eg. the Clearances) - yes. Outsiders in general are often heavily involved in imperial projects - no idea, but I’m not going to argue they’re not; it sounds likely. (If you’re an outsider, you’ll have a better chance seeking your fortune elsewhere.)
But none of those are the same as your original claim. You’ve slipped up by arguing “of course. That’s why colonialism—or better put, oppression—is part of a general trend of concentrating wealth and power in as few hands as possible.”
Just because both the Clearances and imperialism happened at the same time, and can be said to represent parts of the same trend, doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing. Things like the Clearances were not part of the imperial project. You’re arguing that “Scots were involved in the Empire; some Scots suffered during the period of the Empire; therefore Scots were victims of English imperialism”, and that just doesn’t hold water.
Ajay, you’re simply wrong. Read the first comment I posted in this thread. You don’t like my example, but you’ve been arguing about my example, and not my point, this entire time. And again, when you engage the work of scholars like Hechter, we can talk about whether or not the clearances were part of the same series of dynamics as imperialism. (Walter Scott seemed to think so, as did John Galt.)