If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?
In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior. This is also the basic story of Dune, where a member of the white royalty flees his posh palace on the planet Dune to become leader of the worm-riding native Fremen (the worm-riding rite of passage has an analog in Avatar, where Jake proves his manhood by riding a giant bird). An interesting tweak on this story can be seen in 1980s flick Enemy Mine, where a white man (Dennis Quaid) and the alien he's been battling (Louis Gossett Jr.) are stranded on a hostile planet together for years. Eventually they become best friends, and when the alien dies, the human raises the alien's child as his own. When humans arrive on the planet and try to enslave the alien child, he lays down his life to rescue it. His loyalties to an alien have become stronger than to his own species.
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
more of this article...
And another review:
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
more of this article...
And another review:
"So let's just get this out there: All of us North Americans are living on land which we stole, from a people whom we've tried to destroy both physically and culturally for hundreds of years. This message still fails to penetrate. It never fails to amaze me the number of people my age (20s) who think, "You know, it's really time for the natives to get there act together." Really? We raped them into the ground for 400 years, and the best we can say for the past 30 is that at least we've begun to leave them alone, and so really, what's taking them so long?
The point is, when people say, "Oh look, it's another native good, white/western bad story" it's because, in this story, WE ARE THE BAD GUYS. THIS IS A RECAPITULATION OF HOW WE FUCKED SHIT UP FOR THE PAST FEW HUNDRED YEARS. THERE IS NO VERSION WHERE WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. We forgive ourselves for living here in the same way that we forgive great figures of the past for being racist, sexist, mass murderers. I love living in our modern society. I do not yearn for any hunter gatherer lifestyle. I love buying fruit during winter. That does not prevent me from recognizing that we broke a lot of fucking eggs to make this omelet so good.
Is Avatar racist? This is a worthwhile question. However, simply stating that it "clearly supports a white messiah myth" is bullshit. This stuff is textbook: White dude is us, identifiable, and through his conversion we come to understand these other people. That he ends up saving them is more a function of him already being the protagonist in the first place. I did not leave the movie with the impression that only whites can save primitives from themselves. Maybe whites need to be there to save them from whites (otherwise we get arrows vs battleships), but that's not the same thing. After all, last time it was us vs them, well we did kind of fuck shit up, didn't we? It's all moot now anyway.
More important to the racism question is whether the archetypes that all the characters were cut from were somehow deeply misleading. I thought a lot about this when I recently saw a documentary about communes of eastern europeans in the 70s who were living in a recreated native culture - tipis and sweat lodges and dances and all. The documentary involved a couple of natives who went to visit them, and though they eventually accepted what they were doing, it was difficult for them.
What I think it came down to was, are these people trying to respect and pay homage to a great culture, or are they just using it as a canvas upon which to project their own fantasies and whims and as an excuse to have sex in the woods? These Europeans were deeply sincere, but it's extremely hard to tell at times.
So, is Avatar racist on this count? It's harder to say. Avatar is indeed not at all about actual natives. It's entirely about us. It is not confronting us with any tangible culture, but only exposes that romanticism that lies within many of us for this more in tune, 'natural existence'. This existence does seem to have been achieved at least to some degree by the natives of north america, and so in personifying this romanticism, our subconscious construction of 'the native' is indeed an ideal target. In the Na'vi, we see little of a real culture, but only phantoms of what we've destroyed both in the world and in ourselves.
Nevertheless, as caricature, I think the Na'vi are extremely effective. I left the movie feeling deeply troubled by the blood on my hands, a consciousness for the lost cultures of this world, and a desire to more strongly respect nature. if I read too much into it, sue me. Like Wall-e, I think Avatar was successful at communicating a message of extreme importance. That so many people saw these movies made me happy through the hope that these messages were heard.