Avatar

What a brutal movie.

Others will write much better about the construction of the movie, but I want to get down my experience. It was brutal. Not saying that is a bad thing, but I felt bad that my children were watching it, consuming it as entertainment. When I was young, I watched Nazis exectuting villagers on TV. That has haunted me till this day. What will this do to our kids? I can't figure it out. Maybe being haunted is the right thing?

I. Hearts and minds.
If you want to visualize Americas onslaught on Indochina, you might start here.

Besides the clear 'hearts and minds' references, besides the personification of military character and we've got a mission here people, just let us do what you brought us here to do and we'll be back in time for drinks, besides the helicopter gunships shooting incendiaries into a rural population, the massive technology thrown against skin and bone, besides the giant bulldozers ripping away the jungle, besides the pretense that they're the savages, beside the subordination of human values to a lust for resources.

Besides all this, I would focus on one image: a living, burning creature. The local woman, in the midst of what we thought was a complete rout, struck speechless, watching that magnificent horse running wildly away, on fire, burning on fire and running. My heart broke on that one. I could not turn away, but I almost left my seat.

The movie could have ended there. Orwell once said ''If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." Orwell fought the Fascists in Spain. He could not have imagined Viet Nam. The movie could have ended with this horrifying debasement of nature, including human nature, leaving us with an image of what our past projects into the future.

II. Nature and machine

That leopard creature.

The director made us earlier feel the massive power of that beast. He let us be quietly thrilled to see it return, this time aligned with the locals. We, at this point, new what joining those two tails meant. We knew it happened: the humanish local, the overviewer of nature, gets to descend and experience nature directly through the beast, which responded to the mind of its rider. Amoral power linked with a moral mission to preserve something precious.

At the same time, elsewhere, the military man descended into his machine, synched with it, and got to experience the power and the graceful action of such a creation. Amoral power linked with a single-minded drive to dominate, to brush away obstructions.

Each humanish character got to feel the extension of power by synching with what they identified with, what they transcended by having a human mind. They descended into this reality. And they fought. My god, what a fight. I couldn't tell what would happen. An ending, or a false ending? But I wasn't thinking at the time. Earlier, the minions were pulverized gloriously by beasts. Captain America's fleet had been destroyed by nature, his bomb deflected by the hero. Now it was essence against essence. A point was to be made. Nature was ceremoniously murdered. The brutality of the killing of that creature, now an extension of the audiences' hopes for vindication--those knife thrusts. Calmly delivered by man through his machine.

III. Memory of Fire

Beyond all this, there was something else.

When it was clear that the heros would have a final chance to fight the villian, I knew what would happen, everbody did, I'm sure: Good would win. I thought to myself, 'they can't do this to them.' But who was the them?

Near the end of the movie Dances with Wolves, the White hero, John Dunbar, sits in a tent with his adopted Lakota people, discussing their killing of the soldiers taking Dunbar back for trial and execution for betrayal. Dunbar says in the native language, that it was good they killed the white soldiers, he is glad that they did it. But then he tells them that he must leave, for they will never give up looking for him; and he tells the chief that the White men will continue to come in numbers like the stars. Dunbar must leave to protect the village and to tell anyone he can of what is happening. The movie ends with Dunbar and his wife, a White woman raised from childhood by the Lakota, leaving. The text on the screen says the last remaining Lakota turned themselves in at a fort some years later. The results for their resistance: degradation, forced removal, apartheid, alcoholism, near genocide.

But listen: Back in the 80's I worked as a librarian in an activist library on US Policy towards Central America. There, I found the trilogy, Memory of Fire, by the Uruguayan journalist, Eduardo Galeano. It tried to be honest to the conquerors and the conquered in Europe's onslaught against the Americas. He tried to be honest to everyone, especially the resistance and the defeated. Much later, in an essay called The Nobodies, he made a point about conquest and resistence:

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever.

Avatar gave us a tidy ending, albeit with costs. However, the victory was theatrics. It was honest to no one in real history. That the movie brought us here and gave us this--that was brutal.

Galeano goes on in The Nobodies:

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

Avatar stops before the nobodies hit the screen. If this movie would have ended earlier or differently, it could have served as our "Ghost of Christmas yet to come." They're coming back, we know it, in numbers like the stars. What are we going to do?

IV. Coda

I don't like my ending. I don't want to sound so hopeless. I just think the movie should have ended differently. Watch Twelve Monkeys, the end, an endless loop of watching your own future be killed. But that spurs me on to be better; and so does Avatar, I think.

And what are we to do? What does resistance look like now? Are we becoming the nobodies? And think, indigenous spiritualities are infusing White America's hopes for a better world. The populist movements and economics of Latin America are some of the most promising developments for our future. It took hundreds of years and so many nobodies. Maybe we can help cut all that down some. We have to try.

- originally posted in my blog, Readings, February 18, 2010.