AVATAR, Anarchy, Narrative and Perception

POSTED BY: HKCavalier
UPDATED: Sunday, January 17, 2010 21:06
VIEWED: 3543
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Recent discussions of the movie AVATAR around the board and elsewhere have clarified something extremely troubling to me about our discourse. In the arena of politics, everyone has an opinion and everyone can site sources to back those opinions up. We can play the "I'm Right/You're Wrong Game" as long as we can stay awake and keep typing. But with a narrative "text" before us, opinions SHOULD be--at least a LITTLE--less varied, as there is a single record of the "events" upon which to base our interpretations. But with AVATAR I've observed that this is not at all the case. Indeed, people are basing their interpretations of the movie on narratives that they've wholly imported to the experience of the film and imposed upon the existing narrative. What's more, they seem merely to "scan" the existing film for a few key characteristics and once they've isolated these, they can impose their cherished narrative upon the film and, really, stop perceiving, stop taking in any new information.

The Curious Case of Kevin Costner, the Would-be Hero

A lot of people think that Kevin Costner's character in Dances with Wolves became a hero to the Sioux Indians he befriended, but it's not there. It's just not. He was merely ALLOWED to participate in their way of life, JOIN in their struggles, and he contributed what he could. He had to prove himself just to be trusted. His heroic actions? He gave the Sioux tribe a heads-up about the buffalo coming back, allowing the Sioux, I'll be generous, an extra day for their buffalo hunt. They celebrated him as the bearer of good news. He also prolly saved a little boy's life in the hunt, but he was just in the right place at the right time. Nothing extraordinary about his actions, really--not in the Great White Hero Saves the Day sense, at least. But y'know, the community was happy that things worked out for the best and gave him some credit there (wouldn't you?). If you look at the actual events of the story, Dunbar is continually aided by the Sioux, not so much the other way 'round. One example of his genuine aide to the Sioux was when he opened up his fort's arsenal to them, supplying them with guns to fend off an attack--the Heroic Gun Supplier! In the white world from which he came, he was a suicide, but in the Sioux world he finds love and he finds a place among the people. Nevertheless, at the end of the film, it's decided that he and the white woman should leave the tribe because they pose a danger to the others as now known fugitives from the European Nation steamrolling across the continent.

A Hero is a Hero Except When She's Not

So where does this idea that Lt. Dunbar is the Great White Hero come from? Firstly, I think it stems from a conflation of two meanings of the word "hero" and the power of certain narrative devices which, for a lot of people, stand in for meaning. We call the "main" character of a story, its "hero," but his actions and his story may or may not have anything to do with virtue or "heroism." At the same time, in a purely narrative sense, he is set up to be the most "important" character, at least to us; they are his actions, feelings, intentions of which we will be most cognizant; he is set up by the structure of the narrative as the character with which we, as the audience, will most strongly identify.

So, if you are not thinking critically about the character's experiences, merely riding along in the narrative vehicle, as it were, you'll tend to see the "main character" of the story as the "hero" of the story.

Now we come to the second and principal source of the Great White Hero gloss: political correctness. There's a prejudice amongst a lot of progressively minded folk against white character narratives, per se, particularly when that white person's story is set in an overtly multi-cultural context. So even if the main character's actions are ignoble, selfish, confused, a certain progressive "reading" of the story will IMAGINE that OTHER, LESS ENLIGHTENED PEOPLE are seeing the main charac

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Quote:

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:


Anarchy, in its simplest terms, is any social order where the social norms are maintained by some process other than force. To the Anarchist, even to the Libertarian, all laws have the implicit use of force to back them up. Anarchism grows from an understanding that that is not the only narrative going. Mental health is preferable to mental disorder, not because someone says so, but because it is felt/known to be so. People anarchistically do what they believe to be right because that's how they themselves have worked it out. An anarchist social order is built upon mutual respect, but before we can create a society based on mutual respect, we must have self respect. We must find a power greater than the gun to rule us.

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Thanks HK, that was one of the best things I've read this year.
Or last year, for that matter.

I still hate "The Last Samurai," though.


The laughing Chrisisall

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This is why I have taken the long view, HKcav - preferring to intervene before kids are emotionally demolished and stripped of the very self-respect that is vital to developing the mutual respect which Anarchism requires in order to function.

By assaulting the roots of the problem instead of hacking the branches, one can accomplish even the impossible, it just takes longer - now that Pathway has been crushed, and the Sudbury school model has started to take off, we're reversing a trend long set in motion to enable the disastrous status quo.

More to say, but my work schedule isn't cooperative with that idea at the moment...

-F

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Frem, you rock.
Not as much as Chuck or Ash, but, like, for a real dude... awesome.


The laughing Chrisisall

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Well, Chris, here's the bit I didn't have time for last night...


People like to speculate about what mighta happened if someone popped a cap on Hitler before he rose to power, or what have you, but they never turn it around and look at the other, ugly side of that coin.

What if we had murdered the Dali Lama while he was a kid, strangled Ghandi in his crib, sent Mother Theresa to a mental ward and locked her up ?

What then, would the world be like ?

Think about it, Chris, our educational system is entirely dehumanising, and the folk who were MOST empathetic, MOST humane, and thus resistant to it's message, we either medicated them into compliance, or sent them off to the hellcamps, either way we destroyed them and their potential.

Cause we *DID* that shit, and we're paying the grevious cost of it now, by eliminating the most humane amongst us, penalizing and scorning the very idea of empathy, we took all those potential visionaries and just...
Wiped them out, so that they never WOULD exist.

I cannot fully express in words the horror that whole concept embodies, and while it cannot be undone, we can damned sure STOP doing it, and I mean to try, if it's the last thing I do, I *will* help turn that tide or die tryin, and being that I have a whole damn lotta good people ready and able to pick up the torch and run it forward, as I picked it up from those "damn dirty hippies" (that for YOU, Niki, and everyone of that generation who even thinks for a moment that they failed) in my own time, and as such intend to leave a legacy of belief rather than arrogance.


But it's the little things too, all the tiny little HUMAN things we do.
Last night one of our residents, a nice old lady, twisted her foot trying to unload groceries from her car - sure, I coulda said not my job, not my problem, but I humped it over there, got her to her unit and brought her groceries in, along with the quick improvisation of a ziplock bag of snow for an ice pack (and snow we got plenty of!) so it didn't swell up too bad on her - our "mission objective" is to see to the safety and comfort of these people, and trying to unload groceries in the cold, snowy darkness on a twisted ankle ain't safe nor comfortable, to my mind.


Thing is, for whatever reason, to act like that, to be like that, is on whim alone for me, not out of social expectation, or desire for acceptance in a society I can't stand or by people I don't really know, not because of any requirement and often in spite of potential penalties, but for NO OTHER REASON than it damned well pleases me to do it.

Sheriff Bourne: "You were truthful back in town. These are tough times. A man can get a job. He might not look too close at what that job is. But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours... well... then he has a choice."

Mal: "I don't believe he does."

That's always what I identified with about Mal, it's one thing to be decent when the law is on your side, when it meets social expectations, when it's easy and convenient - but to be decent when it's illegal, dangerous, often enough when you are DESPISED, even hunted for it, not out of revenge or malice to anyone, but for no other reason then your own desire to do things that way irrespective of what anyone else happens to think about it...

That is the essence of what makes a person humane, and we're born with that, all but the tiniest fraction of us - who only stay in charge of the rest by driving the efforts of everyone previously "processed" by their social machinery into preserving a disastrous status quo - but that's a large and vulnerable machine, especially to a sideways thinking trickster with a lot of sand up his sleeves, and every kid who slips through the ground down gears is one more potential monkeywrencher, accellerating the process.

And yet, on a longterm view, this *IS* inevitable, you cannot effectively suppress the humanity of an entire culture, not forever, it's like paving over a tree root, the tree is GOING to win - like HKCav here is saying, that social, me

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Don't have much to say on this topic. I see Avatar as a distraction, helpful warnings about corporations and defending our environment being undermined by messages about waiting for something else to repel the bad mojo away. It doesn't matter which element removes or ends the danger, the new convert or nature itself, simply having an outside intercessor resolve the problem doesn't call any of the audience to action against the danger.

Most movies are just opiates for the masses. At best, they're three hours wasted in a dark room that could have been spent thinking, experiencing, or helping.

Serenity is one of the few movies that has made any meaningful impact on me, and that was only after I watched the series, almost three years later.

That said, I've enjoyed this argument, because there's a very clear-cut breakdown here. I'm not for or against either side, I dislike movies in general, and I don't dislike Avatar for any different, new reason, beyond that I think it's unoriginal, poorly written, and anthropocentric.

It's mostly the ladies who are arguing that the hero of Avatar is the "great white hero" trope, and mostly the guys arguing no he ain't. So for wanting to establish an argument about anarchy, and people holding fast to their old battles, this is the oldest one of all. Gender warfare.

The arguments about racism inherent in the "Great WHITE hero" is just an umbrella because women want to identify with the other oppressed not-white-straight-male groups, but as stated what they find most offensive is that the man can do everything and fix everything. Which is not necessarily an invalid complaint. But the movie was written by a man, for men who would identify better with a male hero. I don't fault guys for wanting a male hero any more than I fault women for wanting a female hero.

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HK, my hubby and I talked about the presumed patriarchy of the movie. I'm well aware that white men would approach a culture and say "Take me to your leader", and keep repeating the question until they were taken to a man. And thus contact with western culture bestowed a power to some men: the power of being the conduit to a potentially superior and dangerous other power. But in Avatar, White Man is not just implicitly the hero of the story by being the focus of the narrative, he is overtly the hero because he rode the Last Shadow and became the Toruk Makto, a great leader in a time of sorrow who united all the tribes.

AFA inferior/ superior numbers and Custer's Last Stand: What happened after Custer's Last Stand? Did white men go away and leave the natives in peace? As great a victory as it was, in the end the West was "won" and the natives were herded off to concentration camps... er, reservations. If I were to look for an example of natives winning against imperialism, it would be Vietnam or Afghanistan.

The superior numbers are on Earth's home world, a presumed trillion or so people with advanced technology. Now, the people of Pandora have several huge advantages over the aggressors: the tremendous distance between Earth and Pandora, and the toxicity of the planet to human life, not to mention the hostility of Eywa. If whites had NOT been able to "settle" the Americas- live and breed here- the outcome would have been vastly different: all people and materials would have to be shipped, the distance across the ocean would make the prospect of permanent colonization/ acqusition very dim, and the only reason to even show up would be the presence of a highly treasured resource: gold, or (in this case) unobtainium. In my mind it's something of a tossup as to whether the Corporation would make the same attempt, or simply turn its resources to synthesizing unobtainium in the lab.

Anyway, I realize the narrative constraints imposed by trying to make a popular movie. There is the constraint of having a main character, who has to be someone the audience identifies with. Being an "action" movie, that character is likely male. Once the audience identifies with the character, the character has to undergo a change that the audience will be pulled along with. The counterposing identity has to be sympathetic to the audience as well: It wouldn't do to make them non-humaniform, or ugly, or nasty in any major way.

But I guess I've seen movies and read books that have done this so much better: The Left Hand of Darkness for sexual identity, My Dinner with Andre for reversal of identification, several other books for narrative boldness (one book has a sympathetic group literally disappear a quarter of the way into the story, never to be heard from again). When I read books like the Helliconia series, or Neutron Star ... the authors have dreamed up a setting as different as could possibly be from earth. And yet the natives behave like the stereotypical Benighted African Tribes (two sexes, aggressive and authoritarian patriarchal structure, primitive technology, superstition) and I just want to bang my head against a wall for lack of imagination. I would have liked the movie a whole lot better if they had introduced at least one element that wasn't totally expected.

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Ironic, since imho, the "hero" of the story (Eiwa) is to my perception, female... your mileage may vary.

I will say, y'all remember what I said about the courage to not act - usually in reference to the nameless tank driver in Tiananmen square, right ?

The dropship pilot in line and ready to fire who goes "oh fuck this" and pulls out - deserves a mention for that, she judged her own sides actions from her own perspective and made the tough call.

And remember, she did put her neck on the line as well, despite not having any real connection to the Na'Vi, but rather soley because she judged the actions of her own side to be reprehensible.


Also, some times I think men only THINK they run things... my buddy two star went and added an extra runabout to one of our triangle trades a while ago which cost about twenty percent of the profit and when I finally cornered him and got him to admit why...

Cause his granddaughter wanted a freakin super dollfie and he could get it cheaper and easier if the transaction went through Tokyo.

And then she throws that revoltingly cute smile with both front teeth missing at ME, and my iron will melts like candlewax in a fusion reactor and I wind up buying her enough ice cream to give ME a bellyache.


Ergo I am not entirely sure whether men actually run things, not when a small child or pet can derail even the best of plans on a whim...

Trust me, the best and quickest way to screw up ANY plan is to add children or cats, your plan is hosed on the spot, I guarantee it.

I am grateful enough only one of those two has opposable thumbs, or we'd be in real trouble.

-F

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Once the audience identifies with the character, the character has to undergo a change that the audience will be pulled along with. The counterposing identity has to be sympathetic to the audience as well: It wouldn't do to make them non-humaniform, or ugly, or nasty in any major way.

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I can only assume you haven't seen District 9 yet. :)

See it, you'll get that joke.

Mike

Work is the curse of the Drinking Class.
- Oscar Wilde

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