The latest Indian film

Being Avatar:

Annalee Newitz writes that “[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate,” but it isn’t: the film is racist.  Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists).  Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material.  This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it’s that too.

The rest.

What I’m finding most interesting about the movie — at least as I read the reviews; I haven’t seen it, and probably won’t — is the way it makes literal one of the main tropes of Indian movies and novels written by whites stretching all the way back to James Fenimore Cooper (and before him to the likes of Puritan Indian killer, Benjamin Church): the man who knows Indians. The man who knows Indians maintains all the racial gifts — to use one of Cooper’s favorite terms — of his own white people, while mastering those of the Indian as well, becoming a sort of racial superwarrior in the process.

My favorite example comes in the form of John J. Rambo. What makes him such a badass? Well, he’s half German and half Cherokee, which, as his commanding officer tells him, is “one hell of a combination.” Which is also, at least according to Acephalous and other reviews, what Avatar is all about: “The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens.”

Meaning all the CGI advancement in the world can’t create new stories, nor even find interesting new ways to interrogate old ones. If anything, by making the trope literal and removing it to another planet, the only thing Cameron has done is flatten it and divest it of all the interesting context.