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When You Are Always Stuck On The Past: Avatar Sucks And They’re Making 4 More.

I can probably tell you the entire plot of Avatar, give you a plot analysis, without needing to be promoted or refreshed by Wikipedia. I did not see Avatar, James Cameron’s movie about blue-alien-cat-people that was the highest grossing movie ever. I did not spend money on this film. I think I watched it illegally on my shitty TOSHIBA laptop (not sponsored!) in the dark instead of going to sleep on a school night. But it has haunted me for years and I don't know where to put this. Teresa, the dear mlog creator, has on many occasions sent me rouge text messages and Twitter replies saying “Please. Here are the keys to mlog” about this. I feel like I’ve been the last witness to a strange stage play, written by people who don't understand their own symbolism, still sitting in the box seat.

Avatar is about aliens. Blue aliens that are seven feet tall, have dreads and tails, and live in a ‘savage’ society. The humans, needing resources, invade the planet to mine out the fuel that lies beneath the surface of the blue aliens. To do this they require military people to hook into VR full body suits to control fake blue aliens the military has made, that look like the Na’vi, to blend in and collect information about the species and where they may find more resources. Main white dude is a disabled military vet who gets into the VR, falls in love with the Blue Alien Love Interest, and thusly turns against the human corporation doing this whole thing. They win, human boy gets with alien woman, and cut to black. Collect 4 billion, pass go.

The story itself is a mix of the hero’s journey and a colonizer gets the girl while also doing the right thing. Avatar is about colonizing a world and then pulling the ultimate white person fantasy: leading a revolution against the oppressors and you get the glory. The movie, at its core, is a story about centuries of modern colonizing that we are too afraid to personify with actual human beings. We settle with changing these natives to bright odd colors, creating oddities out of them, to separate our history from them. There are several sites dedicated to the Na'vi language, in fact, the original author wrote an entire book about them, and yet indigenous languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. Autocorrect knows exactly where to put the apostrophe in Na’vi, you can learn Dothraki on DuoLingo. As a society we consider fiction oppressed people more compelling than the people we interact with in real life. These movies allow thousands of people to act as anthropologists who save a culture, instead of supporting real life anthropology, and go home without being challenged.

Twentieth Century Fox

When anthropology was first conceived, in the 19th century, it was all second-hand. Actual anthropologists never went to these places, instead conquerors and soldiers returned to be interviewed by them, and they recorded the caricatures of these natives as scientific facts. When anthropologists did head into the field, to live with these people and study them, they were looking for ways to cut these people at the knees using their own culture. Current anthropology has a strict moral code to protect and record cultures instead of destroying them. Within Avatar you are able to play a fantasy that has harped on every history class since elementary school where kids learned that the pilgrims murdered the Indians, that somehow, you, the white well-educated person, could save these people from your own kind. Maybe there was a new spin, you gave food and shelter to people, maybe told them the future events to prevent them, or romanticized becoming a hero to them. You can go home and believe that the Main Character won. That inequality was fixed within this movie. The white people were not the horrible oppressors anymore. While actual real people are affected by actions of your ancestors and political representatives. I do not need a CGI movie that cannot even stand the sight of brown skin to whisk away the past of colonialism.

Over the course of four years we have begun to see a resurgence of protests and civil rights for people of color, especially black people, demanding to be considered actual human beings. Police brutality has risen every single year, directly against black americans, and has caused 1156 deaths in 2017 alone. We do not need to sit in a movie theater to watch the revolution unfold, it is already happening in the streets. White people are ignoring it or goading the attacks against protesters. I locked eyes with a 19 year old kid right before a police officer stomped on his rib cage. I was helping another girl hop over the concrete barrier on the Washington Bridge in NYC. We were protesting the murder of Michael Brown, this was during the winter protests by BLM, and the increase of police brutality against Black people. The police had picked off people who had fallen a second behind, people at the edges, random black kids off the streets who even looked at them. I remember the fear in his eyes. I remember a white woman shouting “protect cops!” I ran with a dozen people in tow to take cover from the police on horseback. A year later, at Halloween I saw a random Na’vi cosplayer running around, holding a solo cup with a large grin, shouting at his friends to catch up, there was a party in a expensive apartment on the lower east side. I looked at my friend and said, “Am I the only person who knows that’s an Avatar costume?”

Siobhan Donaldson is about currently going to school for journalism. The are my best friend, my partner in crime, and the physical embodiment of impulse. They're a fan of making mixed tapes on cassettes and they are currently raising money to buy a new camera. You can follow Siobhan's Twitter at @oddghost.


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