The film Avatar by James Cameron has been released with a double irony: first, it depicts Americans and, in particular, the US military as wicked villains, bent on exploiting and destroying the peaceful and beautiful world of the Na’vi people at the behest of US Capitalism (having already, naturally, wrecked their own world previously).
The heroes and heroines are the handful of treacherous Americans who betray their side and join the Na’vi. By astonishing coincidence, such as any real science fiction editor would have rocketing into the reject-pile, the mineral which the Americans want (with a name similar to “Uranium” just happened to be buried beneath the Na’vis’ scared Tree of Voices.
While the US Marines are Bad Guys, there are also US scientists and others who change sides because they are more sensitive.
Not a cliché of political correctness is missed – except for the odd fact that the wickedest and most brutalised marines tend to include blacks – don’t ask me why; maybe Cameron thinks the Obama presidency has made black part of the Establishment.
The Na’vi, after futilely (and stupidly) firing arrows at the Americans’ high-tech armour, call in Eywa, the mother-Goddess, to their aid, with whose help they defeat the wicked
Christian soldiers. The Noble Savage and Noble Paganism win again. Those who choose Nature are capable of all things: the technological West is doomed.
As another commentator put it: “The actual moral lesson seen in Avatar is that what the corporate lackeys and their military mercenaries did to the indigenous Na’vi people of the planet of Pandora was an atrocity in the bloodiest, most morally repulsive traditions of 16th century imperialism.
With far more technologically advanced military weaponry, the corporate interests commit mass murder in attacking the Na’vi to impatiently force them to move off the valuable mineral deposits underneath their ancestral homeland.”
He continued: “the movie seeks to apply this plain, straightforward, moral lesson of the story line to other situations where it does not
apply.
“In particular, a couple of references in the movie suggest that what we are witnessing is analogous to the War on Terrorism. The point about ‘16th Century imperialism’ is relevant – nothing like this has existed in the West, and certainly not in America, for
centuries.
“Bad timing for this confused, misleading propaganda line. Because just a few days after the movie’s appearance on theatre screens, America watched a real world morality play on its television screens, as the terrorists we are at war with from Al Qaeda sent one of their trained assassins to commit mass murder in attempting to blow 300 innocent Americans out of the sky on a flight to Detroit.
“The Islamist extremists who have been attacking and murdering Americans for almost two decades now are not in any way analogous to the peaceful Na’vi people subject to attack by the military forces in Avatar.
“These extremists have been at war with their neighbours for almost 1,400 years now, originally conquering an empire to impose their religion by force, and now threatening to do the same today.
In that pursuit, it is they who have committed mass murder of the innocent worldwide, from India, to Indonesia, to Thailand, to Israel, to Spain (which they ruled by force for centuries, lest we forget).”
Avatar, he continued, can be seen as part of a broad propaganda civil war pursued by some death wish-riddled American Liberals against efforts to protect their country, and the West, from the terrorist Jihad.
While this is not spelt out in so many words, it is the unmistakable message of the
film.
The second irony is that just as this anti-American diatribe was being unleased, it was the Americans, and virtually the Americans alone, who were sending aid by the aircraft carrier load to the victims of the Haitian Earthquake while the UN dithered and embezzled, as was the case with the boxing-day Tsunami, and as, it seems, will always be the case.
Guy Crouchback is a published
science fiction author