AVATAR: James Cameron’s Insurgency

Is James Cameron’s new movie Avatar sympathetic to the Taliban? If it is, will anyone over here care? Am I insane? Here’s why I ask.

Once, long ago, watching the third movie in the original Star Wars trilogy Return Of The Jedi in Madras, India, I began to understand something about the nature of the Hollywood blockbuster. Our biggest movies, as they travel around the world, change their meanings as quickly and efficiently as travelers change their clothes. What may seem empty-headed thrill-seeking in Westwood turns out to be revolutionary incitement in South Asia.

The year before, I’d seen Return Of The Jedi back in the United States with my college buddies, and we’d all despised it as a letdown from the high point of the second in the series; a million fanboys were born into a world of bitterness and disappointment on the day the film opened. In particular, we hated the chittering tribal furballs known as Ewoks. Ewoks symbolized everything that had been compromised by money and fame in the Star Wars trilogy.

In India, I had a shocking revelation. Ewoks weren’t plush toys. They were guerillas.

The Madras screening was unforgettable. There had been a riot outside the theater as people tried to get in, and police had put down the commotion with lathi sticks, beating the unruly around the legs. Once inside, men sat in one section, women in another, a gathering of dark-skinned, mostly Hindu Tamils thronging to see Hollywood’s latest amusement.

The auditorium was huge, the ceiling fans loud, the seats rickety. I sat on the front row and peered back at the crowd, wondering what they would make of the movie. It was the late Cold War, just a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, and Star Wars, as a concept, didn’t just mean George Lucas. It also meant a missile shield that had become a worldwide controversy.

The curtain came up, and I was plunged instantly back into the final battle between Darth Vader and the rebel alliance. For the first hour, there were no surprises. Then something happened in the audience. In the forest battle with the Ewoks, as the vast machinery of imperial warfare began to blow away the plus-size guinea pigs, people around me began to get restive. It was suddenly clear, as it hadn’t been until that moment, that my fellow audience members didn’t identify so much with the white-skinned human characters. Their sympathies lay with the natives, who took on the high-tech Storm Troopers with sticks, stones and ropes and won.

In other words, Hollywood had created a product with high technology that turned high technology into the emblem of evil and made what had seemed an ancillary product–the Ewoks–into an insurgent of the developing world. The Ewoks were the Viet Cong. They were the Assamese Tigers. They were Shining Path. Each time a piece of military hardware collapsed, the emotions in the Madras crowd intensified. The cheers turned into a single roar. Applause thundered. When the Death Star exploded, there was an orgasm of delight that felt distinctly political.

Will Avatar excite similar feelings in worldwide audiences today? I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the trailers struck me as a fascinating display of all-American conflictedness. Here we are, in the midst of the longest war in American history, our troops with their high-tech gear involved in a war against guerillas whose teachings come from the Tenth Century, whose greatest weapon is landscape, and one of our most success popular entertainers makes a movie in which a high-tech soldier falls in love with a native, defects to the other side and leads a war against his own people.

Is this a recruiting tool for the Taliban or what?

I’m not attempting to denounce Cameron here. I’m merely suggesting one reason why our country and our culture has always defied and disappointed expectations, and why both will continue to do so. Our movies, our music, our politics, and our religion are never on the same page. What our presidents say is often over-ruled by what our rappers rhyme. Our foreign policy is often undermined by what our movies promote and what our pastors preach. Our national sense of self is often belied by what our governments do.

This is true of all countries, surely, but it seems especially the case with America in the current era, as it swings from being the nation of George Bush to that of Barack Obama. Has there ever been such an extreme shift from one identity to the other? And yet as we swing, we seem partly unconscious in the act, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to go overnight from being the reviled, cluster-bombing hyper-power to the Nobel-prize-winning harbinger of peace. Know thyself, wrote an ancient Greek.

Do we know ourselves at all?

When the movie opens on December 18, my Purple State colleague Craig Detweiler assures us in his latest post, audiences will flock. He saw thirty minutes of the movie and was blown away. I recently saw the new trailer and had an extremely positive reaction. Cameron appears to have made another movie like Titanic, a grand, old-school spectacle that eschews deconstruction and creates a new mythology.

His lank, blue creatures are called the Na’vi, a new and improved version of the Ewoks. They’re not cuddly, but they live in a jungle and fight with the equivalent of sticks and stones. The underdog story is as old as David and Goliath, of course, but it strikes me having a special significance in the era of our imperial decline, as we try to get out of two wars and struggle through the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Here’s my hunch. Cameron may have made a movie that Taliban guerillas and their sympathizers in the Muslim world can enjoy, but chances are its provenance will make it a hard sell in the world of the madrassahs. Where Avatar will work best,  tapping into a very deep root, is the developed world, where popular disenchantment with government, with political parties, with the routine of parliamentary democracy is spreading.

In the trailer, the human who defects to the Na’vi looks like an avatar for people  sick of the abuse of power, money and privilege. The bad guys smell like the Wall Street bail-out boys. It would be just like Cameron, after an 11-year silence, to return with a two-and-half-hour ass-kicking of the kind of money that probably helped to finance this $500 million juggernaut of a flick. Biting the hand that feeds is as American as apple pie, and just as delicious.