Every so often, a movie comes out of Hollywood that breaks new ground, technically, and sends a message that needs to be heard. Some good examples of this are Ghandi (1983), Dances With Wolves (1990), Amistad (1998), Ali (2002), and this year, Avatar.
What is it, and what is it saying?
"Avatar is a 2009 American science fiction epic film written and directed by James Cameron and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez and Stephen Lang. The film is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system.[5] Humans are engaged in mining Pandora's reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na'vi—a race of indigenous humanoids—resist the colonists' expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na'vi and the Pandoran ecosystem. The film's title refers to the genetically engineered bodies used by the film's characters to interact with the Na'vi.
Avatar had been in development since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote an 80-page scriptment for the film.[7] Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but according to Cameron, "technology needed to catch up" with his vision of the film.[8][9] In early 2006, Cameron developed the script, as well as the language[10] and culture of the Na'vi. He said sequels would be possible if Avatar was successful,[11] and in response to the film's success, confirmed that there will be another.[12]
The film was released in traditional 2-D, as well as 3-D and IMAX 3D formats. Avatar is officially budgeted at $237 million;[2] other estimates put the cost at $280–310 million to produce and $150 million for marketing.[13][14][15] The film is being touted as a breakthrough in terms of filmmaking technology, for its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with cameras that were specially designed for the film's production.[16]
Avatar opened on December 18, 2009 to critical acclaim and commercial success. It grossed $27 million on its opening day in the United States and Canada.[17] On its opening weekend, it grossed $77 million in the United States and Canada[18] and $232 million worldwide.[19] Within three weeks of its release, with a worldwide gross of over $1 billion, the film became one of the highest-grossing films of all time worldwide, exceeded only by Cameron's previous film, Titanic."
When your lead author saw it on the big screen a few days ago, I was stunned. Not just from the dazzling 3-D action, stunning scenery and amazing technical effects, but from the overt message it sends. Which is this:
Avatar and the Genocides We Will Not See
Cameron's blockbuster half-tells a story we would all prefer to forget
by George Monbiot
Avatar, James Cameron's blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It's profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It's profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.
But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.
In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced(1). In 1492, some 100m native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th Century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered.
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peacable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives' extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered.
The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly as a result of murder, overwork and starvation. The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women's breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted Indians with their dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, around 95% of the population of South and Central America had been destroyed.
In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of "missions": in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint(2).
While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation's wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe "is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi". During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims' genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt called this event "as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier." The butchery hasn't yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe(3). Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible - Spain, Britain, the US and others - will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.
This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a "revisionist western" in which "the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys."(4) He says it asks the audience "to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency." Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as "just ... an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable"(5).
But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly(6). It reveals, he says, "a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide - that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see". But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.
I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important - and more dangerous - than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies."
Avatar also sends a very strong anti-militaristic message, with strong parallels to the current illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq, which posed no threat to the U.S., or any other country. It was quite interesting when one of the hardened ex-soldiers working for the RDA Corporation, mentions that he had just had seen actions in wars in Venezuela and Nigeria. Two of course very oil-rich nations, which could very well be next on the Imperial radar of the U.S. Especially Venezuela, since it's current freely and fairly elected government has the audacity to use some of it's oil wealth to benefit the poorest people in it, with the aid of a nationalised oil industry.
Of interest also is the plot line whereby the main character, Jake Sully, a former marine working for the RDA corporation, is hired to serve as a controller of one of the genetically created Avatar bodies, used to interact with the indigenous inhabitants of the planet. He then interacts with this culture, which is very much like all the indigenous cultures on Earth, learns to respect, and eventually love it, and a woman in it. Very much like what occurred in Dances With Wolves. Many instances of this have occurred since the Western Hemispheric genocide began 500 years ago, when soldiers and colonists went over to the indigenous peoples, joined their culture, and even fought to remain in it. Because they recognised it as a healthier alternative to the culture from whence they came.
There are some things about Avatar we at A.P.R. found disagreement with. The most important was that this movie was set in the year 2154, with scientific achievements like human hibernation, and near-light speed space travel to adjacent star systems (which still took several years). Yet the attitudes of the soldiers and members of the RDA Corporation were very much like what you would see in conservative military and corporate personnel in today's U.S.A.
It is our contention at A.P.R., that this is impossible. Humanity will not make it to 2154 with any kind of scientific/technical culture, as long as the bulk of people, and politicians, in the U.S. (and other countries) continues with this kind of mindset. To offset this, James Cameron wrote in his screenplay, that the Earth was ruined, and hence resources from other worlds on other star systems were needed. We don't think humanity will escape massive die-offs from global resource depletion/overpopulation, and catastrophic climate change though, unless massive changes occur in the basic outlooks and political/economic systems of the "developed" nations within 20 years, at most. Incorporating the indigenous cultures basic world-view of the sacredness and inter-relatedness of all the parts of the Earth, and its ecosystems.
The ending of the movie, whereby the indigenous Na'vi, with the aid of a few sympathetic humans, are able to fight off and send packing back into space the corporation and soldiers, was outrageously unrealistic. A large starship, bristling with nuclear missiles and lasers would instead have come to the humans aid, and destroyed the Na'vi. Just as all resistance from the indigenous cultures in the Western Hemisphere was met and destroyed by the sheer numbers and destructive weaponry of the Europeans, our ancestors.
Nevertheless, we highly recommend you see this movie. Because it has an important message, and should remind you of how our countries came to be, in North and South America. And to remind you of the cultures that were almost destroyed (and still are being so, in South America, and Africa). Cultures that must be protected, and embraced, if humanity is to have any kind of healthy future on this planet.
GOD'S WILL
The heartbreaking earthquake yesterday in Haiti, which may have killed 100,000 or more people, is indeed a cruel event, to this poor country, beset by so many tragedies, political unrest, and massive poverty, in the last several decades.
But this is not the entire story. Why did a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, which has occurred across many areas of the globe, cause so many casualties, and why is Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? For a good explanation why, we have this:
What You're Not Hearing about Haiti (But Should Be)
by Carl Lindskoog
In the hours following Haiti's devastating earthquake, CNN, the New York Times and other major news sources adopted a common interpretation for the severe destruction: the 7.0 earthquake was so devastating because it struck an urban area that was extremely over-populated and extremely poor. Houses "built on top of each other" and constructed by the poor people themselves made for a fragile city. And the country's many years of underdevelopment and political turmoil made the Haitian government ill-prepared to respond to such a disaster.
True enough. But that's not the whole story. What's missing is any explanation of why there are so many Haitians living in and around Port-au-Prince and why so many of them are forced to survive on so little. Indeed, even when an explanation is ventured, it is often outrageously false such as a former U.S. diplomat's testimony on CNN that Port-au-Prince's overpopulation was due to the fact that Haitians, like most Third World people, know nothing of birth control.
It may startle news-hungry Americans to learn that these conditions the American media correctly attributes to magnifying the impact of this tremendous disaster were largely the product of American policies and an American-led development model.
From 1957-1971 Haitians lived under the dark shadow of "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a brutal dictator who enjoyed U.S. backing because he was seen by Americans as a reliable anti-Communist. After his death, Duvalier's son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" became President-for-life at the age of 19 and he ruled Haiti until he was finally overthrown in 1986. It was in the 1970s and 1980s that Baby Doc and the United States government and business community worked together to put Haiti and Haiti's capitol city on track to become what it was on January 12, 2010.
After the coronation of Baby Doc, American planners inside and outside the U.S. government initiated their plan to transform Haiti into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean." This small, poor country situated conveniently close to the United States was instructed to abandon its agricultural past and develop a robust, export-oriented manufacturing sector. This, Duvalier and his allies were told, was the way toward modernization and economic development.
From the standpoint of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Haiti was the perfect candidate for this neoliberal facelift. The entrenched poverty of the Haitian masses could be used to force them into low-paying jobs sewing baseballs and assembling other products.
But USAID had plans for the countryside too. Not only were Haiti's cities to become exporting bases but so was the countryside, with Haitian agriculture also reshaped along the lines of export-oriented, market-based production. To accomplish this USAID, along with urban industrialists and large landholders, worked to create agro-processing facilities, even while they increased their practice of dumping surplus agricultural products from the U.S. on the Haitian people.
This "aid" from the Americans, along with the structural changes in the countryside predictably forced Haitian peasants who could no longer survive to migrate to the cities, especially Port-au-Prince where the new manufacturing jobs were supposed to be. However, when they got there they found there weren't nearly enough manufacturing jobs go around. The city became more and more crowded. Slum areas expanded. And to meet the housing needs of the displaced peasants, quickly and cheaply constructed housing was put up, sometimes placing houses right "on top of each other."
Before too long, however, American planners and Haitian elites decided that perhaps their development model didn't work so well in Haiti and they abandoned it. The consequences of these American-led changes remain, however.
When on the afternoon and evening of January 12, 2010 Haiti experienced that horrible earthquake and round after round of aftershock the destruction was, no doubt, greatly worsened by the very real over-crowding and poverty of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas. But shocked Americans can do more than shake their heads and, with pity, make a donation. They can confront their own country's responsibility for the conditions in Port-au-Prince that magnified the earthquake's impact, and they can acknowledge America's role in keeping Haiti from achieving meaningful development. To accept the incomplete story of Haiti offered by CNN and the New York Times is to blame Haitians for being the victims of a scheme that was not of their own making. As John Milton wrote, "they who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness."
We encourage everyone to donate funds, supplies, or even aid, if you are able to get there, to help in their search, recovery, and rebuilding efforts.
Finally, one of America's leading right-wing luminaries has put this tragedy in perspective, and offered some unique and incisive commentary on it for our edification: http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/01/13-14
PFAW Condemns Pat Robertson’s Comments on Haiti Earthquake
Religious Right Leader says Haiti “swore a pact to the devil”
WASHINGTON - January 13 - People For the American Way President Michael B. Keegan today condemned a statement made by Religious Right leader Pat Robertson (VIDEO), who said that the nation of Haiti has been cursed ever since it “swore a pact to the Devil.”
In discussing the earthquake, which the UN says has killed thousands of people, Robertson said:
"And you know Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True Story. And so the Devil said "OK, it's a deal." And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island is Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. Uh, they need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God and out of this tragedy. I'm optimistic something good may come."
Michael B. Keegan, president of People For the American Way, issued the following statement:
“Pat Robertson’s comments about the victims of this earthquake are reprehensible. Unfortunately, they fit right in with his history of mean spirited attacks accusing his opponents of causing natural disasters and terrorism. To blame the victims of this disaster for what they’ve been through is appalling. Regrettably, Pat Robertson can’t be written off as an eccentric aberration of the right-wing—he’s still a leading figure in the conservative movement."
“At a time when our attention should be focused on helping the victims of this disaster, Robertson’s comments are beyond the pale.”
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