James Cameron's "Avatar" is one of the most spectacular movies ever made--not just for its breathtaking visual effects and its capacity to evoke and draw us into a new world, but also for its powerful countercultural storyline. Here are intertextual riffs on "Apocalypse Now," "The Matrix," "Little Big Man," "Dancing with Wolves," and Disney's "Pocahontas" (and here it's best that I stop counting) . . . how many movies have we seen that present the protagonist as an "enemy of [his] race"?
On second thought: we are invited under the digitalized skin of a blue-hued hero who so clearly is meant to evoke the red-skinned nations destroyed by American imperialism. How telling that the movie appears the same month that the federal government settles a decade-plus lawsuit brought by the first nations of this continent demanding that the U.S. live up to its treaty obligations. The settlement--achieved after the government, drawing on its inexhaustible resources, simply wore down the plaintiffs--offers about six cents on the dollar for land expropriated by the U.S. under the usual pledges of good faith, etc., etc.
Cameron's movie isn't the first manifestation of a powerful rule of imperial culture: the conquerors are eager to romanticize the conquered the moment their legitimate claims have been silenced by force or coercion.
On second thought: we are invited under the digitalized skin of a blue-hued hero who so clearly is meant to evoke the red-skinned nations destroyed by American imperialism. How telling that the movie appears the same month that the federal government settles a decade-plus lawsuit brought by the first nations of this continent demanding that the U.S. live up to its treaty obligations. The settlement--achieved after the government, drawing on its inexhaustible resources, simply wore down the plaintiffs--offers about six cents on the dollar for land expropriated by the U.S. under the usual pledges of good faith, etc., etc.
Cameron's movie isn't the first manifestation of a powerful rule of imperial culture: the conquerors are eager to romanticize the conquered the moment their legitimate claims have been silenced by force or coercion.
