Jonathan Brun

Review: James Cameron’s Avatar’s Failed Message

James Cameron’s Avatar has two fundamental problems. Most criticism centers around the simple story-line, but beyond simplicity there is something more profoundly wrong. Fundamentally, the film departs too far from reality – I am not referring to the aliens, special effects or foreign planet. The film does two things which do not hold up to inspection. First, it presents a caricature of both the indigenous and the foreigners rather than a nuanced portrait of conflicting interests. Second, it pretends that a small, poorly equiped group of individuals can do head on battle with a superiour force and win – that just does not happen.

Stereotypes

The film portrays the ruthless conqueror, hungry for gold, against a peaceful and harmonious native communities. This idealistic view of native tribes, the noble savage, presented by Rousseau and other enlightenment figures simply does not hold up to inspection. Many studies of indigenous tribes demonstrate very high levels of violence. While resource hungry conquerors have many crimes to account for, they also bring technology, medicine and new ideas.

Through the alien world, Cameron clearly hopes to help us realize the nature of our crimes. Placing people and events in a new setting can sometimes help us see their true nature; however, most Avatar viewers came away with little new morality. Cameron has changed the world, but he keeps pushing a known stereotype. The average person knows modern civilization abuses nature and minorities and the sensitive native is in touch with nature. This is well laid out in films such as Dances with the Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas and others. Emphasizing the most known characteristics of a people simply reinforces the stereotype instead of dispelling it. If we really want people to realize our common societal problems (pollution, health-care, violence..), we need to show them the unexpected in both the dominated and the dominator.

Reality

Avatar fails to enlighten us because its story conflicts with our history. On earth, when the weak fight a vastly superiour force they rarely emerge victorious. When they do, it is not through a head on battle on the conquerors terms – but rather through guerilla tactics (Vietnam), non-violent protest (India, Civil Rights in the US) and this always takes a long, long time. There are examples of David vs Goliath, but perhaps it does not happen like Avatar – take for example, the fight against South African Apartheid.

In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “A Long Walk to Freedom”, he recounts his childhood in a traditional african village with a benevolent ruler. He both confirms and dispels the tribal stereotype through the description of rituals and injustices between people in these villages. Still a young boy, Mandela, leaves the village and enters the oppressor’s system of schools and institutions. After years of admiring the white man for his technological advances and institutions, he eventually realizes the true nature of South Africa. It is a country where the blacks are servants to the whites. Their submission to the whites is not due to any particular inferiority; the whites simply arrived and overwhelmed them militarily, politically and economically.

After his studies, Mandela embarks on a struggle against white rule, and quickly realizes of the odds he is facing. He struggles through both non-violence and violence, ending up in jail for over twenty years. Throughout the struggle, he never compromises his morals, always indulges the enemy in patient explanations of the struggle and eventually shows the world why white rule is bad. The story of Mandela is similar to other freedom fighters – King, Gandhi, and others before them. To defeat a vastly greater opponent, one must be patient, stubborn, and infinitely resourceful.

Avatar denies the challenge of freedom struggles by compressing the Naavi’s struggle in time, emotion, and complexity. Story book endings with the natives rising up, confronting the oppressor and emerging victorious never happen.

Whenever a guerilla force fights against an overwhelming power, it takes two things to succeed – time and effort. Never does a frontal assault work. By portraying this tactic as victorious, Cameron reinforces completely unrealistic expectations that play to the advantage of the dominant force. The dominant power wants you to play be their rules, but the only way to beat them is to change the playbook.

Avatar is an amazing feat of engineering and art, but it fails to convey the message Cameron wishes us to understand: Our insatiable thirst for resources is consuming the world.

Two possible endings would have been far more instructive to the world. In one scenario, the natives are annihilated and we mine the resources, this is a sad, but common reality on earth. In another, the natives embark on a long and treacherous fight using non-violence and violence to show to the human population their own faults – eventually converting them to the cause. Though those endings may not be typical crowd pleasers, perhaps they would have been more instructive.

Review: What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science

What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science

Dispatches from the future is a collection of essays by young scientists on the cutting edge. The topics vary from dark energy, to linguistics to neuroscience. All the essays are interesting and reveal young fields which will surely develop in the next decade. Some of the essays offer little major revelations, they simply explain a phenomenon or area of research.

Of the fifteen essays, two stuck out for the implications with respect to social interactions and behaviours of societies:

* Mirror Neurons and whether our ability to mimic others enables us to be more compassionate and ethical. (A similar article found here)

* How our mother tongue affects the way we think about objects, people, and our place in the universe.

A bunch of these essays (I think) can be found on the amazing website, http://www.edge.org

Buy the book here:

Mandela and Rowling

Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “A Long Walk to Freedom“, is fantastic. Well written by Mandala and his associates, the book lays out the struggle for freedom in South Africa – it is a struggle that spanned 75 years and many sacrifices. Mandela himself is an amazing man by any standard. He grew up in a typical rural south african village where he was pegged as a future advisor to the local king. This privilege allowed him to pursue education and opportunities denied to nearly everyone else. Despite these benefits and apparent easy career path, he fled to Johannesburg to search for work. After struggles and help from various people, Mandela eventually entered the legal field and opened his own practice.

It could have stopped there, he could have comfortably rested on his practice, made a good living by African standards and turn a blind eye to the inequalities of the society around him. Instead, Mandela gave everything up – his practice, his family and his loyalties to fight for equality between whites and blacks. His struggle spanned four decades and culminated in the end of apartheid. His decision to use his privilege and status to help others, without hope for compensation, is what makes him stand apart. The noblest human action may be the personal sacrifice for others without expectation of compensation or recognition.

J.K. Rowling gave an amazing 2008 commencement speech at Harvard, where she says among other things,

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

If anything, that is the crux of Mandela – his ability to fight for others, to give his life for the benefit of his fellow citizens.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Bill Gates’ New Site

Big Bill just launched his new site, pretty nifty, The Gates Notes. It is basically a fancy blog by the richest man in the world, but there are some good bits of info on the site, such as this interview with schoolchildren.

A Fair Country by John Ralston Saul

John Ralston Saul’s new book, a Fair Country, lays out a new framework for thinking about Canada. It makes the strong argument that our country has much more aboriginal spirit in it than we might think. The typical approach of analysing Canadian life along the French-English axis misses the third pillar, aboriginal culture.

With countries like England, France, and Germany undergoing an identity crisis, this book brings a breath or relief and a new way of looking at our own national identity. Saul argues that the european nations are built around monolithic cultures while Canada does not hesitate to embrace its diversity and does not insist on suppressing it as was done with Gaelic culture, Bretagne, Basque, and other European minorities. By adding aboriginal philosophy in our image of Canada, we see how and why we are different from the US and Europe. All Canadians should take a look at his ideas and reflect on their implications for the Canadian spirit.

A globe and mail review pretty much summarizes my feelings about the book, so I will let them speak for me.