Going Na'vi: Mastery in Avatar

I was saddened to notice the recent passing of Robin Wood, one of the driving forces behind twentieth century film criticism and of CineAction! Robin had been my teacher a few years ago, and during my graduate study we would occasionally meet for lunch. Conversation would inevitably turn to sexuality or identity, and it was through Robin that I truly began to appreciate how all cinema texts are political. Because of the way in which Robin came out of the closet, in a manner that consequently radically changed his life, the politics of gender and identity were ingrained into his worldview and subsequently everything became political. Even his choice of restaurant was political (more often than not in Toronto's gay village, where he chose to make his home), and naturally conversation would turn to film. Robin was a great critic of all films, not so much concerned in whether the film was good or bad but rather invested in reading the film as a political text. And so it is in the spirit of a late lunch with perhaps too much red wine that I find myself thinking of politics and questions of identity in James Cameron's latest visual spectacular, Avatar. Avatar (Cameron, 2009), the first film to surpass the two billion dollar box office record mark, is a film that's popularity and appeal is derived predominantly from what Laura Mulvey described as scopophillic pleasure, or the pleasure in looking. (1) In the article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' Mulvey argues 'The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure.' (2) While Mulvey was discussing the poetics of Hollywood formal style and the Classical Hollywood aesthetic, Cameron's Avatar uses the new 3D technology to further the pleasure in looking, expanding the film's hermetically sealed world further out to mingle with the audience's (false) perspective. But while classical Hollywood uses formal compositions to heighten the aesthetic pleasure of the female form and consequently subjugate the female body as object of male pleasure, so too does Cameron's three dimensional aesthetic spectacularize the female form and relegate it to passive object of beauty and thing to behold. The film takes pains to render in digital code a fully constructed image-space of visual wonder, but as both technology and nature are spoken of as the feminine, she (the pseudo-natural world of 'Pandora' and the pixelated body of the native woman Neytiri) becomes a site of spectacular pleasure. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The film, on both the formal and narrative levels, is about mastery--mastery of technology, and mastery of nature. The film, while exploiting this new technology, tells a story that reaffirms ideologies which have not changed much in the 30 years since Mulvey's article appeared, and is a narrative of white male supremacy which reaffirms and normalizes patriarchal hegemony. While on the surface being a neo-liberal tale of eco warriors battling against corporate interests, when examined at the ideological level, the film in many ways promotes conservative attitudes and values in relation to education, identity and gender. The film revolves around a recently wounded soldier Jake Sully, who is sent to a distant planet named Pandora to pilot an avatar, a human/alien hybrid creature that is designed to help humans infiltrate the population of native Na'vi who live on the planet and whose home is based upon a massive deposit of unobtainium a rich source of energy. Jake's recently deceased twin brother had originally been one of the avatar pilots, and as Jake has similar DNA, he too can 'link' with this particular avatar which had been cloned and therefore genetically matched to his brother's (and subsequently Jake's) DNA. Jake, while paraplegic, must master, in this order: the (alien) body, nature, language, beasts, the woman and the Na'vi people. …

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