Avatar: Cinema of Liberal American Guilt

Maidul Islam*

Films like other performative cultural forms can speak the language of its own times, in which they have been
created and situated. As a visual reflection of society in which it is contextualized, it can speak both covertly
and overtly about the past and present world, and albeit can articulate politics and reflect upon philosophy as
well. James Cameron’s Avatar, a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster is not an exception in this regard. The
film is set in the future year of 2154 and in this regard can be called as a speculative science fiction movie.

A couple of years back, Cameron in an interview pointed out that his film’s title was inspired from the name
suggested for “incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology
in the future is capable of injecting a human’s intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. It’s not an avatar in the
sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It’s actually a physical body. The lead character, Jake, who is played by Sam
Worthington, has his human existence and his avatar existence… Avatar is an adventure about how we as humans deal with nature.”1

In another interview, Cameron himself has acknowledged that it is a film about both ‘imperialism’ and
‘biodiversity’: “So certainly it is about imperialism in the sense that the way human history has always worked is that people with
more military or technological might tend to supplant or destroy people who are weaker, usually for their resources…We’re in a
century right now in which we’re going to start fighting more and more over less and less. The population ain’t slowin’ down, oil will
be depleted—we don’t have a great Plan B for energy in this country right now, notwithstanding Obama’s attempts to get people to
focus on alternative energy. We’ve had eight years of the oil lobbyists running the country. So there’s a conscience within the film,
but it’s not boldly stated. It’s kind of there if you want it to be there; it’s not there if you don’t want it to be there. It can be as classic a
story of fighting back against cruel might as ‘Star Wars.’ You can take it back to the origins of America in a fight of rebels against an
imperial dominating force. You can interpret it many, many different ways. The bad guys could be America in this movie, or the good
guys could be America in this movie…Depending on your perspective.”2

Since, Cameron himself is telling to read it in different ways and gives us scope for further reinterpretation and
freedom of the reader, this article would try to read the film in varied ways, but particularly from a political
theory perspective combined with a psychoanalytical treatment of the film.

Politics of Dichotomy, Antagonism and Agonism

Hollywood Science fiction films often portray the Alien as something threatening to human existence.
James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is a radical break from this trend—a paradigmatic shift from the 20th Century
Fox distributed Alien series comprising of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), David
Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1997). In critiquing Cameron’s Aliens,
Stephen Mulhall observes: “Aliens is a generic hybrid: it fuses the logic and conventions of the horror film with that of the war
movie, and Cameron has more than once acknowledged that he conceived the Marine mission to LV 426 as a study of the Vietnam
War—in which, on his analysis, a high-tech army confident of victory over a supposedly more primitive civilization found itself mired
in a humiliating series of defeats that added up to an unwinnable war. To be sure, this analysis allows Cameron to criticize certain
aspects of American culture—its adoration of the technological, its ignorance of alien cultures, its overweening arrogance. At the
same time, however, the generic background of his film, together with its specific inheritance of the alien narrative universe, ensures
that the structure of his criticism works only placing the Vietnamese in the position of absolute, and absolutely monstrous, aliens; and
it rewrites the conflict it claims to analyse by allowing the Marines to win the war by destroying the planet in a nuclear explosion. It
thereby supports the vision of American political hubris and xenophobia that it claims to criticize.”3
Cameron’s first film, The Terminator (1984) also in the science fiction genre “concerns a threat posed to
the future of the human race by the unintended evolution of a species of machines which respond to a threat to
their own survival from their creators (who try to unplug SkyNet, the self-aware strategic defence computer
who ‘fathers’ this species) by trying to annihilate them—first by nuclear war, then by genocide.” 4 Cameron’s
Aliens (1986), a sequel of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) portrays how the human race is now threatened not only
by a single Alien, but by a species of Aliens and hence the emphasis on the ‘plural form of the film title.’ 5 In
The Abyss (1989) set towards the end of cold war, Cameron portrays two enemies of US navy—the Soviets and
underwater creatures having non-terrestrial intelligence (NTI). In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), a sequel
of The Terminator, Cameron continues the story of his 1984 film to show how the female protagonist in the film
deals with the threat posed from the machines of the future. In True Lies (1994), in the absence of the Soviet
enemy and a little change from the science fiction genre to an action-comedy film, James Cameron finds a new
enemy in the ‘terrorist’ who threatens the security of United States with a nuclear weapon. In Titanic (1997),
Cameron showed the great tragedy of a gigantic ship and its fellow passengers that got sunk and how social
classes played an important role between life and death in such a moment of human crisis. Now, it is clear that
all of Cameron’s films portrayed a kind of antagonism between two entities. In the first five films of Cameron’s
career, it is always the American’s who are threatened from an external enemy, either from aliens or machines
or terrorists that has an independent existence of its own and poses a great threat to the life of human race
represented by the Americans. We can call this a sense of big power insecurity, a kind of paranoia reflecting the
dual symptoms of self-obsession and mistrust with the ‘other’ that the political establishment of mighty global
powers often have. This insecurity is a feature of any empire precisely because it is aware of the historic wrongs
and injustices that it has been committing on ‘other’ people in trying to feed its own population. So, the films of
James Cameron before the making of Titanic was reflective about the self-obsession of American ‘self’ and at
the same time an insecurity of American ‘self’ culminated into mistrust with the ‘other’. Titanic however,
represented the change of liberal American mind from mistrust with the ‘other’ to the ‘guilt’ for the ‘other’ from
a class angle. The social tensions between rich and poor representing a class antagonism in the background of
the film Titanic reflected the guilt for the white poor population in America from a relatively middle class
morality. But Titanic did not address the question of other injustices apart from the class one like racism and
imperialism that Avatar seeks to explore. In Avatar, Cameron also corrects his mistaken approach about aliens
in Aliens as previously pointed out by Mulhall.
Avatar is a film about aliens but it also treats humans as aliens. In this regard, it is scripted from the
perspectives of both humans and Na’vi—the extra-terrestrial blue monkey like creatures in a different planet
called Pandora. At the end of the film, there is an interesting dialogue: ‘the Aliens (humans) are going back to
their dying world.’ For the Na’vi, it is the humans who are aliens, while for the humans, the Na’vis are aliens
and these relativity of designating each other as aliens can be witnessed in the film’s many dialogues as well. In
this respect, it should be borne in mind that Cameron’s portrayal of the American marines and corporate giants
as the representative of human race is interesting. Since America is a superpower and its monopoly control over
world population via its imperialist hegemony and technological superiority is unparallel, the posing of white
Americans as the representative of human race was aptly strategic when it would face defeat in the hands of
Na’vi—whom the Americans think as a backward/savage/hunter gatherer/technologically inferior race. The
Americans are portrayed as a civilized race as opposed to the savage na’vi. Thus Americans become a
synecdoche of human master and na’vi becomes the same for inhuman servant/savage. The civilized can wipe
out an entire habitat with a lethal weapon of huge explosives by just pressing one button at his fingertip but
cannot respect the different culture and norms of the savage na’vi. Therefore, it is not the savage who is a
barbaric as the civilized wants to believe, but the civilized can equally or even become more barbaric than the
savage. This critical assessment of savage/civilized dichotomy can be also seen in the dialogues of Satyajit
Ray’s Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991). As Walter Benjamin proclaims, ‘there is no document of civilization
which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’6 The film in this regard is also a message to
acknowledge ‘difference’ and respect alternate ways of life. On that count, the film is trying to push an anti-
Orientalist politics against the Orientalist approach of several mainstream Hollywood movies. It tries to break
away from the image of white colonial stereotyping of the ‘other’ in Saidian terms. 7 The question of
savage/civilized dichotomy this question of ‘self’ and ‘other’, mine and yours, this whole question of
superiority complex of ‘power’ of American technology, this paranoid white colonial self marked by self-
obsession and mistrust with the ‘other’, this master’s consciousness of Americans and its forgetfulness about the
servant (the na’vi) in Nietzschean terms is very well represented in the film. As we can learn from Nietzsche
that the master always thinks that he is good and his morality and goodness is defined in terms of what he is or
what his qualities are.8 Therefore, the master only sees himself in the mirror and thinks only his values (the
master’s morality) as ‘good’ while servant is equated with concepts and terms like ‘low’, ‘plebian’, ‘vulgar’,
‘bad’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘evil’. Since the master has the monopoly right to give names to what it thinks ‘good’ or
‘bad’, it should be mentioned in the context of our discussion on the film that the savage does not know that
(s)he is a savage, rather the civilized master gives him/her the name ‘savage’ while the savage/servant is
unaware of it. Now, while the master is immersed into his ‘goodness’, he actually forgets the ‘bad’ and in turn
forgets the slave/servant. To put it simply, the master is not at all bothered about the servant precisely because
of its superiority complex. This forgetting of the servant on the part of master only makes him unaware of the
world of servant/savage. His ignorance about the servant/savage follows from his forgetfulness of what he
thinks to be bad and therefore, master’s ignorance is lack of consciousness and underestimation of the
servant/savage. This underestimation of the servant/savage by the white master eventually turns out to be a
sudden encounter with resistance from the savage/servant with a vengeance. In this respect, the film portrays an
essential politics of antagonism which is rooted in the very structures of an unequal and differentiated world
(dis)order culminating into a conflict between master/civilized and servant/savage in Nietzschean terms or
between ‘power bloc’ and ‘plebs’ in Laclauian terms.9
However, this antagonism between American power and na’vis are not transformed into agonism via a
democratic engagement. Here it should be borne in mind that while antagonism is a friend/foe relation which is
‘the limit of all objectivity’10 and a ‘struggle between enemies, agonism is struggle between adversaries.’11 As
Chantal Mouffe points out that while:
“antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a
we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless
recognize the legitimacy of their opponents. They are ‘adversaries’ not enemies. This means that, while in conflict, they see
themselves as belonging to the same political association, as sharing a common symbolic space within which conflict takes place. We
could say that the task of democracy is to transform antagonism into agonism.”12
The relationship between the American forces and na’vis as depicted in the film is antagonistic and not
agonistic as the American power does not recognize the legitimacy of its opponent na’vi. In fact, the American
power was very much dismissive about the na’vi, as if na’vi’s power does not exist and as if the na’vi is living
on the mercy of American might since it believes that it can destroy the entire na’vi habitat within minutes.
Now, in this context of American master’s dismissive attitude towards the servant na’vi and its unawareness of
the servant’s world creates conditions of possibilities of successful vehement resistance by the servant against
the master towards victory. Therefore, before we see the final battle of American marine’s attack to the na’vi
habitat, the film’s male protagonist Jake Sully (Samuel Worthington), as an avatar tells his comrade-in-arms
(na’vi fighters) that ‘they (American marines) don’t know our land and their systems are not going to work
here.’
Avatar: Reflecting a Totemic Society
It was interesting to notice how the Pandora and the na’vi community were similar to Freud’s
description of the primitive totemic society. According to Freud the primitive society was guided by a system of
‘totemism’ that filled up the lack of religious and social institutions and the primitive tribes were divided into
several clans ‘each of which is named after its totem.’13
To Freud, as a rule, a totem is “an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a
plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem
is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous
to others, recognizes and spares its own children. Conversely, the clansmen are under a sacred obligation (subject to automatic
sanctions) not to kill or destroy their totem and to avoid eating its flesh (or deriving benefit from it in other ways). The totem is not
attached to one particular place. The clansmen are distributed in different localities and live peacefully side by side with members of
other totem clans.”14
 The film shows that the Na’vi clan Omaticaya lives in harmony with nature, worshiping a mother
goddess called Eywa. The na’vi clan has three important totem plants: Hometree, the sacred Tree of
Souls and Tree of Voices, the latter being destroyed by a bulldozer during the human inavsion. The Na’vi
stays with other neighbouring totem clans. In the film, we also see the skeleton of a totem animal who was
the common ancestor of this na’vi clan. Jake tames a Toruk, a powerful flying beast that only five Na’vi
have ever tamed, which only gives him a license to be the clan leader of Omaticayas. Jake prays to Eywa,
via neural connection to the Tree of Souls, to intercede on behalf of the Na’vi in the coming battle, which
is the practice of Totemism since as per Freud the totem is the ‘guardian spirit and helper’ of the clan.
The Na’vi clan Omaticaya has a spiritual leader in Mo’at (C.C.H. Pounder), mother of film’s female
protagonist Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who got attracted to Jake because of his bravery. The na’vi has a clan leader
in Eytucan (Wes Studi) and an heir to the chieftainship of the tribe in Tsu’tey (Laz Alonso). All these simply
reflect upon a totemic society which was close to the version given by Freud. But is the film offering a solution
in championing an exotic primitive way of community life in the midst of modern and postmodern crisis of our
present world? My subjective reading is that the film is actually trying to expose the inhumanity of
(post)modern conditions15 of capitalist venture and how science and technology can be used to serve the
interests of capitalism even by imposing violence on the ‘non-capital other’. Thus, it seeks to locate the humane
in the ‘non-capital other’ by being completely disgruntled with the ravagery and savagery of (post)modern
capitalist man. But a different kind of postmodern celebration of the ‘other’ and ‘difference’ can be also seen in
the film, which is only instructive to the modern man with a message: let us not impose ‘our’ way of life to
someone who is ‘different’. Let us acknowledge the ‘other’ by recognising the ‘other’ way of life. Let us take a
lesson from our past mistakes of authoritarian imposition from above to a population who are unwilling to
identify with our lifestyle and our sense of modernity, progress and development.
Critique of colonialism, post-colonialism and ‘war on terror’
The film shows how humans want to extract a precious mineral called unobtanium by a mining
operation in different planet called Pandora, while the Na’vi—a race of indigenous humanoids and one of
several inhabitants in Pandora successfully resist this colonialism that posed a threat to the existence of Na’vi
and Pandora’s ecosystem. This mining operation in ‘other place’ with a precious ‘mineral’—a metaphor of raw
material and ‘native indigenous population’—a metaphor of labour reminds us about European colonialism in
the past and takes the question of contemporary American neocolonialism in search of oil in Iraq or corporate
plunder of jal, jangal, zameen (water, forest, land) in India and African continent to the forefront. This colonial
and neocolonial plunder also leads to the post-colonial question of displacement of indigenous population due
to dominance of corporate led neoliberal model of development characterized with ‘accumulation by
dispossession’16 and ‘accumulation by encroachment.’17
The film shows that Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), head of the Avatar Program has been
working among the na’vis to make the indigenous population learn English, so that the Americans can
communicate and negotiate with them with a hope to convince peacefully for a resettlement. In this way, the
film at the very onset describes the age old colonial policy of educating the indigenous to reap benefits out of
the entire process of colonial education to the colonized. Thus, colonial education as always has a motive to
serve its own self-interests and not a kind of charity to the indigenous. It invests on educating the indigenous
with a hope that the indigenous would serve the purpose of colonialism after getting the colonial education with
the emergence of a new class of brown/black orientalists.18 These black/brown orientalists would become native
informants to the colonizer, collaborate with the colonizer and would carry forward the agenda of colonialism.
By contrast, the na’vi community Omaticaya, which hates the human ‘outsider’ is more inclusive by making the
human na’vi (Jake) learn the tactics of savage warfare to prove that he can be a loyal and legitimate part of the
clan, although the na’vi is skeptical about this process of conversion, which we can see in the doubts of Tsu’tey
towards Jake. When Jake asks Neyetri to make him learn the na’vi way of life, she says that ‘we cannot fill up
something which is already full’. This statement is extremely important as it connotes several meanings. One is
that the na’vi simply does not want to make its enemy learn about their ways, for she is doubtful whether the
enemy would take advantage of this knowledge in decimating the na’vis. Secondly, it also implies in an ironical
manner that since humans are so full of them and think so high about their own capabilities that they don’t look
upon others to know more. Thirdly, this human self obsession of being ‘full of themselves’ also makes them
‘fool of themselves’ because the idea of full knowledge as claimed by humans is nothing but foolishness
because knowledge is infinite.
The na’vi is satisfied with its own world. It does not go to capture the world of humans. The humans are
more hungry people than na’vi—hungry for power, money and glory and that is why they have come to capture
the world of na’vi. On the other hand, the na’vi has no other choice but to only defend their land from this
American aggression. When Jake was arrested by the na’vi leader Tsu’tey, the Omaticaya’s clan leader Eytucan
–Neytiri’s father and Mo’at’s mate says that ‘we need such a human warrior’. This is a clear example of a
strategy of survival by either decimating/erasing or resisting the ‘other’ by absorbing the knowledge and
technology of the ‘other’. The na’vi knows that they are threatened by human (read American) aggression and
thus it wants to use the knowledge and skill of its enemy to resist the enemy. This is the precise limit of
colonialism. The colonizer comes to the territory of the colonized, but at the same time, the colonized is also
conscious/aware of the motive of the colonizer and hence tries to learn from its enemy in order to defend its
own territory.
The film shows that a mining operation is jointly carried out by an alliance of American corporate giant
—the metonym of ‘capital’ with US marines—the metonym of ‘state’. This connivance between state and
capital is currently witnessed in the case of contemporary post-colonial accumulation as well, where huge tracts
of land and mining operation is facilitated by the state for the interests of capital. In line with the classic
Marxist-Leninist formulation, the film in fact shows how the state is subservient to capital’s interests while
managing its affairs, giving security and evicting a population. The film also shows that the corporates were
initially willing to offer money and build roads (infrastructure) to the indigenous instead of forcefully evicting
them. But the corporate gets perplexed when it realizes that the na’vi do not want any compensation or
resettlement and will never abandon Hometree under which huge deposits of precious mineral unobtanium is
laid. The corporate becomes surprised to see that the na’vi does not want to relocate but just want to protect its
environment and habitat. In other words, the na’vi is happy with its own ways of life and just wants to protect
his land from the external aggressors. We can describe this na’vi life as a life of Lacanian jouissance,19 which
connotes both ‘enjoyment’ and ‘suffering’. This jouissance meaning ‘that excitement whether correlated with a
conscious feeling of pleasure or pain.’20 The na’vi enjoys his life with close association with nature, and a life
with strong sense of community feeling, bond and interdependence but carries the pain and hardship of a
hunter-gatherer life. However, in an overall analysis, the na’vi is happy with his life and does not want to reject
this lifestyle, rather it would take the pain/suffering to protect its neighbourhoods. This is the moment when
capital becomes hostile and takes the path of coercion and forceful eviction for it cannot understand the
language of the protestors, who want to protect their land. As capital thinks itself as the ‘master’ and is self-
obsessed, it cannot think beyond its own interests, say the interests of those, which it describes as ‘savage’ or
‘servant’. It cannot understand why a population is just happy with their own existence of primitivity and
aboriginality and why they are rejecting the ‘rationale’ mindset of the capital. It is this inability to come to terms
with ‘Other’s’ feelings, beliefs, opinions, culture and existence that capital commits some irrational acts like
applying force, coercion or authoritarian imposition of its project from above to a set of population, which does
not want the so called civilization of capital. To be precise, capital would hinder the jouissance of its ‘other’.
Since, capital always thinks about itself as the ‘greatest power’, it has an inbuilt narcissism: ‘how come
someone challenges me? How come someone resists me? How come someone disagrees/differs with me?’
The entire mining operation in Pandora can be also seen as a metaphor of ‘neoliberal model of
development’ that we are currently witnessing in the world around us and is guided by IMF-World Bank
prescriptions of ‘orientalist mode of development’ with subtle racism and an underpinning of a ‘civilisational
project’ where the master-servant relationship is enforced by an urbocentric 21 cum capitalocentric22 model of
development by displacing/dislocating the rural/forest hinterland either by coercion or ‘resettlement’ of the
indigenous inhabitants.23 Before becoming the avatar, when Jake asks that why are we (the humans) are
negotiating with na’vi and rather should use force, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the corporate
administrator tells Jake—‘Look we can’t kill the indigenous people as it would be politically incorrect besides
giving a bad press and bad name.’ The corporate boss is however bewildered by the fact that even if he is
interested to offer the na’vi—money, roads and schools they still are not willing to go elsewhere and seems to
resist. This is the precise language of the postcolonial accumulation of capital. It speaks the language of
‘compensation and resettlement’ and it speaks the language of maximum possible ‘consent’ of the affected
people before ‘coercion’. This language of post-colonial accumulation of capital can be seen in the case of
creating Special Economic Zones and big mining and industrial projects in India and parts of Africa by taking
land from ‘indigenous peasant population’. Here, the logic of capital speaks in the language of transaction and
business rather than explicit forced displacement. Here, the capital says: ‘look we are just and fair as we are
offering money and compensation and not forcefully evicting you’. In this respect, it is technically different
from classic Marxian primitive accumulation of capital since in the case of compensatory transaction, ‘primitive
accumulation’ is not happening “when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of
subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labor market. The expropriation of the
agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil,”24 is in fact missing due to this element of
transaction/business/exchange between the land owner (indigenous inhabitants) and the land buyer (corporate
capital). Thus, we can say this phenomena specifically related to post-colonialism, also as an (ab)original
accumulation of capital by replacing Marx’s use of the term ‘primitive’ with ‘(ab)original’. Primitive
accumulation takes place ‘outside’ the production relations where transaction is missing with a form of
coercion, whereas, in (ab)original accumulation of capital, a ‘subtle coercion’ can be located within or inside the
production relations in the name of ‘compensation package’ in some cases and low prices of land transactions in
others. In (ab)original accumulation of capital, both ‘primitive’ and ‘original’ components are there in the form
of ‘subtle coercion’ inside production relations and state intervention, where the state itself is negotiating on
both sides. In short, (ab)original accumulation of capital is a form of coercive accumulation that takes place
‘inside’ production relations unlike the ‘primitive accumulation’ where coercion takes place ‘outside’ the
production relations. Here, the state is projecting itself as the ‘collective bargainer’ on behalf of big capital and
the displaced farmers/indigenous inhabitants. This form of coercion is expressed in the form of acquiring huge
concentration of lands in very few hands to establish the corporate monopoly over land with the active
collaboration of the state that marks an important feature of contemporary global capitalism. Therefore, under
the banner of contemporary globalization, land becomes one of the chief sources of emerging contradictions
and great inequalities among various social groups that leads us to a situation of emerging contradistinctions
where on the one hand, the ‘displaced farmer/indigenous inhabitant’ either want to save his/her ‘land’ or
demands ‘land’ as a part of the rehabilitation package from the state and on the other, the big capital is also
demanding ‘land’ from the state to maximize its profits. In these circumstances, the choice is thus given only by
the power bloc to the people and a formal ‘consensus’ is built around that given and overdetermined choice in
front of the ‘people’—either to resist greedy capitalist accumulation or perish in near future. Since new
imperialism uses tactics of both consent and coercion aka Harvey, when consensual methods like compensation
and negotiation do not work, capitalist hegemony is established via coercion as aptly shown in this film. Avatar
subtly showed these peculiar complexities of corporate led globalization that is justified around concepts of
‘compensation’ and ‘resettlement’ on one side and ‘forced displacement/eviction’ on the other.
Another welcome move was that the film has critically questioned America’s war on terror project and
made passing references to the rhetoric that was used during the US imperialist onslaught in Iraq war. For
example, indigenous resistance with technologically inferior bows and arrows to imperialist aggression with
bombs and rockets was termed as ‘terror’ by the US colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The imperialist
tactics of pre-emptive warfare with ‘shock and awe’ and ‘terror has to be dealt with terror’ was used as
dialogues for the US colonel, the merciless head of the mining operation’s security team in the film. After
noticing the na’vi mobilization for resistance to defend its territory with bow and arrows, Miles actually
convinces Parker to give him permission for a pre-emptive strike on the Tree of Souls, reckoning that the
destruction of this hub of Na’vi religion and culture will demoralize them into submission. At this juncture, one
is simply reminded about what Chomsky talks about ‘state sponsored terror’ as ‘weapon of the strong’.25
One can argue that the problematic area of the film is that the ex-US marine becomes the new avatar
and the new leader of na’vi assisted by his ‘good’ human friends Grace, Trudy Chacón (Michelle Rodriguez)—
a Marine combat pilot assigned to support the Avatar Program and Dr. Max Patel (Dileep Rao), a scientist who
works in the Avatar Program laboratory. More importantly, the film also acknowledges the role of Jake’s friend
Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore), another human avatar in winning battle in favour of na’vis. In the film,
Norm is an anthropologist who studies plant and nature life as part of the Avatar Program. He arrives on
Pandora at the same time with Jake. Although he is expected to lead the diplomatic contact with the Na’vi, it
turns out that Jake was more suitable to win the natives’ respect. He should have been on the margins and not a
protagonist to portray a more authentic resistance of the na’vi people. It is another matter to stand in solidarity
with a group, which is fighting against injustice and exploitation but to actually provide a leadership even being
an outsider seems to display an appropriation of an authentic politics of resistance. In this respect, the old traces
and connections of theology and ideology in the form of avatar/messiah is prominent in the (un)conscious of the
filmmaker. Thus, colonization of Pandora was actually restricted by a supposedly colonizer!—a person who
wanted to colonize it but actually had a ‘change of heart’, which only pushes forward an image of a ‘good
colonizer’. But simultaneously one can counter this problematic by arguing that although the orientalist
colonizer becomes the leader of Omaticaya, yet he is transformed into a different being and no more identify
with crudeness of modern greedy capitalist venture. We can possibly argue that the traces of
primitivity/aboriginality/tribalism embedded within the modern man as a repressed form only facilitate to make
him the savage/forest man. Satyajit Ray’s protagonist Manomohan Mitra in Agantuk (1991) also informed us
that ‘it is a matter of great regret that he is not a junglee (savage), although he wants to be…that is why he needs
field notes to study them as an anthropologist. If he would have been a junglee then he would not have needed
those.’ So it was that desire to find the primitive roots of the human being that Jake fall in love with the flora
and fauna of Pandora, his affection for Neyetri and the Omaticaya tribe, which were instrumental for switching
sides. But not all human scientists in the film wanted to become a na’vi and neither most humans in our world
would like to become a primitive man in a hunter gatherer community! So, there lies the limit of this film.
However, it does not make it a less fascinating film in other respects like the political message of anti-
imperialism that I would elaborate in the next subsection.
Technological weakness and Anti-imperialist resistance
Before the final battle between the human species with the Na’vis, Jake gave an inspiring speech while
addressing the entire Omaticaya clan. He said, ‘we would show them that they [humans/Americans] are not
going to get what they want. This is our land and we are going to defend it.’ The film has wonderfully shown
the victory of na’vis (savage people) against the white superpower. This history of successful local/savage
resistance is often put into oblivion by modes of ‘sanctioned violence’ 26 like cultural propaganda, academic
interventions and media publicity stressing more on white power bloc’s victory and less highlighting or keeping
silent on the victories of black/brown/yellow population against the white power bloc. The instances of limits of
technology of the white power bloc in countering the successful resistance of so called technologically inferior
populace are many. The glorious history of successful indigenous people against civilized power—ranging from
the victory of tribal Ekalavya against Aryan Arjun in Mahabharata, the anti-colonial struggles of Algeria and
India, down to Vietnamese people’s victory against American superpower, several Latin American victories
against attempts to CIA sponsored counter-revolutions, to contemporary resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
savage has always learnt the technology from the white civilized/sage from a distance, right from the days of
Ekalavya. This learning of technology from a distance and then using it for savage’s own resistance against the
white power bloc is extremely well portrayed in the film. As we see that the na’vi successfully combated the big
spaceship with the biggest flying dinosaur like animal and on ground a rhino like animal combated the tanks.
The history of socio-political revolutions also shows us that the plebs or underdogs have always won those
epochal victories against the power bloc even with their technological weaknesses. In this regard, we can
remind about the Spartacus slave revolt, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the
Chinese Revolution, decolonization and Iranian Revolution. Some of these epochal revolutions have been also
portrayed in several films like slave revolts in Spartacus (1960), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and
Gladiator (2000), French Revolution in The Affair of the Necklace (2001) and La Révolution française (1989),
Russian Revolution in October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1927) and The Battleship Potemkin (1925),
Chinese Revolution in The Founding of a Republic (2009), decolonisation in The Battle of Algiers (1966) and
The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002) to name a few. Now, the victory of anti-imperialist struggle is mostly
dependent on the united people’s resistance and the will power of the plebs who fights the imperialist power
bloc as the advanced and sophisticated technology is always at the disposal of the power bloc. This possession
and control of technology in fact creates the division between ruling and ruled/plebeian classes. The
ruled/plebeian classes can never have the sophisticated technology, in which only the ruling classes have a
monopoly. However, in epochal moments of history, the ruled/plebeian classes overcome/overthrow its masters
—the ruling classes even with its technological barrier by united people’s resistance and strong will power that
was aptly shown in the film.
Ecological crisis
Man is part of the nature but he tries to distance himself from nature and in turn exploits the nature. The navi
says, ‘they [humans] killed their mother [nature]’. The film portrays this ecological crisis that if man declares a
war against nature then it would have to face the negative brunt of nature. Thus we see the monstrous animals,
threatened by the destructive affairs of capitalist enterprise of ‘white man’ react violently and join the party of
resistance. Here, the film beautifully engages with metaphors and analogies of resistance and ecological crisis.
As we have noted earlier that at the end of the film, when Selfridge and the remaining corporate personnel are
expelled from Pandora, while Jake, Norm, and other scientists are allowed to remain, there is a reference to the
‘dying world.’ Now, we can read this ‘dying world’ of humans as a world of ecological crisis where the present
capitalist venture of decimating the balance of nature and the white man’s civilization is actually in a ‘suicide
drive’ by creating its own ‘others’—atom bombs, suicide bombers, ecological crisis, that only creates
conditions of possibilities for the death of the human world. Marx and Engels pointed out about this suicide
drive of capitalism by saying that ‘the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.’27
The historic experience however shows that it is not only proletariat who is a potential death threat for
bourgeois order but also other forms of antagonisms that capitalism simultaneously creates. In the current phase
of globalized capitalism, the ecological crisis is perhaps the greatest threat of human civilization, which this
film has tried to give that message.
Avatar and Collective resistance
If we take the film Avatar as text to read, then it is also interesting to note that how the film’s portrayal
of a plebian/subaltern resistance to an elitist power bloc is more of a celebration of the heroic leadership rather
than focus more on collective resistance. It effectively anchored around the ‘individual rebel’ or ‘hero’ of such
subaltern resistances. Avatar celebrating the savage resistance to white power bloc entirely focuses on the
heroic fight of three principal leaders: Jake, his lover Neytiri and Tsutey while slightly ignoring the collective
resistance and participation of thousands of common ordinary Na’vis. In the collective resistance towards the
military aggression on Pandora, Norm (another human avatar) was actually leading the battalion of thousands of
na’vis and the film slightly fells short of highlighting the importance of collective participation of na’vis in a
successful resistance. Rather, the film shows that all the definitive moments of na’vi victory was due to
interventions of mainly two leaders: the film’s leading characters and protagonists—Jake and Neytiri. But one
can also argue that Avatar has clearly shown that for a successful struggle of the local (subalterns) over the
global imperialist onslaught, the local needs to make the broadest possible alliance with all those forces that are
not only anti-imperialist but also can provide some sort of challenge at the level of technology and
organisational stability. Hence, we have seen how the na’vi mobilises other local na’vi clans in combating the
imperialist aggressor.
A Film of Liberal American Guilt
The success of the film in the Anglo-American world however reflects the fact that the western audience
perhaps identifies with the liberal American guilt conscience, a guilt which is produced after hundreds of years
of destruction to its own indigenous population of Red Indians, the painful violent histories of European
colonialism, the oppression of neocolonialism, racism and the contemporary exploitation of post-colonialism
and imperialism. However, the film is not devoid of contemporary political context in America where a black
president with a Muslim pedigree (both savage identities for the white master) have replaced an utterly
destructive white President, who have earned a ‘bad name/bad press’ for America with imperialist war, ‘war on
terror’ and mismanagement of climatic hazards like hurricane Katrina. Thus, the liberal American guilt as a
critique to erstwhile regime with the ‘new audacity and child of hope’ in a new black President is also clear in
the film. It would be better for the collective fate of world population, if this guilt is translated into some
concrete positive steps to rectify the historic wrongs that the Anglo-American establishment has been
perpetrating in order to make this world relatively just and peaceful in near future.
1
*Maidul Islam is a Clarendon-Hector Pilling-Senior Hulme Scholar and DPhil candidate in Politics at Brasenose College,
Oxford and with the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.
Rebecca Winters Keegan, ‘Q&A with James Cameron’, Time Magazine (Thursday, January 11, 2007) URL:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1576622,00.html#ixzz0a69HUhNB [accessed 25/01/2010].
2
Michael Ordoña, “Eye-popping ‘Avatar’ pioneers new technology”, San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday, December
13, 2009) URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/13/PK4B1B0EHD.DTL [accessed
25/01/2010].
3
Stephen Mulhall, On Film [2001], 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 65-66.
4
Ibid., p. 47.
5
Ibid., p. 62.
6
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana,
1973), p. 248.
7
For a detailed theoretical narration on the construction of ‘other’ by the white colonial ‘self’, see Edward W. Said,
Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
8
See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals [1913], edited by T.N.R. Rogers (Mineola, New York: Dover
Publications, 2003).
9
For a theoretical exposition on the issue of antagonism and how it turns into conflict between ‘power bloc’ and
‘plebs/people’, see Ernesto Laclau, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory [1977]
(London: Verso, 1979); Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
10
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London:
Verso, 2001), p. 122.
11
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 102-103.
12
Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 20.
13
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics [1913],
translated by James Strachey [1950], 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 3.
14
Ibid.
15
Here I am using both ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ conditions as conditions of capitalism and not arguing on the lines of
postmodern epistemological concern about celebration of authenticity, locality and difference.
16
See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
17
See Prabhat Patnaik, ‘The Accumulation Process in the Period of Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43,
no. 26-27 (June 28 - July 11, 2008), pp. 108-113.
18
For a theoretical discussion on ‘brown orientalism’, see Ajit Chaudhury, ‘On Colonial Hegemony: Toward a Critique of
Brown Orientalism’, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 1994), pp. 44-58.
19
Alan Sheridan, the translator of several of Jacques Lacan’s works however says: “There is no adequate translation in
English of this word. ‘Enjoyment’ conveys the sense, contained in jouissance, of enjoyment of rights, of property, etc.
Unfortunately, in modern English, the word has lost the sexual connotations it still retains in French. (Jouir is slang for ‘to
come’.) ‘Pleasure’, on the other hand, is pre-empted by ‘plaisir’—and Lacan uses the two terms quite differently. ‘Pleasure’
obeys the law of homeostasis that Freud evokes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, whereby, through discharge, the psyche
seeks the lowest possible level of tension. ‘Jouissance’ transgresses this law and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure
principle.” See ‘Translators Note’, in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 281. Lacan has
himself pointed out that ‘[t]he superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!’ and thus made it clear that jouissance is
closely related to enjoyment. See, Jacques Lacan, ‘On jouissance’, in On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and
Knowledge, 1972-1973: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated
with notes by Bruce Fink (London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 3. Also Lacan has used jouissance as an overlapping
term for ‘happiness’ particularly in ‘The Jouissance of Transgression’ in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960: The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated with notes by Dennis Porter (London:
Routledge, 2008), pp. 237-239. In other contexts, Lacan has used it to describe as beyond ‘pleasure’ and thus ‘keeps us a
long way from…jouissance’ and in a way ‘pleasure’ is the ‘first half-serious step…toward jouissance’, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, p. 228 and jouissance to signify ‘pleasure’ in another context, Ibid., p. 233 and ‘satisfaction of
a drive’, Ibid., p. 258. But Lacan has also used it as ‘suffering’ as he points out ‘if we continue to follow Freud in a text such
as Civilization and Its Discontents, we cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil. Freud leads us by the hand to this
point: it is suffering because it involves suffering for my neighbour.’ Ibid., p. 227 (italics mine).
20
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995),
p. 60.
21
Tagore way back in early 1920s was critical about this urbocentric model of development. See Rabindranath Tagore, The
Robbery of the Soil (Kolkata: Muktomon, 2006) edited and translated to Bengali namely Bhushampader Bittoharon from
Tagore’s English original by Sandip Bandyopadhyay.
22
For a detailed theoretical exposition on this issue see Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg, Transition and
Development in India (London: Routledge, 2003).
23
For a theoretical analysis on ‘dislocation’ and ‘resettlement’ see Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Kumar Dhar,
Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to the World of the Third (London: Routledge,
2009).
24
Karl Marx, ‘The Secret of Primitive Accumulation’, Chapter 26 in Capital Vol. I (Online version: marxists.org 1999).
25
See Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1988); 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories
Press, 2001).
26
‘Sanctioned Violence’ is a form of violence that is implicit and not explicit. It is located behind the veil of modern
structures of power like propaganda, media campaign, advertisements, publicity, imaging/image building mechanisms via
image industry etc. Sanctioned Violence essentially produces discrimination between two similar works or persons
committing/performing the same acts. This ‘sanctioned violence’ is a form of omission/exclusion/silence due to abstraction
for generalisation that at the end of the day is (un)conscious suppression while shaping a discourse. For example: Huge
protests were witnessed against Iraq war but we kept silent during the judicial mockery of Saddam Hussein that led him to
gallows although both Iraq war and hanging of Saddam by victor’s justice were both ‘imperialist acts’. Then many cinema
directors use very obscene languages in films but we as ‘decent common citizens’ generally cannot/do not use slang in
public due to the location/situation of two different persons in different hierarchical positions in the society. So, the
‘sanctioned violence’ produced by the dominant power bloc essentially conditions/programmes us—the
‘excluded’/subaltern to show resistance against the ‘most excluded’ or ‘excluded of the excluded’ or ‘margin of margin’ and
be passive conformists to the elites. Sanctioned violence can be theoretically defined where consent of one agent produces a
sub-space ‘as it was Marx’s merit to pinpoint how human consent can sometimes stand over against itself…that brings forth
effects in it turning over against him leaving little room for his further consent’, See Ajit Chaudhury, Dipankar Das and
Anjan Chakrabarti, Margin of Margin: Profile of an Unrepentant Postcolonial Collaborator (Calcutta: Anustup, 2000), p.
92. For more examples of ‘sanctioned violence’ in other contexts see Maidul Islam, ‘Saddam’s Pre-Determined Execution
and Dynamics of Imperialism,’ People’s Democracy, vol. 31, no. 01 (7 January 2007); Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar,
Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From third world to the world of the third (London: Routledge, 2009).
27
Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Online Version: marxists.org 1999).