Let's Smurf under that racial stereotype

Yes, to all you Avatards and CGI-hounds, Avatar might very well be deserving of the Academy Award for Visual Effects: many congrats to the Weta Digital techies sitting at their computers in New Zealand. As for Best Picture and Best Director, let all the 'savages' of this world unite to deal James Cameron a firm post-colonial walloping with the gold statuette itself.

Avatar has been described by some critics as a 'piece of anti-American war propaganda'. This was partly Cameron’s intention. As he stated, 'it’s all about opening your eyes. We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don’t know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil'. So Avatar becomes a neo-liberal, peace & love flick about the evils of capitalist greed, and the prevailing goodness of the innocent foreign victims of war.

These suspiciously familiar victims—typically portrayed by black and Native American actors—are primitive beings; the Na'vi bound nakedly through the land with their graceful athletic figures, they snarl bestially and unite their souls with animals in a somewhat copulative manner, they sing, they dance, they talk to trees. Ultimately, these blue-skinned, lithe-limbed, beaded and braided 'natives' are a mish-mash of 19th century stereotypes of indigenous races.

And like those old colonial stereotypes, these good-hearted, but ignorant blue people need the awesome white American saviour to come to their rescue. They don’t fully comprehend the very complicated concepts of war or evil and so our hero Jake Sully kindly dumbs things down for them to understand who their enemy is; 'the sky people'.

Here is where the politics of Avatar become entirely self-contradictory. If Avatar really was the champion of liberty and equality, then the entire film wouldn’t rely on the ignorance and ineptitude of the Na’vi people, compared to the rationality and advancement of the Americans; apparently the blue aliens are just too primitive to understand why they can talk to trees, and it takes a white American scientist to present the science and rationality behind it all.

What’s more is that Avatar lifts lines directly from the Bush administration’s discussion of the Iraq War: 'Our survival relies on pre-emptive action. We will fight terror, with terror'. Cameron’s clunky allusion of the Na’vi, not only as Africans or Native Americans, but Iraqis, patronises and demeans not blue aliens, but real people to such an extent that they are portrayed as helpless and bumbling 'savages'. No matter how seemingly benevolent these portrayals are, Avatar succeeds in literally alienating people of different races.

Granted, Cameron is not a devil, and the plot, as well as the appalling racial dynamic, is one that’s been seen countless times before. But if this film is going to be up for prestigious awards and widespread acclaim, it must have something that goes beyond the thrill of special effects; it’s got to be transcendent. If all Jaws had were the special effects of the cardboard shark, it would have no appeal today.

A couple of years on, when the shiny novelty of 3D has worn off, Avatar will be little more than the masturbatory imaginings of a white guilty conscience.