Review: Avatar: The Way of Water is a masterpiece of oppression
When James Cameron presented his first Avatar — a film recognized as much for its technical advances as for its success as the highest-grossing movie of all time — thirteen years ago, he was met with accusations of racism. Critics pointed to the writer-director’s appropriation of elements from various Indigenous cultures in his depiction of the Na’vi, a blue-skinned race of space aliens with supernatural intuitive or biodynamic abilities, as well as to his centering of a white male savior (played by Sam Worthington) whose arrival and ultimate allegiance to these “native people” (whom he comes to resemble via his adoption of blue skin) results in their victory over an army of Earthling colonizers.
And when, the following year, Cameron suggested that the historic Lakota Sioux were a “dead-end society” and could have “fought a lot harder” against genocidal Europeans, he only dug himself into a deeper hole.
Anecdotally, this controversy sparked comparisons of Avatar’s plot to other white savior dramas like Dances with Wolves (1990) and Pocahontas (‘95) — but, more crucially, it didn’t appear to touch Cameron, who proceeded with his plans to make not only one, nor two, but four sequels. The first of these sequels, The Way of Water, has been in theaters for two weeks and already crossed the billion-dollar mark, making it the second-most profitable movie of the year.
Sure enough, it is a technical marvel; sure enough, it trades in racism. From the Na’vi’s use of actual Māori traditions to the casting of white actors as blue- and green-skinned “natives,” nothing has changed. But this is also nothing new.
The hard truth is that, in America, the advancement of cinema technology has almost always gone hand-in-hand with some form of blackface. When D. W. Griffith was first experimenting with narrative structure and production scale in his proto-blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915), he misrepresented the American Civil War as a crusade against the alleged moral corruption of nonwhite people — and cast white actors to portray Black folks as murderous rapists. (The film’s glorification of the Ku Klux Klan led to that terrorist group’s reemergence.) At the dawn of sound, Al Jolson was there to greet audiences with a rendition of “My Mammy,” in blackface, in The Jazz Singer (‘27). Even movies with stories as apparently benign as Star Wars (‘77) or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (‘82), both renowned for their technical sophistication, hinge on the existence of aliens, or racially-distinct creatures that are both primitive — i.e., inferior — to humans and yet more advanced than them. And those creatures were portrayed either by actors wearing masks, or robots.
It’s possible that I lost a reader or two with that last comparison — after all, what makes a movie set in outer space racist? Especially when it’s not directly based on the history of specific Indigenous people? Part of what’s made identifying racism in today’s movies trickier than ever is the fact that, over the last fifty years, Hollywood has transitioned from using overt blackface to propagate imperialist ideals, to intergalactic beings instead. In many ways, sci-fi has become the new Western; with nothing left on Earth to dominate, the colonizing imagination has turned to outer space — the final frontier.
Space aliens occupy a role once reserved for Indigenous Americans: as faceless masses to be decimated in the name of a greater good, or as sacred beings whose fragile purity serves as a metaphor for an endangered Earth.
Indeed, the benevolent light under which aliens are often cast only further confuses us in our ability to locate racism at the movies. It’s easy to think that nothing’s afoot if a given creature isn’t represented in harsh tones, but the docile nature of E.T. or Ewoks shouldn’t distract us from the colonialist thinking that underpins their existence. Indigenous folks or non-colonizers have always been represented as either inarticulately hostile or magically in-tune with a spiritual source; both characterizations reduce, or dehumanize their subjects.
Can there be a more facile shorthand for perpetuating racism than by framing an entire people as being from another planet?
I write all of this while also harboring the simple, shrugging fact that I thoroughly enjoyed the second Avatar. It is as smartly, as soundly constructed as any action movie can hope to be — and if it abounds in clichés, then the result is a kind of sublimity that Umberto Eco once identified in writing about Casablanca (‘42): “When the tried and true repertoire is used wholesale… there is a sense of dizziness, a stroke of brilliance.” The teeming beauty of an entirely artificial reality… the shockingly elegant depth of imagery provided by 3D glasses… the talented cast, the audacity of Cameron’s vision… It is dizzying.
There are so many reasons to have fun throughout this mammoth, three-and-a-quarter-hours long production. And none of them matter.
James Cameron is working in the tradition of great cinematic showmen — Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hughes, George Lucas — and just as he inherits their creative genius, he inherits their subservience to incentives of commerce. And global commerce is forever indebted to the existence of slavery and genocide.
Avatar: The Way of Water is a masterpiece of entertainment, spectacle and oppression. The great American movie.
