The anti-imperial and anti-colonial narrative of the Avatar films is hardly a subtle one. There are clear parallels to both historical and contemporary resource extraction and settler-colonialism. But can a huge movie franchise be a force for radical ideological and political change, or is the medium itself a limiter on any real-world spillover?
To be clear, I loved the latest Avatar film, The Way of Water. It’s a encircling cinematic experience, from the stupendous CGI to the earnest heart-on-sleeve story. While I didn’t leave the cinema wishing I could live in Pandora, I left with questions about my own position on Earth and which side of justice I belonged to. What I want to do in this article is explore the film as a commodity within capitalist modernity and whether it can inspire ‘real-world’ political action.
Indulging in cultural studies, particularly culture of the imperial core, is always at risk of lending itself to a liberal theory of change. In this mindset free floating ideas are the engine of social change and an obsession with mass culture comes at the ignorance of the very real exploitation happening right now in this world in favour of navel gazing wankery about fictional character alignments. On the other hand, an alternative view sees culture as the end-point of economics, ethereal and interchangeable trivia that is subservient to the concrete world of things.
Yet to see culture as merely ‘imperfect reflections, trailing behind economic forces'’1 is to miss the ways in which culture and ideology act together with economic forces to produce the ways we live and our fields of reference. As Stuart Hall was at pains to stress, ideology, including and especially that of the right-wing, is not mere trickery, but a system of meanings ‘operating on genuine contradictions… [with] a rational and material core’2. Ideology and culture do not create reality, but it frames it and thus frames the political struggles that fight to change it.
Culture then, is important, for while the economic base creates the tools and their distribution, the product of those tools is defined by the virtually infinite possibilities of human creativity and interpretation. The economic base provides the pencils and even tells people what to draw, but the pictures do not belong to it.
Is Avatar Unique?
There’s hundreds of films whose message would broadly agree with the idea that an army going into the another people’s territory to extract resources and brutally put down any rebellion would be the bad guys. What makes Avatar somewhat unique is that the bad guys are clearly signposted as American, and not just as any Americans. Despite being set in the distant future, the Oakley sunglasses and speech cadences of the marines are clearly 21st century. The fairly explicit message being that American wars of our period were not just ‘mistakes’ or executed poorly, or even included a few bad apples, but were fundamentally evil endeavours.
This runs alongside an ecological narrative that again, is far from subtle. The Na’vi live in harmony with nature’s bounty, while humans seek only to exploit it. One of the criticisms of Avatar is that it perpetuates a ‘noble savage’ trope, that is creates a romantic image of non-western societies. While it’s true that uncritical depictions of culture can lead to an infantilization and over simplification, the discourse around the idea of the noble savage is itself problematic. The term was originally used by imperial racists as a sort of strawman argument directed at other western philosophers who were engaged in philosophical dialogue with native American societies. Over time, the word came to be used by more left wing critics, but in many ways its overuse (such as claiming that any positive depiction of non-western society is a ‘noble savage’ trope) can derail any potentially fruitful discussion about different ways of life3.
So what of Na’vi society? Cameron’s willingness to linger where other directors would opt for short montage gives the films an immersive quality, one that has led to the so-called ‘Pandora blues’ among some film-goers, who can’t quite handle the fact that Pandora isn’t a real place they can stay in. It’s easy to see why. Pandora is a place where your survival (well, before the humans came) isn’t based on how much money you have or how much of a shithead you can be to other people. On Pandora people live meaningful lives and thrive without commodities. They forge loving relationships unmediated by bureaucracy or insane hierarchies. The value of Pandora for me at least, is that like the moon of Annares in Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, it’s a fleshed out world without capitalism. It sticks a finger up to every politician and economist who told us that “this is the natural way of things”. And if another world is believable, it might be possible too.
Fetish Commodities
In the first chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital he talks about the idea of the commodity fetish. Essentially, this is how in capitalist societies we come to ignore the social production of objects, instead seeing them as abstract entities, disconnected from the labour that produced them. As I mentioned above, left wing cultural critique is always at a constant risk of this type of fetishisation, seeing media products only in terms of the message while ignoring the materiality and the human lives involved in their creation.
At this level, one that considers Avatar in its whole production, it’s difficult to defend because no matter how righteous the message, we can’t turn away from the reality that, like every other Hollywood movie, it has been a mini eco-disaster. Every major film consumes vast amounts of energy, from transportation of cast, crew and equipment, to vast arrays of lighting rigs and computing equipment. On location, film crews are like small armies, trampling over local ecosystems and even communities. James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) notoriously decimated the sea urchin population of Popotla, Mexico, which in turn, ruined local fisher livelihoods, who used the urchins for bait. The filming of Mad Max Fury Road (2015), a film involving driving fast cars around a desert, unsurprisingly did huge amounts of ecological damage to the Namib Desert.
Films made on computers and filmed on sets are not exempt from this either. All those computers and equipment not only create pollution through their operation, but trace their production far back enough and you will find people using massive amounts of fuel to take minerals out of the ground. Avatar The Way of Water cost around $250m to make. That’s a number that represents a vast amount of objects being moved, buttons being pressed, wheels being turned, minerals being mined, water being absorbed, and fuel being burned. Even allegedly green energy, such as electrical-solar, is still fundamentally rooted in extraction that comes with a high environmental cost.
So there’s a jarring contradiction between Avatar’s message and its economic base. As Mark Fisher wrote about the first film, ‘we can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of the very cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.’ Taking the medium itself as the message, Avatar can’t really be anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist, because it is a production rooted in capitalism, American hegemony and ecological destruction.
A utilitarian argument is that the ends justify the means. Did the donation made from the Producers of The Beach (2000) to Thailand’s Royal Forestry Department and Tourism Authority make up for the permanent damage the filming did to the sand dunes and flora of Phi Phi Island? For Avatar specifically, does its anti-imperialist/pro-ecology message outweigh the destruction that was needed to facilitate its own production? The problem with this way of thinking is that it’s a little like carbon-offsetting, the practice where corporations pay for their pollution by planting trees somewhere else. It’s a practice that keeps the game going at a time when we need to flip the whole table over.
I have no doubt that many people who watch the Avatar films will come away from the experience thinking deeply about humanity’s current path. Perhaps this is the reason why there are so few memes. One of the talking points surrounding Avatar in the media-sphere is that it has ‘no cultural impact’. What this means is that the film has not spawned a Star Wars-like industrial fandom or a Marvel-universe parade of easily meme-able quotes. This is of course a stupid argument, one that says more about the people who say it than the film itself. Avatar hits people in an emotional place that is the antithesis to disposable culture. The last thing they want to do after seeing it is hop on twitter to scroll through funny pictures. It did when I watched it. So this isn’t some righteous call for a boycott. If you like films it’s better than most.
What’s stayed with me though, the nagging, deeper message of the film is that it’s not enough to say you’re against something. you have to be against it. The message of Avatar is that sacrifice is necessary. For Jake Sully it is his entire human body he must consign to oblivion. There are other characters in the series, early Dr Grace and Dr Garvin. They don’t hold guns. They like and respect the Na’vi. And yet their lifestyles could not exist without others holding guns and killing Na’vi. And that’s what seems to make Avatar such a polarising film, especially with western liberals. It holds that mirror up and says yes you say you hate the right wing, yes you hate war, yes you hate racism, but your entire way of life is supported by these evils.
As noted above, culture helps to frame our view of the world and thus is inextricably linked to political struggles. In the case of Avatar, it’s difficult to see how the framing of the problem and the resulting struggle can be anything other than the need for the complete destruction of the industry that makes films like Avatar and our own complicity within that system as consumers.
To know that sacrifice is necessary but to not have the courage to follow through leads to a special kind of self-loathing.
Thompson, E.P. (1957) Socialist Humanism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm
Hall, S. (1979) The Great Moving Right Show. Marxism Today. pp.14-20
See Graeber and Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything. p.70-71.