Avatar

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I took Andrew to see Avatar (no, it's not completely unrelated -- Brother Martin was a bit of a sci-fi fan). Neither of us really wanted to go, but it was the only movie that didn't star vampires, rodents, or Alec Baldwin (a bit redundant, perhaps). We had to get out of the house, because the girls had a friend over, and Betsy's sister was coming to visit with her two girls. Total hen party, we had to escape.

The movie is a visual spectacle, although the story is effectively a warmed-over version of Dances with Wolves. The tall blue people live in community with nature, and the evil space-Americans want to come and take their land and natural wealth.

Let's deconstruct the deconstruction for a moment, mmkay?

First, what sort of message does this movie (and the dozens of others from the same template) give us? That outsiders should not come uninvited into a strange land and partake of the local wealth? Sounds reasonable, until we consider that illegal immigrants from Mexico are coming into the US uninvited to partake of the local wealth. Oops, didn't think of that!

Second, what sort of culture do these blue people have? Is it really something that any modern American of any stripe would want to live under? Granted, I have only slight clues from which to judge, but here are some key aspects of their culture:

1. Arranged marriages.
2. Hereditary leadership.
3. Strict religious observance.
4. Lifelong pair bonding beween male & female (evidently premarital, extramarital, and homosexual relations would be impermissable).
5. Primitive technology. No phone, no light, no motorcar, not a single luxury. No TV, no blockbuster 3D movies, no snarky blogs.
6. Entrenched warrior class. These people can't be all that sweet & peaceful if they have a warrior class. These blue guys aren't Smurfs, they're more like the Irish, who fight among themselves until the English come along.
7. Extraordinarily conservative society. If they've lived the same way for centuries, then that's pretty much the textbook definition of fundamentalism.

I'm old enough to remember when movie bad-guys all had Russian accents, or German accents, or British accents, or some mottled hybrid of the three. Now, the Shibboleth for movie bad-guys is some combination of white, male, American, military, Christian, Republican, with a good job. The formula works on Law & Order as well. And they say that profiling is illegal!

Anyway, Andrew didn't much care for Avatar, and in a way I'm glad. He's more focused on current reality, than on imagined futures that can't happen.