Do you know that old Hollywood cliche where a white guy is the hero of a native race? Well that's happening here in James Cameron's Avatar and some people aren't taking kindly to that.
Like the Titanic, people are sinking low to a new level into ridiculousness.
Movies that had white men leading natives into victory are Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and Broken Arrow. I don't think people have had an issue with those movies before but when they see a white man leading the giant smurfs to victory against the humans and their spaceships and giant robots, those people knew they have had enough.
I know we need to get the racism nonsense away from the videogames but is it really necessary for the movies to be next on the hit list?
The film's reliance on old cliches is what holds it back as a classic.
After watching the second trailer, I wondered what the other twists in the plot would be that we could see from the trailer. I went to see the film - found there wasn't any.
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
Well, Jake Sully actually discards his "white" body and literally becomes a Na'Vi. So, it wouldn't matter what his race is, in the end, because he completely discards his body and quite literally, becomes a Na'Vi.
i be mad if i found out my wife had a blk man...... i have low self esteem when it comes with pleasing women and knowing will smith was with her would seriously under mind what little confidence i had in the bedroom... is that racist?
The "We need to save them because they can't save themselves" motif is not new in Cameron's work, and does encompass a large body of media going back hundreds of years which served to oppress and justify the oppression of many non-white peoples.
The same tactic has been used by non-whites, but the general connotation is that media made for white, christian audiences glorifies said culture by having it solve other people's problems, which in turn was used to make people believe that military force and expansion was justified as helping poor people without the guile to help themselves.
regardless, it is still something that we should be discussing.
I don't believe Cameron made the movie with the intent of propogandizing some archaic "save other weaker civilizations" issue, but the fact is, that is still a very strong cultural idea.
Are people being sensationalist, sure, but maybe there is room to critiscize something for being so short-sighted, or even for being so unimaginative to fall into the most cliche storytelling devices without even considering the underlying meanings. At the very least, it signifies that Cameron spent a day and a half with the script
the length of production is probably not reflective of how challenging of a script it was.
At the very least, no studio is going to throw that kind of money at something that might make the audience think, beyond already established cultural maxims and centuries old cliches.
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James Cameron's work might be Racist?
Jan 12th, 2010 04:46 AM
FER TEA!!
