Now I still regard Mark Driscoll's absurd claim that Avatar was the most satanic/demonic film he'd ever seen as absurd. I didn't much care for James Cameron's Avatar. Over at Slate someone remarked on how little a cultural footprint the film had whereas a ton of us remembered Joker's magic pencil trick. Forgotbusters had an amusing discourse somewhere on how Cameron's film was remaking Billy Jack in space. I had mentioned how I thought Avatar is to hard-science-fiction what My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is to socialist realism (and I still enjoy that the associated movie beat mother! in domestic and global box office and Emily Blunt was clearly having a blast voicing Tempest Shadow).
James Cameron is, I have proposed, the Michael Bay of blue-state voters. It's not that I can't or don't enjoy his films while I'm watching them, it's that they are no less trite and cliche-riddled than Michael Bay's films. The tropes are merely different, not better or worse.
That said, I was simply not won over the first time and I've got no incentive to go spend three hours or more watching a sequel that trades as much on white guy joins the Indian tribe and gets the Indian princess and saves the day stuff. Call it a reflex borne from being half Native American because of my Native American dad but James Cameron's Navi are basically magical Indians in tune with nature.
Local author Sherman Alexie has had maybe too much fun pointing out how most of those cliches had nothing to do with actual Native American tribes and everything to do with the overt fabrications of white progressives and liberals who reverse-engineered the kinds of American Indians they thought could popularize their ideas and leverage metric tons of white guilt along the way about the grisly treatment of Native Americans to give the ideas more traction. Alexie was particularly amused to note how often white progressives acted as if Native Americans never owned slaves, never had a slave trade. European/white imagination has had it that nomadic hunter-gatherers couldn't have had a need for slaves. Well, Leland Donald wrote an entire book on how every tribe in the Pacific Northwest had slavery practices. That many a tribe abandoned the ownership of slaves by the 1920s is still worth noting, of course, but having been the son of a Native American for decades now I gotta say, it rankles me sometimes what cliches about Native Americans still pass muster in the reception history of pop culture that would not be the case for other groups. Are we going to see sequels in which different tribs of the Navi trade slaves?
So, yeah, call me skeptical about James Cameron's whole approach. If we're supposed to dig The Way of Water because it's against colonialism, imperialism and egregious whaling then all those stereotypes about righteous Native Americans in tune with nature and the cosmos is fine.
James Cameron launching a cinematic franchise that is to environmentalism what Uncle Tom's Cabin, was to the issue of slavery and the treatment of slaves ... Robinson thinks we should roll with the stereotypes and tropes? Do we have to? I don't see a reason to spend three hours sitting through Cameron's sequel to a movie I thought was meh and that didn't need sequels. Not that I begrudge Zoe Saldana getting stable work or anything and Cameron does know how to make spectacles. But I'm not rushing out to go see the new film.
In his book Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff pointed out that despite all the objections to Uncle Tom's Cabin there's an awkward historical reality to the work, it "worked". It got people to rethink their perspectives on how blacks were treated as slaves and about the ethics of slavery as it was defined and defended. It can be far too easy for us in the 21st century to look down on the patent moralizing and stereotypes of UTC; even "great" works of art can be criticized for various reasons and there's no reason we shouldn't be critical of great works and less-great works. But there is a sense, a very real sense, in which Uncle Tom's Cabin is up for criticism because it worked, it achieved its literary aim as protest writing. Wolterstorff proposed, a bit delicately, that Baldwin and other authors who damned UTC did so perhaps because their own writings traded on similar appeals to moral outrage.
Why mention that? Because when a work of art trades so flamboyantly on what can be regarded as crude and morally simplistic characters and characterization to appeal to moral intuitions there may have to be a "it worked" element before we can pass a verdict. The proof will be in the pudding here. If Cameron really made a movie about how whaling is bad and we should save whales ... if that's a major take-away I'll stick with Star Trek IV, alright. If you actually like Cameron's space fantasy I don't want to take that away from you ... but my comparison of Cameron's film to the legacy of Uncle Tom's Cabin is intended to provoke some thought about how worthwhile it really is that Cameron has traded on tropes about Native Americans to make a few points about colonialism and ecological issues.
If James Cameron really couldn't think of any other way to make his moralizing points about ecology, colonialism and imperialism without trading on every cliche about Native Americans known to pop culture that, personally, cements my impression that he's a Michael Bay for blue state voters. Your perceptions and mileage may vary. Obviously if you've read this far I think someone like Cameron should have been able to make his points about ecology, colonialism and imperialism without resorting to every cliche of the magical Native American communing with nature. That he didn't and maybe couldn't is why I would argue James Cameron is a few notches below Stephen Spielberg and probably a bit on par with George Lucas (comparably terrible at writing dialogue, for instance).
But as I said, your perceptions and mileage may vary.
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