Avatar – the Latest Anti-Western Movie From Hollywood
From the desk of Fjordman on Fri, 2009-12-18 10:02
The hero is the U.S. Marine Jake Sully who has been sent to
the planet-like moon Pandora because humans desire the mineral resources found
of Pandora, which is inhabited by a race of tall, blue-skinned aliens, the
Na’vi. They have a non-industrial civilization technologically inferior to ours
but apparently spiritually richer and in perfect ecological harmony with the
natural environment. The hero predictably falls in love with the native culture
and connects with a native girl.
“Going native” is in itself not an original theme; it
resembles Dances with Wolves, only with
aliens instead of Sioux. Neither is the preference for pre-industrial
civilization, which was after all shared by a good man such as Tolkien in his The
Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien had
personally experienced the meaningless horrors of trench warfare during the
First World War and this naturally affected his view of industrialized society.
What is different about the movie Avatar is how it portrays whites as a bunch of raging monsters, something
which Tolkien never did.
Basically, the white characters are portrayed as brutal,
greedy and insensitive beasts who rape the environment and destroy other cultures
with a smile in the search for profit. The main antagonist is the white Colonel
Quaritch, a brute who hardly possesses a single positive character trait. The
final climax of the movie is when he screams “How does it feel to betray your
race?” to the protagonist while he is trying to murder him. Although a few of
the white characters such as Jake Sully are portrayed in a more redeeming light
this is only because they totally reject their own civilization and join the
other team in the fight. In other words: the only good whites are the ones who
utterly turn their backs on their own destructive and evil culture. As reviewer
Armond White put it,
“Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his
identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.”
Of course, back in the real world whites are among the most
self-critical and least ethnocentric people on Earth, and have been so for a
long time. Whites are also disproportionately represented in the environmental
movement whereas many “diverse” Third World peoples couldn’t care less about
the environment. But why let the truth get in the way of making a good
anti-white movie? The fact that quite a few among the predominantly white
audience cheered for this movie shows that anti-white hatred and stereotypes
have become so widespread and accepted that most people cannot even see it,
least of all whites themselves.
Intelligence is bound to decline further with immigration
Submitted by Joern on Wed, 2010-08-18 12:46.
Yes, and the intelligence will certainly decrease further. From 1979 to 2006 average IQ fell from 99,35 to 98,3 in Denmark. And this is not the end. In 2057 the average IQ will be 92,5 due to the immigration from areas with much lower IQ in Africa, South-West-Asia and the Middle East, if it contionus as it did for latest 7 years.
We based on a simple weighed average and simple prognosis based on fertility, deathrate, and immigration.
And we were expected to adjust our basics to the globalization and also finance and manage the slitest bit of welfare to the needing while ageing made by the same rulers were/is meant to go on.
But we are not stupid all of us all though the average declining.
Joern, Denmark
English and German articles from my site
Blue People...
Submitted by atheling on Sun, 2009-12-20 23:16.
Apparently this is a "Dances With Wolves" type film, from what I've read elsewhere. Except the natives are blue CGIs.
"Dances With Smurfs"?
Dances With Smurfs
Submitted by KO on Mon, 2009-12-21 01:47.
Funniest three words yet on this movie! That has legs!
Unbelievable "realism"?
Submitted by truepeers on Sun, 2009-12-20 07:18.
@Fjordman & KO & Frank Lee
while it is visually spectacular...
I doubt I'm going to pay to see this hatefest, but a friend interested in animation is suggesting I blog, from a Generative Anthropological perspective, on the phenomenon of the "uncanny valley" that this film is supposedly bringing to greater attention. The uncanny valley refers to the revulsion audiences have for "animated" images and perhaps especially for CGI that are, on first appearance, very photorealistic; but for just this reason they apparently turn off the audience when the images don't perform in a way that lives up to the expectations implicitly raised by surface realism. We are more attracted to well-animated simple drawings than we are to photorealistic animations which inevitably seem to lack "soul". That, at least, is the friend's theory.
GA suggests that a desire to move towards ever greater realism is central to film history, that film producers are ever concerned to pack their productions with signs and things that shout "this is now". I would guess our desire for realism is fundamentally a need to relate to characters' desires and intentions, and to remind ourselves that there will always be new possibilities or ways of imagining and experiencing the scenes of human interaction. It would seem that in this respect, Fjordman finds the "visually spectacular" completely unbelievable; as Frank puts it, perfectly rational beings who remain in the stone age don't convince.
If this makes sense, then we might see this film flop; but if we explain any flop just in terms of a political turn away from white guilt, for which there are some if far from enough signs out there, we might be missing the point that it is the combination of white guilt's implicit racism/caricature of the other, plus the best CGI ever, that leads to unbelievable or perhaps revolting subaltern characters. This would remind us that the problem with the left is, in good part, their worship of method and technique as a substitute for realism.
Any thoughts? Are the Na'vi in fact revolting?
@ truepeers
Submitted by KO on Sun, 2009-12-20 12:12.
Thanks for your reminder that we should not look at aesthetic objects solely in terms of their ideological content. I have no intention of seeing the "hatefest" you refer to, so I will keep my comments short. Surface realism that serves ideological lies is inevitably disgusting. It raises an expectation regarding the relationship of the aesthetic object to the world of experience that is then thwarted. The technical precision of the representation turns out to be a fraud.
"Titanic" created that sense of fraudulence with the contrast between the astounding realism of the drawn-out destruction of the ship and the sickly, juvenile-liberal sentimentality of the central story. I would expect no more from "Avatar."
Prof. Gans has a very good discussion of the GA theory of narrative in his on-line Chronicles of Love and Resentment. He does not emphasize realism, but the relationship of the human subject to the scene of representation over time. Pseudo-realism disrupts the revelation of that relationship and attempts to palm off falsehood in place of truth.
I regret to say that "Saving Private Ryan" comes to mind as another example of impressive, credible realism subordinated to liberal propaganda. The fight to the death of a humane civilization against the brutal perversion of civilization is reduced to individual survivor guilt. Expect more of the same from Spielberg/Hanks' "Pacific," coming soon to HBO. Hanks is already telling the world it will present a "new narrative" instead of repeating "the same old story."
@KO
Submitted by truepeers on Mon, 2009-12-21 09:32.
Gans has an interesting discussion of film as "realistic spectacle", pointing to the paradoxical tension between film's realistic content and its compact and often fantastically sacrificial narrative form.
It would be interesting to think through survivor guilt in terms of this tension. Many soldiers who fought on behalf of our humane civilization did end up suffering some such guilt; but for just this reason they would not, i suspect, want to imagine themselves as filmmakers making a spectacle of their experience. They are heroic in returning to their anonymous lives and just getting on with freedom; but for the filmmaker to then attempt to capture this experience, "realistically", must he, in making a filmic spectacle, force on us the kind of guilt that is destructive of the memory of a just war and its anonymous heroes?
The main antagonist is the
Submitted by Ronduck on Tue, 2009-12-22 01:10.
The main antagonist is the white Colonel Quaritch, a brute who hardly possesses a single positive character trait.
The Colonel from the film seemed as if he was straight out of Apocalypse Now. I was expecting the Colonel to confess how much he loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
Apocalypse Not
Submitted by KO on Tue, 2009-12-22 02:32.
@Ronduck: Are you referring to the most anti-American movie ever made? See the "director's cut" if you don't believe me!
@KO
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Sun, 2009-12-20 03:29.
@KO
Have not seen District 9, but have read that it's more truthful than anything else in decades that attempts to portray African reality. "The Last King of Scotland" was quite good in portraying not merely Idi Amin but African society, the common African psyche, and a white naif who stumbles into it. BTW, I don't purport to be an authority on Africa, so when I write "African society," or "common African psyche" I am generalizing from my personal experiences in five sub-Saharan countries and from personal contacts with Africans elsewhere.
@ Mr. Seiyo
Submitted by KO on Sun, 2009-12-20 11:46.
Yes, "The Last King of Scotland" was excellent, not only in the depiction of African society but in Forrest Whittaker's portrayal of the African tyrant, with his sadism, appetite, brutality, resentment, and self-pity.
"District 9" is worth seeing for its vivid truthfulness about both barbarism and the liberalism that shelters it, but is disappointing in its presentation of stock villains (scheming white capitalist arms manufacturers) and the liberal hero (who goes over to the enemy).
There is a small class of movies in which the artistic integrity of the personnel overcomes their liberal ideology and the truth shines through in spite of their propagandistic intentions. "Dead Man Walking" heads the list. "A Few Good Men" is on it. A recent addition is Don Cheadle's "Traitor." Its liberal message is the evil nature of the American intelligence/defense establishment--yawn. But the truth that blazes forth, despite the liberal intent throughout, is that Muslims do not belong in the West.
"District 9" does not create that effect of involuntary revelation. Rather, it raises a suspicion in the viewer of a deliberate cover-up or a knowing retreat from truthfulness.
hi
Submitted by fatstripping on Sat, 2009-12-19 11:51.
There is certainly nothing wrong with self criticism, but i am amazed that people make big bucks from self loathing....
Weight Loss
Fjordman,
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Sat, 2009-12-19 00:08.
Fjordman,
Follow the money. Here is director James Cameron’s list of political contributions: http://www.newsmeat.com/celebrity_political_donations/James_Cameron.php. And let the single “California Republican Party” item not fool you. That party has as much to do with good sense and conservatism as the other Cameron’s party, David’s, has to do in GB.
“Brazil” could have been a much better sci-fi filmic comment on our times than "Avatar", if it were only cast to reflect the blessings of our diversity. The low-budget "Idiocracy" is pretty good too, and surprisingly courageous.
Cf. District 9
Submitted by KO on Sat, 2009-12-19 03:42.
@Fjordman and Mr. Seiyo,
How did you like District 9? On first impression, it presents a remarkably lucid grasp of (1) the incompatibility of savage immigrants with developed society, and (2) the self-destructive stupidity of liberal attempts to tolerate and assimilate the intolerable and unassimilable. But then the true villains, white capitalists, assert themselves, and the hero turns out to be the white who, through a remarkable misfortune, becomes the ally of the aliens.
Another failure of lefty intelligence
Submitted by Frank Lee on Fri, 2009-12-18 18:20.
This movie reminds me that 99 percent of academics completely misread (and therefore misteach) works such as Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart." Achebe clearly notes how backward, anti-rational, and superstitious is the culture of his African characters--which leads to their being instantly undermined by the arrival of monotheism and the Enlightenment values of Western culture--but Western academics curiously applaud the book as an anti-Western diatribe. I'm going to guess that the Na'vi in Cameron's movie do not kill homosexuals, kill apostates, kill deformed babies, kill twin babies (which, in Achebe's novel, have evil spirits). More than likely the Na'vi are wonderfully rational and logical beings who for some strange reason have never managed to progress technologically despite their rationality. And they probably live in harmony with nature (with no malaria or other diseases to contend with) and therefore have no need for Western medicine. As an American, I have a very childish impulse to point out that Cameron is a Canadian--don't blame us!
Things Fall Apart
Submitted by KO on Sat, 2009-12-19 12:29.
@ Frank Lee: That excellent novel shows how a society destroys itself by generating internal enemies. It is a cautionary tale of universal application. In the novel, Western institutions are on the spot to pick up the pieces by giving value and status to the rejected and disaffected. From the point of view of Generative Anthropology, Western society is not superior because it does not generate resentment, but because it permits the resentment it generates to be channeled into productive activities in the competitive marketplace of goods and services, including culture, religion, and politics. The transcendental egalitarianism of Christianity authorizes maximum expression of individual energy and creativity within the social order.
Unfortunately, Mr. Achebe quickly became Mr. PC to reap the rewards of anti-colonialism in the Western marketplace. After a long career of telling liberal Westerners what they want to hear, he is currently pushing his children's book intended to substitute for Western children's books that present a negative image of Africans.
God willing, we are starting to see "things fall apart" in the liberal-socialist world order as it generates sufficient internal opposition to provoke a revolt. With the global warming fraud, the universal health care fraud, the bail out fraud, and the immigration fraud exposed to view, maybe the Western peoples will develop widespread contempt for the rule of the liberal elites. (See neopopulism.org.)
The liberal order was intended to replace the historical social order and create more freedom by eliminating resentment-generating differences. Instead, it makes us slaves of bureaucracy, generating more resentment, closing off avenues of economic and cultural expression, and disabling the resentment-controlling structures of the historical social order (e.g., gender and ethnic roles and identity, shared culture and religion). That's why the liberal order is falling apart.
I second that "meh"
Submitted by pale_rider (not verified) on Fri, 2009-12-18 18:09.
I am sick and tired of that moronic stereotype of the noble savage. There's nothing wrong with self-criticism, but we've come at a point where people are actually making big bucks out of self-loathing.
And that is not to even mention my hatred of those dumb, idiotic, over-the-top, disastrous disaster films.
If you want good entertainment, I recommend Pale Rider. :)
Meh.
Submitted by atheling on Fri, 2009-12-18 17:11.
I won't bother to see this kind of self-loathing, PC garbage. I rarely go to the movies because I detest Hollyweird, and I prefer not to line their hypocritical pockets with my cash.
Besides, CG movies are a crashing bore.