Avatarred

[WARNING: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS]

Yeah, okay, the CGI was amazing, and on the whole it was entertaining enough.

But now that we've got that out of the way...

Much of the film was distractingly silly, in a way that relates directly to its political failings. A great deal has been said, very masterfully (especially by Annalee Newitz), about the problematic colonial 'saviour' fantasy playing out in Avatar, so I went into the cinema with probing Magical beak at the ready.

(To dispose of this objection quickly: the film features human beings from a corporation backed by armed might who seek, out of a profit motive, to relocate a racially distinct indigenous population with cultural features strongly recalling stereotypical representations of native Americans, namely war paint, 'feathered' clothing, and bows and arrows. If anyone still wishes to argue the film-makers don't specifically invoke colonialism - an intertwined complex of racism, militarism and capitalism - please do so elsewhere.)

The weakest aspect of the story is that Jake Sully, who initially comes as part of the invading force, is apparently divinely ordained as The One who will lead the indigenous people, the Na'vi, to success in their struggle against humanity. Two issues with his portrayal really leap off the screen.

One is the astounding, untenable ignorance with which he approaches the Na'vi and their planet, Pandora. This just defies belief: he goes wandering into a completely alien forest, in a completely alien body, without the faintest clue about the completely alien perils he might face. He wanders off mid-mission to poke completely alien plants that - for all he knows - might eat or poison him; and when faced with gargantuan and dangerous animals he hasn't the foggiest how he ought to respond to them, so he shoots randomly. Despite the enormous expense they have incurred to transport him to Pandora and kit him out in this new blue body, none of his employers sees fit to ground him in even the most basic facts about the hostile environment in which they want him to operate, nor does he - apparently entirely lacking in curiosity - ask.

This is the guy your amazing life-force-embodying-tree-goddess, allegedly calling upon the cumulative wisdom of thousands of sentient beings of times past, chooses to lead the people? ...and specifically, this guy is chosen over the careful, respectful, interested scientist Grace Augustine, for inclusion in the Na'vi community?

Second, the inevitable counterpart to Jake Sully's ignorance is the collapse of the Na'vi into a cartoonish bunch of mystics. There's a lot to be said for the attractiveness of their culture, like the respect for life and biodiversity, but it all becomes undermined by the film-maker's Super Duper Top Priority, i.e. that Jake Sully must be the one to lead them to victory. Quite aside from the fact that at the time of his selection by the floating seeds he appears to be totally, wilfully clueless, there's also the manner in which his eventual leadership is established. Are the film-makers genuinely telling us that in a society where mastering the flying Toruk brings pre-eminence, no one for generations other than this n00b has successfully completed the relatively simple task of flying above it and dropping onto its back? Moreover, the story implies that the Na'vi are so utterly simple-minded that they'll immediately accept not just the help but the leadership of a traitor whose deception and betrayal have just destroyed their sacred home, just so long as he turns up on the back of this red dragon.

This ridiculousness, again, has its source in the imperative that this member of the colonising force must be the one who leads the oppressed people to victory. The film-makers are simply more interested in the colonisers than the colonised, and this ideological perspective warps an otherwise promising story. It's also for this reason that the audience never gets to meet Na'vi who aren't members of the royal family, or to witness any complex dynamics within Na'vi society (by contrast to tensions within the human camp). Heroism is not available to the oppressed group.

All of this makes the movie less believeable, less interesting and less meaningful than it could have been. In other words, it's not critics of Avatar's approach to colonialism and racism who are spoiling the story with their politics. The film-makers have been more than adequate at doing that themselves.

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I am indebted to conversation with Badly Drawn Pig, who astutely points out that this problem may inhere in the very concept of "The One" to begin with, especially when "The One has traditionally always been a dude ... here to save all us sissies".

When you're too good not to be white(r).

This is a post on three instances when you're too good not to be whiter.


(Taken from Otago Daily Times.)
Story 1 - That's Jeff Ma on the left.

He was a very smart Asian-American kid, who at some point of his life at MIT decided that he could outsmart the the game of 21 by counting cards. So he and some other very smart Asian-American mates bandied together, headed down to Las Vegas to count their way to riches.

It was. A. Lot. Of. Money.

Enough of a-lot for someone to write a book about him, which led to Hollywood making a movie about the book, lead starring the very cute Jim Sturgess, who's on the right in the photo. Resemblance between Ma and Sturgess?

Not much.

Because somewhere along the line, someone exercised a little creative genius and rewrote the story: Kevin Lewis (in-book)/ Ben Campbell (in-movie) is a very smart Caucasian-American kid, who at some point of his life at college decided that he could outsmart the game of 21 by counting cards. So he and some other mates (mostly Caucasian-American) bandied together, headed down to Las Vegas to count their way to riches.

It was. A. Lot. Of. Money.

Enough of a-lot for people to want to rewrite your identity into something more palatable for the general masses who have been told that only certain identities and looks have more selling power.

Well, at least they kept the penises. Farmer help us should they'd gone all crazy by reimagining a woman there instead.


Story 2 - In a more fictitious universe, there's the Nickelodeon cartoon series, "Avatar: The Last Airbender". The story has all sorts of culturally period Asian settings and mysticism, with the key character, Aang, looking quite a bit like a Shaolin monk (see picture above; dude who looks quite a bit like a Shaolin monk--yeah, doesn't take a PhD in anthropology to spot, ya?). Not to mention, Chinese calligraphy and pugilistic moves are featured throughout the show. There's also a strong hint of Inuit identity in two of the major 'Water Tribe' characters as well.

It's a very popular show, so like any popular work of art, book, cartoon, comic, video game, stage performance that has an inkling of a narrative, it has to translate into a celluloid blockbuster. (Of course, it has to! What do you mean why!? Question does not compute...) However, during that translation, Asian and coloured actors and actresses died of what comedienne, Margaret Cho, terms SARS (Severe Asian Racism Syndrome), so the producers and casting crew ended up with this:


(Image from Racebending.com.)
Oh.... All the coloured artistes who could have more important roles died, but lots survived for the minor roles of bad guys, of course. As is anti-hero Zuko's role, played by Dev Patel of "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008) fame. Because darker-skinned people evoke more terror in the hearts of many people, ya?

(Question: who scares darker-skinned people? Racists, I wager.)


Story 3 - That's a movie-still of the most divine Jake Gyllenhaal and the very pretty English actress Emma Arterton, in their respective role as a Persian prince and Indian princess. (True fact: Persia's current day Iran.) They're from the movie "Prince of Persia" (2010), which is based on--if you have been following my point about 'good anything = good movie'--the very popular computer game of the same name from the 1990s.

(Images taken from Jordan Mechner.)
True, the computer game was no history lesson to take home to your kids. In fact, judging by the cover art of the game itself, this was just some Orientalist's dream, where you get all the culture and food of an exotic place without having to actually have the burden of factoring in the people from this place too much. (Maybe video games really aren't all that good for kids?) But in the two decades between 1989 and 2010, you'd think people have figured out that there's something really wrong about the Prince of Persia arch.

Oh, by the way, they did of course cast Sir Ben Kingsley, of half-Indian, half-white parentage as Teh Ev!l guy Nizam in the movie. He gets the dark under-eye liner, menacing goatee and doubly ornate wardrobe evil exotica treatment. Kinda like Boris Karioff's Fu Man Chu from the "The Mask of Fu Manchu" (1932).


(Nizam from IMDB; Fu Man Chu from Racebending.com.)
The problem here is that Hollywood is a really big machine that churns out so much material that is so widely marketed and shown everywhere. The Hollywood content is not some accidental, small option at the movies, instead they are the main spread in our movie culture for a lot of people. That sort of long-term normalising is the reason why, even though we still don't have a lot of Caucasians in our midst, it is really difficult to not factor them in our imagination, hence the prevalence in seeing Caucasian models selling anything and everything. And it has seeped so deeply into our consciousness that it's actually not a big deal when we do meet them living in our neighbourhoods or working alongside us as well.


Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, spoke quite recently about her experience with "the single story", of growing up reading English books by English and American authors, meeting other people outside of the Nigeria who have perplexing impressions of her and where she comes from. In the middle of it, she points out quite correctly, I think, the (suggestion) of power that gets embedded in the narrative, which really isn't a new idea but I guess it bears minding:

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.

I would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now, this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. ("The danger of a single story," Jul 2009)

In summary, don't be a Stupid Gherkin you people in your boardrooms talking up ideas about the next movie, television and story. The world is full of stories to be told, and contrary to what you think, a good story can probably sell itself without your white-washing it--not just simply by putting only white people on screen, but also making everyone look a certain type, or talk a certain way (Singapore, I'm looking at you too!). The exposure to more representation can only be a good thing, then maybe brown spectre turkeys don't have to protest against the rail-thin, snow-white fair beauty regiment of contemporary culture, cats don't have to deal with daily racists pretending that they're beyond racism (or "micro aggressive racism", if you will), and you wouldn't have to change a goat's name because it doesn't fit right inside your little non-United Colours of Benetton world. And a badly-drawn, male unfeminist pig feels obliged to write a whole meandering blog post, on top of looking for matching pictured about this.

Now, imagine that!

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Racebending.com is the official international protest movement that's calling for a boycott of the movie "Avatar: The Last Airbender". Pledge your boycott if you agree that the movie-makers have quite a serious case of all-sort-of-fucked-up, and believe that there's room for other coloured folks to take up screen time in more diverse roles.

18 Mighty Mountain Warriors urges best in this skit:

"Paper Heart" - Teh Gayz = Singapore's "Paper Heart".

(Original image from Reel Movie Critic.)
So occasionally this badly drawn, gay male unfeminist pig ventures out of this lovely barn and into the city--not unlike the original pig in the city, Babe. I did it a week ago to watch Paper Heart, a mockumentary about people falling and staying in love. From the internet reviews, I learnt that film involves the central character, Charlyne Yi, interviewing friends, bikers, lawyers, scientists and even a gay couple on their respective definition or experience of love.

People talking about love sounds harmless enough, I thought. Except when I trotted to the cinema did I realise that the movie was rated NC-16.

"Oh dear," I thought, "them gays must have talked about sticking straws into nostrils or something." Little did I realise that it was worse than that, because throughout the movie, there was no gay couple at all! The censors had to eradicate the entire segment, yet stuck an NC-16 rating for reasons unbeknownst to me.

Just what was so offensive about the gay people in the movie?

My cursory research reveals Teh Horraz: they "plug for gay marriage... are also white and male"; in their interview, "the word "sex" goes unmentioned"; the two are "long committed... [though one of them] has an "urn containing the ashes of [his] late boyfriend (referred to as an “ex in a box”)"; he actually "describes the death of [that] boyfriend, his voice breaking as he attempts to lighten the moment with a quip"; the film also doesn't "dramatise the romance of [the] two burly gay New Yorkers the same way" other interviewees were in a puppet-theatre setup mastered by Yi (see picture below).

(Picture from Paper Heart Official Website)
So this is just how we roll in conservatism-loving Singapore.

Two years ago, when an NTU research on Singaporean receptivity of media representation of gay people in the media surfaced in the Straits Times, with the findings that "68.6per cent of respondents 'generally held negative attitudes', 22.9per cent had positive attitudes and 8.5per cent were neutral", these results were used to justify Singapore not repealing its anti-sodomy law, Penal Code Section 377A. The rationale, which a lot of people used, hinged on the findings obtained from this study, suggesting that Singaporeans were far too conservative to accept homosexuals content on their television, much less in real-life.

Well and good, except for the question of just how much gay representation does the average Singaporean receive in our local media in the first place? Accounting the fact that the media authorities exercise such a heavy-hand at not only preventing positive homosexual content from appearing, but also quick to penalise the media providers who rock the boat with a hefty fine.

People obviously need to be shielded from the terrorising images of gay people because of their homosexual lifestyle and agenda. Just read this subversive description of an average day in gay-agenda manoeuvring undertaken by this gay man:

I work my ass off at an unfulfilling job. I pay my bills. I pay my taxes. I do my best to keep my house in order. I try to be a good citizen. I try to be a good neighbor. I worry about the future of the planet. I recycle. I'm usually in bed by 10:00 PM. I give to charity. I help others in need. I just want to have a comforting home. I feed the cat. I visit with the elderly. I go to Mass. I work in my garden. I argue with my spouse. I support high school sports. I just want to have a few good friends who understand and appreciate me. And on the weekend, I watch a film, drink a few beers, and go to bed. (Source.)

Appalling, simply appalling!!!

Clearly, Singaporeans' negative reactions to homosexual content--however imagined--supports the case of continuing the status quo, because we all know that positive or neutral representation of homosexuals in the media will not actually help to educate people's image of gay people. We are after all moving away from a conservative society, where the idea of open and accepted homosexuality is simply new to a lot of people and wrought with misconceptions--like all new things, get old and familiar with time, to a Conservative society, where the idea of open and accepted homosexuality must actively be kept new and wrought with misconceptions for its people--eternally other, never familiar.

So that's why Teh Gayz had to go in the movie. Flying Spaghetti Monsters forbid that we might actually uncover the essential point that makes gay people gay: the heart, which strangely enough isn't so different as it is similar to the average, straight Singaporean.