Posted on 12/20/2009 8:27:16 PM PST by DogByte6RER
When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?
Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.
Spoilers...
Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate.
Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?
Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California's redwood cathedrals and Brazil's tropical rainforest. The moon's inhabitants, the Na'vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we've seen in Hollywood movies for decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at io9.com ...
I think the entire idea is to not support offensive movies with costly ticket purchases. This means that one must research the movie before taking the $$$ plunge.
I'll plunk down my $$$ for Avatar when I've read enough to convince me it's not a platform for propoganda.
The Comanche was the ultimate "terrorist", and after a few decades the US learned exactly how to deal with them. That solution was known as the "Texas Rangers", who constantly stayed on the offensive.
It's a shame we didn't take that lesson to heart.
Good on you!! it was a wise decision to not expose your kids to the influences of TV
I quit going to movies for one simple reason...the money winds up being used to promote the causes of the progressive left.
I saw it on a small screen...
It’s “Dances with Wolves” moshed up in a reverse “Battlefield Earth”
Lots of battles with minimal gore, one ‘sex’ scene without sex, no humorous character to break up the pace....it was OK.
I hear the 3-D theater is where to see the special effects.
Battlefield Earth was better - LOL
Except that central Ca from the Grapevine to Fresno is becoming a desert since they cut off the farming irrigation. All the topsoil has blown away from generations of development due to the water distribution policies.
**Battlefield Earth was better - LOL**
OUCH!!! I’ve only known 2 that were WORSE than battlefield earth.
Mark
Mark
This is the fantasy/psychosis/hubris of the liberal mind. They don't like what they are. So they try to become something else. And of course, they know better what the other people need than the people themselves, so they become their leaders. Or try to.
Mark
that was my point
Actually it was the white liberal critic who found it to be a white race fantasy. Then the black liberal commenter says, lighten up and don’t do the typical white-person-finds-white-racism-in-the-movie analysis. This was an interesting table turn because it denied the white critic the opportunity to atone for her white guilt by exposing those themes.
“Horsefeathers, it is commie crap. “
Was ‘Titanic’ a class warfare screed? Were the Terminator films warning against an advanced Robotic/Military Industrial takeover? You can find all sorts of thing if you look hard enough. I saw this the other day and it’s no different from myriad “undercover cop falls in and sympathsies with the criminals” stories.
Why are you defending it?
‘The Terminator’ and ‘Titanic’ were stalinist agitprop? LOL!
Ah! She wanted to be the super-duper-double-dog-not-racist white person (they actually argue over things like that).
Exactly!
In T2 on the other hand, the cop is a metallic killing machine, while biker gang look-alikes are the good guys. Misguided scientists are building evil nuclear weapons that will destroy us all, in a "day after" nuclear freeze-ers script. Men are useless unless programmed to protect juvenile deliquents, while ranting man-hating feminist assasins pretending to be Che are the heros. It was made that way primarily to trash the dangerously conservative popularity of the original, and it utterly wrecked the entire franchise as a result.
As for Titanic, it is a soppy chick flick at bottom, with such evil villians as it manages to dream up consisting of useless rich people who deserve to die. Heroism consists of giving up your place on a life raft and quietly dying like you are supposed to, especially men. Last I checked, that was approximately the green position on human life in the first place.
Good points but...
the ‘metallic killing machine’ actually killed a cop and took his shape. Bad guys dressed as cops to fool their victims are a staple of crime fiction. Just as the Arnold terminator looked like a biker because he embarrased a goup of real bikers who were portrayed as morons.
I always thought Linda Hamilton’s ranting suvivalist in T2 came off like an self important twit and was completely unconvincing. It almost seemed like Cameron was making fun of her. The nuclear subplot was always there...described in the first film complete with scenes in a ravaged post nuclear future. It was just dramatized in the present in T2. As for killing the franchise, it was extremely popular both critically and commercially. It’s still very popular. It’s the non-Cameron sequels no one cares about.
As for Titanic, ‘women and children first’ is a standard Victorian/Edwardian propriety. It has more in common with Chivalry then the Green Mvt. Since it’s set in that period in British history the Class divisions were almost an inevitable subtext.
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