[Yardstick]

I can't believe I'm having to explain this to you.

We worry precisely because those without the background to discern will accept Cameron's message without knowing they're being fed a message, or without understanding his agenda. The concern isn't that Avatar will sway savvy conservatives (or savvy liberals for that matter); it's that it will sway unsavvy apolitical types and young people.

It's hard to believe anyone could think that propaganda is only effective when it is recognized as propaganda, when in fact it's just the opposite.

[aruanan]

We worry precisely because those without the background to discern will accept Cameron's message without knowing they're being fed a message, or without understanding his agenda.

And I can't believe that you say one thing and then another. Earlier you said that people without a background to detect his motives for making the film would see only a film. Now you're saying the exact opposite, that they will unconsciously adopt his beliefs about why he made the movie but which is not visible on the screen.

Your idea of a "message" infiltrating the minds of the susceptible is about on the level of Frank Garlock of Bob Jones University saying that because James Taylor is mentally ill those who listen to his music will become mentally ill through "sympathetic vibrations" induced in them by the music in the same way that a tuning fork is able induce another tuning fork to vibrate. Just because A says that B means C doesn't mean anyone seeing B will necessarily think or believe C if C is never explicitly a part of B.

The message seen in the film is that bad guys who try to screw over relatively powerless people get done in by their own badness in the end. This is an excellent moral message and one that has been made into films innumerable times. An outcome of the film that would have made it morally objectionable would have been the leadership of the Na'Vi agreeing to let the aliens blow up the home tree, get the ore, and basically gut his world for a sweet piece of the pie and a condo on one of the other moons.