On Avatar

On Avatar

I saw Avatar last night. There's a lot to say about it. First, let me get the whole race thing out of the way. Not because it's unimportant -- it's not, and the critics are right and correct in their complaints. It is sort of Dances With Wolves or any other film where the white folks are evil colonialists and the blue folks are going to teach them something. And it is told through the POV of the Earth person, rather than the people who adopt him. And yeah, he saves them all. Even more importantly, though, is that this particular trope is included mindlessly in the service of another one, that of technology and modern values against pastoralism and valuing the natural world. I think that this is really the kernel of all the race issues people have noticed, but haven't mentioned. For me the real problem is that, in setting up the dichotomy of 'people in touch with nature' vs. 'people who have destroyed their world through greed and technology,' Cameron et al. have clearly not considered that race and questions of race will exist in the minds of the audience. TO me, that's something worse.

But.

I'm not sure how I feel about this film, because there's a lot more to it, or maybe I'm just wanting to read more into it. At any rate, I'm going to go through it point by point, so if you don't want to read about the film, stop here.

Still here?

First -- The Na'vi are just really cool looking. Giant blue stripey vaguely feline people. I can see how people complain about the whole Native American look, but honestly, I wasn't so much bothered with that, if only because their clothing and hair could have been just as much Native American, but from South America -- with a touch of Aborigine, really. So if there is a complaint here, it really should be that Cameron and his team picked and chose traits that seemed to go with people who live in a tropical rainforest, and then tweaked them a bit for the Na'vi who live on the plains and near the sea. In some ways, this was distracting, but it also made sense, in that a pastiche of different looks and traits pulled from a lifetime of reading National Geographic (that's what it felt like, at least) may have been as much about trying to extrapolate from what we know of Earth, and applying it to another planet. So in a way, you can reverse engineer this to a conversation where the filmmakers said to each other, "So we want pastoral people, hunter-gatherers, with an animistic belief system -- what can we take from Earth?"

Thus, what we learn of Na'vi custom is pretty much derivative/imitation: for example, the Na'vi thank their prey when they make a kill, and try to make the kills as clean as possible. They don't kill unless it's necessary, but they certainly aren't peaceful. There are snippets of dialogue that tell us that there have been wars between the different Na'vi people, and we know they will defend their territory. They can also tap into the spirit of their world, and to the spirits of all the dead. But when it comes down to it, we do have the eternal conflict between colonizers and colonized, and one of the real problems in this film is that that's really secondary to the plot. As far as I can tell, the filmmakers really weren't thinking about race or colonialism at all. The Na'vi are less a people, and more caricatures who serve as foils in a cautionary tale about not appreciating Nature.

Nature, or rather, the planet Pandora, is one of the stars of the film. The depictions of the planet are stunning, and really, I think it's worth seeing the film if only to see the world-building. It's amazing and gorgeous. We mostly see the rainforest parts of the planet. It's like, and not like, every rainforest we've ever seen. The plants are gorgeous and huge, and many of them phosphorescent and beautifully coloured. There are misty mpuntains that float. This was problematic for me. That much disbelief I have trouble suspending. Having said that, they are sooo cool! The animals are pretty cool -- there are canine-like hunters, hammer-headed-rhino-like giant critters, something vaguely huge and feline, and dragon-things. It's as if the filmmakers took examples from both dinosaurs and early mammals, and combined them to make something new. I think it's pretty effective. For me, though, the best, and most creative part of the animals is that all of them have appendages that can be joined to a set of feelers in the tails of the Na'vi. Joining appendages allows the animals to join thoughts. It's a bit of a jar to realize that only the Na'vi seem to be able to jack in and impose their will on others; in a planet where everything is clearly very interconnected, there is still a clear hierarchy, and the anthropoid critters are on top. The Dragon-things are pretty high up the chain, too, it seems. Unlike the six-legged horse-critters, who can bond temporarily with any rider, the dragon-things bond only with one Na'vi, and for life. Still, easier than on Pern, due to the lack of telepathy needed, harder 'cos they try to kill the person who wants to bond with them. (yeah, problems with number in that last sentence -- sue me!)

Enter into this pristine landscape People from Earth. It seems to be the same Earth that spawned the Alien films, an Earth where man has destroyed most of the environment through greed and warfare, and giant corporation(s?) with mercenary armies have led expansion further out into space. This particular group is searching for Unobtainium, an element that exists to take the piss. And the corporation will do anything for it. Enter our Avatars, Na'vi versions of humans who can link into their empty brains and drive the bodies from comfy (not if you're claustrophobic) couches that have some sort of embedded psi-links. I'm not even going to go into how bad the science here is, because it's a cool idea, after all. But there's also a huge plot hole. Our hero, Jake, is supposed to gain the trust of the Na'vi by joining their group, which he does, and trying to negotiate a peaceful move of their homes away from the larges source of snipe nests unobtainium. So he's there long enough to gain trust, live with them learn their ways, and become one of them ... and never bothers to tell them why the Earth folk are there??? Really? Really? You'd think if he cared, he might have warned them somewhere in the process.

But obviously, he can't, because that would ruin the whole Evil Corporate Interests Ruining Nature For Fun And Profit &tm; theme. Because really, the crazed colonel in charge of the mercs wants to kill all the Na'vi, just because. He is that mean. He doesn't even care about the snipe unobtainium, just doing the soldier thing and killing blue cat-people and mocking the scientists.

And so we come to the end of the film where the bad guys look to be winning, until lo and behold, a plucky Latina pilot helps to rally the scientists to get Jake into his Avatar so that he can lead the Na'vi against his own kind. But will they trust him? And why should they listen? they have a war leader, after all. Ah, but Jake listened to his teacher and mate when she told him about how, in times of crisis, the Na'vi had been brought together by the rider of the super-dragon-thing...

Yeah, he dumps his dragon for a better model, rallies all the Na'vi, and prays to the planet to help. And the planet answers, but not till Cameron has killed off the plucky Latina and a bunch of Na'vi, not to mention the leader of the scientists (Sigourney Weaver, who is as good as ever). And then, in a terribly written ending, Jake tells us that "the aliens" were forced to leave Pandora, and the planet, or its deity, Eywa, uses its super-special "jack into the planet's energy" powers to transfer Jake's mind to his avatar's body forever and ever.

This is the one thing that I think could really have made an interesting film. The ability to truly change from one thing to another, to place a mind and soul into another body -- can that make a person that thing? One of the chief issues whenever we speak of race, and especially of racism and white allies, is that the white person can never truly know what it is like to be Other. Jake becomes Other, but in a world where there is no one but the Na'vi. Moreover, he never can lose the Earth marine that he was. The Na'vi have accepted him as one of them, but he didn't start out that way. There are so many interesting questions that the film could have asked, but didn't. But then really, should I have expected more?

Something More Important

Something More Important

In case you have not been watching, the sf blogosphere has been full of righteous anger on behalf of author Peter Watts, who was arrested and beaten (beaten and arrested?) by US Border Patrol Officers last Tuesday.

There is a defense fund set up. Links are at the Scalzi post and at Making Light, I think.

I'm not going to get into arguing the fine points. I'm not really worrying about "he should have known better," for example, because US police procedures are not standard around the world, and also? No US police agency that I know of justifies using more force than is necessary to subdue a person. In other countries, it is perfectly normal to question the police as to the reasons for a search of a vehicle. Me, I'd have just done what the cops said -- not because I fear the police, but because I have known enough cops over the years to know that people who don't follow their orders can make *some* cops jumpy, and I don't like to be around jumpy people carrying loaded guns.

The sad truth is that we live in a country where people in positions of authority feel no need to justify their actions. One would think that the border folks might have thought about the fact that borders are places where cultural norms cannot be assumed to be the same. One would think.

More importantly, one would think that people who apparently posed no real threat wouldn't get pepper-sprayed, beaten, and arrested.

On the Recent Brouhaha

On the Recent Brouhaha

For those of you who don't read Whatever, you may have missed John Scalzi's recent post on the pay offered by Black Matrix Publishing, or his follow-up post that rounds up the responses of lots of pro writers and editors. Today, Scalzi points us to a very cranky response by MFA student and aspiring pro writer Jenn Brissett. The comment thread is wonderful. It's useful. It makes clear that Brissett doesn't get it.

So why do I care? Scalzi is not my friend, although I would love to hang out with him some time. I do know some professional sf writers and editors, though, and have been on the fringes of fandom for a long time. I don't see myself writing professionally, because I think I'm not really imaginative enough to write something that isn't jejeune and embarrassingly full of the Mary-Sue-ness that, even though it can sell (I'm looking at YOU, Stephinie Meyer), is not really very good. And if I wrote sf or fantasy, I would want it to be good, because I don't want the people I respect as writers to laugh at me. So yeah. Don't look for fiction by ADM anytime soon.

Right -- so this is why it concerns me at all. There are really a couple of reasons. The first is that, well, I have friends who write, and I want them to be writing for markets that pay relatively well. The second is that, well, I do write. I mean, I write really slowly, and I don't get paid in anything but CV credit, but in some ways I think that's relevant to the larger conversation. One of Brissett's arguments is that publishing with businesses like Black Matrix is still better than not publishing, because it can give a writer pro credits. The counter-argument is that some publishers are better than others; while the publishers who pay well tend to be the best-known and have the big pro reputations (hence good publication credits), many of the smaller and badly paying venues are also not places where the credit will count as much. This is not true for all of them, and I can imagine that, given the right publisher and editor, it might be advantageous for a newbie author to publish for free.

That seems pretty sensible to me, because the same is true for academic publishing. We rank our venues. A peer-reviewed publication is the bottom line, and from there there is a hierarchy of journals and publishers. Oxford UP or Cambridge UP will publish your book? Gold standard for many of us. Non-academic publisher or publisher with no guarantee of peer review? Not so much. There is an assumption of quality based on venue.

The second issue that strikes me about all this, though, is the one of payment. Academics don't expect to make tons of money from their books (although some do bring in some good royalties). To the best of my knowledge, most sf/f authors also do not make ginormous profits. Brissett argues that, by calling publishers like Black Matrix on their sweat-shop like wages, pro authors are acting as gatekeepers who don't want the newbies to get a fair shot. I call shenanigans on that. I may be a medievalist, but dammit, I teach the modern survey, too, and passed macroeconomics. I am familiar with Ricardo and his Iron Law of Wages. It's not about gatekeeping as much as it is looking around us and noting that, when we live in a society that undervalues labor, everybody's wages suck. This is true whether we look at people working at places like Walmart or in the kitchens of restaurants, or at humanities faculty. When people undersell themselves, they make it possible for employers to underpay them. Not only does it drag the wages of everyone else down, but it also encourages people to see what we do as having little worth. Unions can sometimes mitigate that, but honestly, they can't prevent state budget cuts and furloughs, which would not pass if people were properly infuriated and placed a high value on what we do.

Yeah -- that's getting a little close to blaming the victim, and I don't mean to do that. But this also connects back to our discussion of Bennett's History Matters, in terms of women and their occasionally willing participation in the perpetuation of the patriarchal equilibrium. Actually, it just connects back to feminism, plain and simple. If we aren't part of the solution, we are part of the problem -- and Brissett not only is part of the problem, but her arguments are so self-interested that she seems unable to see the same problem the rest of us do, i.e., that a poor wage structure, especially coupled with a venue that does not supply any particular cachet to its writers, is a sucker's game.

A final issue, which make it three for the promised two, is that ... WHAT? As I said above, I'm really sort of on the fringes of fandom. I don't drag myself to cons, even though I am starting to explore options there (Readercon, Sirens, and Wiscon are on my radar these days, although often they are not at convenient times for me to travel). But my overall impression, from being on those fringes for the past 30 or so years, is that the world of sf/f writing and editing is really not one of extraordinarily high, multi-bolted gates. There seem to be an awful lot of pros who got their start writing fanfic or editing fanzines. Smart people with something sensible to say seem to get put on con panels, and get worked into the system, although there does seem to be a flexible, but existing, frontier between the pros and the fans. But by and large, it seems to me to be a world where the talented can reinvent and establish themselves in ways that are not nearly as possible in many other professional areas.

You may wonder what all this is in service of. First, it's my blog and I had too much to say in a comment. Also? I've just successfully avoided marking essays for about 40 minutes! Guess it's time to get on that...

OMG The Vajayjays are killing SF

OMG The Vajayjays are killing SF!!!!!

I hate to give a blog like this any traffic, and I would like to think it's just irony-packed.


But seriously. Really? It can't be real sf if girls like to read it or write it. Because the balls of sf must be made of big and clanky stuff like TESTOSTERONE!!!

International Blog Against Racism Week

International Blog Against Racism Week

Well, it's International Blog Against Racism Week, and I only found out on Wednesday. So I don't have a particularly long or well-thought out post and am instead linking to some things that maybe you would like to see.

The first are from a site called Racebending. The site grew in reaction to the casting for a movie version of Nickelodeon's show, Avatar: the Last Airbender. The world of the show is clearly built with East Asian and Inuit cultural elements. Where the problem is ... well, look at the characters from the show:



Look at the casting:




The film is M. Night Shyamalan's latest attempt at a blockbuster, and the trailer looks pretty damned cool. I certainly thought it looked like I might want to see it, but not now. In fact, I'm going to be boycotting it, and encouraging my friends to do likewise.

It's not the first time this has happened, and it seems to happen a lot with sf/fantasy -- does Hollywood think that, because those genres are still somewhat marginalized, the fans are too few to notice and be annoyed?

If you remember, this sort of thing also happened with the adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin was not pleased with the result. It also regularly happens on bookcovers, where the main characters are depicted as white, even when the text makes it clear that they aren't.

Racebending also points to the video below. It's almost 10 minutes long, but worth watching.



It's interesting that this week is also seeing the winding-down of the furore following the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his own home. There's been a lot of coverage of that on the web, on TV, and pretty much everywhere. HNN has had a lot of coverage, including this column on President Obama's tendency to not confront issues of race very directly. My own opinion is that the arrest was probably fine within the letter of the law, but the circumstances were probably loaded with a lot of racial baggage. Would Gates have been as upset had he not been a black man who has achieved a pretty notable position in the scholarly, and even talking-head, community -- and yet every day has to deal with a society where there are still many forms of institutional racism, and knows very well that people of color are frequently treated differently by the legal system and its representatives than whites? Would Sgt. Crowley have reacted as he did had Gates been white? or even (and my own totally unfounded guess is that this might have had something to do with it) had Crowley not been someone who was supposed to be especially well-versed in issues of racism, and was perhaps even more upset by Gates' alleged abusive language because he thought of himself as an ally?


I am not sure. What I am sure of is that race is still a very real issue in most of the societies in which I and my readers live. There's a poll on Facebook at the moment asking whether Michael Vick should be allowed to return to a career in the NFL after his conviction for participating in a dog-fighting ring. I do sometimes wonder if professional athletes would be held to higher standards if the demographics of professional sports in the US had not changed so dramatically over the last 30 or so years. Along with our, "anyone can make it if they just work hard enough," mythos, we have also developed one where sports save the young black men from a sure future of life in the inner-city, probably dealing drugs, fathering welfare babies, and otherwise caught, inevitably, in a vicious cycle of crime and punishment. So if professional athletes act like criminals, well, what do we expect? There's a subtext of "we know that's what they are" in a lot of the media coverage of the lives of professional athletes.

Um ... no. There are lots of reasons why people commit crimes, but I'm pretty damned sure that race is not a cause, although there are correlations between some of the effects of institutionalized racism, e.g., poverty, poorer education and fewer opportunities for better education, surroundings where people are more exposed to crime, disproportionate incarceration of juvenile offenders, etc., and whether or not a person becomes a criminal.

I don't really have much else to say on the matter. I just thought I should say something, because, well, it's something we should be aware of, and now's a good time to remember that.





Thanks to Tony over at Memorabilia Antonina for one of the links, and to writer Sherwood Smith for originally pointing me to the Avatar stuff.