Episode 123: Transcript
Episode: 123: Why we Disagree About Avatar
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about science fiction, fantasy, science, and futurism that shrank ourselves down and then couldn't reach the re-enlarging button. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of the Young Adult space fantasy trilogy that ends with Promises Stronger Than Darkness this April, and also I'm writing New Mutants for Marvel Comics.
Annalee: [00:00:21] And I’m Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer, and I actually am in the quantum world right now because I am never gonna be large again. But luckily in the macro world, you can buy my new novel, The Terraformers, which is coming out January 31st, so very soon, so you can pre-order it now. Pre-orders really help, so please do smash the order button at your local indie.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:47] Cosigned, yeah. Pre-orders are more important than ever now.
[00:00:51] So today we're going to talk about Avatar: The Way of Water, the very long delayed sequel to that 2009 film about blue sparkle people on a lush and beautiful moon where everything wants to kill you personally. And I'd say we have conflicted feelings about this film. We're gonna get into how it deals with environmentalism, how it deals with race, and how it deals with gender.
[00:01:15] Also, on our mini episode next week, we're gonna be talking about Andor, that Star Wars TV show and how we kind of wish that all Star Wars was like that. That smart and that nuanced.
Annalee: [00:01:26] And by the way, I just wanted to remind you that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners on Patreon, and right now we're at a funding level where we can completely pay for hosting this podcast. We pay our amazing producer, Veronica Simonetti for each podcast. But you know what? Me and Charlie Jane, we don't get squat. We still are doing this for free, and so if you could kick in five bucks a month, that might help us get paid a little bit for all the preparation we do and all the wacky ass shit we say to you for your benefit.
[00:02:02] So please consider checking out our Patreon. If you sign up, you get mini episodes every other week that are pretty substantive and you'll learn lots of cool stuff. You also have access to our Discord channel where we hang out all the time and talk about writing. TV and all that other cool crap, and everything that you give just goes back into making our opinions more correct. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:28] Okay, so let's go to Pandora.
Annalee: [00:02:31] Woo.
[00:02:31] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:02:57] So before we get started, I have three disclaimers that I wanna throw out there.
Annalee: [00:03:03] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:03] The first disclaimer is that you know, there's gonna be spoilers for both the 2009 Avatar, but also Avatar: The Way of Water. If you haven't seen those films and think you're gonna see them, you might wanna wait to listen to this until you have seen them.
[00:03:19] Second disclaimer is that one of the writers who worked on Avatar: The Way of Water was Josh Friedman, who is a friend of both of ours, and I personally worked for him five years ago. The third disclaimer is that we actually did not see Avatar: The Way of Water in IMAX or 3D because of COVID concerns.
[00:03:38] We saw it in a tiny theater on a smallish screen in 2D. But we still, I feel, got the theatrical experience.
Annalee: [00:03:46] All right, Charlie Jane. I'm glad we got those disclaimers out of the way. I feel like a burden has been lifted. We’re ethically pure now. So why don't you start us off—
Charlie Jane: [00:03:52] So pure.
Annalee: [00:03:53] Yeah, we’ve always been, I think, but now even more so
[00:04:00] So Charlie Jane, please just explain the plot of the Avatar movies, if you can.
Avatar clip: You are not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora. Ladies and gentlemen, respect that fact every second of every day. If there is a hell, you might want to go there for some R&R after a tour on Pandora. Out there beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for Jujubes.
[00:04:38] We have an indigenous population of humanoids called the Na’vi. They're fond of arrows dipped in a neurotoxin that'll stop your heart in one minute, and they have bones reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fiber. They are very hard to kill.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:56] Okay, so basically it's the future. Earth is kind of rapidly becoming uninhabitable due to environmental blarg. And so humans have discovered this other lush, beautiful moon called Pandora, where the atmosphere is not quite breathable to humans and there's an indigenous species called the Na’vi.
[00:05:15] And so for humans to be able to kind of move freely on the planet, they develop a technology where they grow a Na’vi body that they can port a human consciousness into, and eventually through shenanigans, Jake Sully becomes just like a full-time Na’vi. His human body is destroyed.
Annalee: [00:05:31] Jake Sully who's a human, who's part of this exploratory force that's gone to the moon.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:36] Yeah. And he kind of goes “native” and joins the Na’vi and helps them to fight against the humans and he falls in love with. A Na’vi named Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana. And so in the second movie, Jake and Neytiri now have kids and they've been living on the planet for a long time and the humans have been gone because we drove them off the planet. But now the humans are back.
[00:05:58] And in a surprising twist, the antagonist from the first movie, Colonel Miles Quaritch, a human who died at the end of the first movie, has been resurrected in a Na’vi body and is now kind of using his Na’vi body to try to attack the other Na’vi. And it's sort of about almost every major character in the movie now is in a Na’vi body, and it's about them kind of struggling over the future of the planet.
[00:06:22] And Jake and Neytiri are forced to go live with an aquatic tribe who live among kind of super intelligent whales, and they have to protect the whales and the tribe. When Colonel Quaritch and the other kind of Na’vi avatars show up to attack them. And that's kind of the gist of it.
Annalee: [00:06:39] That was pretty good, yeah. I think that that summed it up.
[00:06:45] So what did you think of it? Like, did you like it? How did it make you feel? Tell me more.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:50] So, I think my feelings about the first Avatar are very much the same as my feelings about the new one, The Way of Water in that I liked it, I kind of enjoyed it. I felt like it's a really solid action movie. And James Cameron is a really good storyteller and he used these visuals in this sort of immersive world building, which is very carefully thought out and very kind of well constructed to make you really buy into caring about this planet. It's just lush and beautiful.
[00:07:25] And at the same time there are some issues with the film that we're gonna get into later in the episode, especially with kind of the issues around this being a story that really is engineered to appeal to white people about colonization.
And it continues to kind of… Pandora has a certain amount of Pandora-ing, to white people in it. See what I did there. And at the same time, there are other issues in the second movie that I really felt were a big deal, but we're gonna get into those later. But on the whole, I felt like it was a really fun, engaging, emotionally engrossing film.
[00:07:57] And Annalee, what did you think of it?
Annalee: [00:07:59] I did not enjoy it as much as you did. I also thought it was a solid action film. The structure of it, I felt like it was really meandering. It reminded me a little bit of, in terms of the structure, it reminded me a little bit of The Dark Knight, which was another very long movie that kind of has two parts to it. And it almost feels like two shorter movies squished together. And I think for some people that really works as a structure. And for me, not so much. And that's just a personal preference. It's not a judgment of moral goodness.
[00:08:32] I felt like at a certain point this movie went from being one thing and turned into something else and neither of the parts really made sense together and I was really thrown out of the story. I had a really hard time engaging emotionally with the characters because I felt like their struggles, unlike in the first film, which I actually did rather like. In the first film, I felt like the struggles around environment and sovereignty of the indigenous people on the planet felt much more foregrounded. And in this film, and we'll get into this more later, it's much more a film about family. And it felt like the stakes were really low, that it was just about Jake and his sort of immediate nuclear family.
[00:09:20] And it kind of made me think of like Lethal Weapon or some like ‘80s flick where like the whole drama is the bad guys might get my family.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:31] Yeah. I did feel like it got a little more claustrophobic this time. I felt like it did actually kind of… it was much more like, and that's a standard Hollywood thing of I gotta protect my family. At the same time that structure that that bothered you, I understand the parallel with The Dark Knight, which is a movie that definitely kind of just like, has 20 endings.
[00:09:55] I kind of liked that we got to slow down and kind of actually live on Pandora and just kind of hang out. I thought that that was actually kind of an interesting choice that for me kind of worked.
[00:10:08] I also just wanna shout out the thing of having the antagonist from the first movie, you know, Colonel Quaritch now be a Na’vi, which feels like, in a way, sort of a similar kind of evolution to, in Terminator 2 where Arnold Schwarzenegger was the antagonist of the first movie and now he's kind of one of the good guys. Feels like a way of kind of turning things on their side that's really interesting.
Annalee: [00:10:28] I wanted to clarify that I didn't feel like the problem with the movie was that there were long scenes where we just like hang out. I actually kind of like that. I like the scenes where they're just sort of running around and having fun.
[00:10:39] My problem was that it felt like the plot was really meandering. Not so much that it slowed down, but just that it never really went any place.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:49] One of the things that, in addition to being more of a kind of a family story, the new movie is kind of more about assimilation rather than exploration. Annalee, how do you think that changes our view of the story?
Annalee: [00:11:02] It's interesting. I mean, I guess I would push back on the idea that the first film wasn't about assimilation and that this film isn't about exploration. I think they're both, both of the films are about exploration and how that's connected to assimilation when you already have an indigenous group on the planet.
[00:11:22] And I would say one of the things, as many ways as we're going to criticize Avatar, and particularly me. The thing I like is that we see that the settlers, the Earth settlers keep pretending as if all they're doing is exploring and extracting, but the movie never stops reminding us that what they're doing is coming into an already existing civilization and assimilating to it very poorly. And they're perturbing it. They're wrecking it. But at the same time, if they wanna be on that planet, they do have to engage in a certain amount of assimilation. So there we kind of see the clash between the colonizer narrative of we came to a virgin land versus the indigenous narrative, which is like a bunch of assholes came from the sky and pooped all over us and tried to kill us.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:14] Yeah. And I feel like that's a really, really good point. And I feel like part of what we don't really ever fully get in either of these films is the perspective of the Na’vi on, like humans are showing up and imposing their human values. Definitely this movie has a very strong point of view that Jake is right about everything.
Annalee: [00:12:34] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:36] Even when he is wrong, he's right. And we don't really get like Na’vi being like, what is this human concept you're trying to enforce upon us? But I do also think that you're right, that because part of what's baked into the concept of the films is that you can't walk the surface of the planet unless you're either in Na’vi body or you're wearing like a mask, a kind of face covering that gives you oxygen. And so you either have to be constantly dependent on this assistive device or you have to kind of be almost cosplaying as one of the indigenous people.
[00:13:12] Even if like Colonel Quaritch or some of the people in the first movie, you're not that sympathetic to the indigenous people, but you still have to kind of take on their appearance, which I think is a really interesting concept. And it's one that the movie, to its credit, does kind of play with, but also kind of is a little unconscious about at times.
[00:13:31] And speaking of that thing of like cosplaying as another identity or whatever, Annalee, back in 2009, you were one of the first people to kind of point out that the original Avatar was a white savior fantasy and I wanna send you a quote from the essay that you wrote 13 years ago which caused a lot of controversy at the time, and I'm wondering if you could just read this paragraph.
Annalee: [00:13:52] Yeah, so this essay was called “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar,” and I think my Wikipedia page was permanently changed because so many white people were pissed that I asked this question.
[00:14:04] So this is what I said. “These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they're complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color, their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the alien cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color. It's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the oppressive white outside.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:59] Yeah. There's so much great stuff in just that one paragraph. There's so much to unpack there, and it's just, I feel like that essay still really holds up. I just reread it.
Annalee: [00:15:07] Thank you.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:07] And the discussion that it started was actually a great discussion about how we can discuss problematic things while still acknowledging that we like them and, but also the other way around, how you can like something and still kind of acknowledge that it's problematic.
[00:15:22] That thing of like, Jake Sully, it's not enough for him to join the Na’vi. He has to be their greatest hero. He has to be their leader. And you know, he has to be their Taruk Makto, who is like their kind of legendary savior. Just like in Dune, you know, Paul Atreides as to become like the Muad’dib, and it’s a trope. And obviously we talked in our dude episode about how Dune kind of critiques that and undermines it, but also kind of revels in it. And it's like, it's complicated.
[00:15:53] One point you make in that original essay, Annalee, is that Jake Sully still has the power to go back and forth between being human and Na’vi. He can just like, he can go back to being a human anytime he wants, which obviously is not true in this new movie. He is stuck as a Na’vi. That's his body, now. How does it change things when he is just, he's been living as a Na’vi for a long time? Does it erase his kind of origins?
Annalee: [00:16:16] That's a really good question. And this is a question that we are asking about a lot of characters in this film, because of course, Colonel Quaritch, who's the bad guy, he also, his human body has been destroyed, too. So there's a lot of white people, in this case, going around in blue bodies.
[00:16:31] And what I would say is that it changes the story, in terms of Jake, from being a white guilt and white savior story to being a gone native story, which is a different kind of white trope, another white fantasy, if you will. And in the gone native fantasy, you have a character who has all the powers of the colonizing force. In the case of Avatar, he has all this technology, communications equipment, command of weapons and industrial transit. But he also has all of the power of the Na’vi, the indigenous people. All of their knowledge of the forest and the ways of the animals, the hidden pathways, the secret places to go. So that's the gone native white fantasy, is that you get to be a super being because within your brain, you combine both colonizer and colonized knowledge.
[00:17:29] The other thing that happens in this story that I just wanted to call attention to that also fits this gone native trope is that one of the children that Jake has is Kiri, who's played by a de-aged Sigourney Weaver, and she is the, wait for it, the virgin offspring of the Sigourney Weaver character, the scientist who dies at the end of the first Avatar, they have no idea how she got pregnant. So her Na’vi body has a virgin birth, who is Kiri, and Kiri is basically baby Jesus with indigenous powers and she's definitely portrayed as a hybrid. The one way that they tell the difference between Na’vi and avatars is that Na’vi have three fingers, avatars have four. Kiri has four and at the same time she can psychically connect to the moon at any time.
[00:18:30] She constantly is like saving the day and doing a variety of other things, and she's such a colonizer fantasy that she combines this white settler religion, Christianity, this Christian myth of the virgin birth, the superpowered baby Jesus with kind of indigenous iconography. And boy do I have a lot of thoughts about that.And it really, I'm just gonna pause there before I start spitting.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:00] You know, it's funny, I saw the entire movie and did not realize that Sigourney Weaver was playing Kiri until I read an article about it later and I was like, that was Sigourney Weaver? Like it did not… I was actually very surprised by that and I was like, it was a little strange. It was a little bit strange. I'm interested in that character. I'm interested to see where she goes in the next three Avatar movies because there’s three more coming.
Annalee: [00:19:23] Well, dude, she is baby Jesus. So she's gonna be the chosen one.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:29] I mean, she definitely, you know, obviously we don't know that Sigourney Weaver's character was a virgin in the first movie, but she was an immaculate conception.
Annalee: [00:19:36] No, it's her avatar. So I mean—
Charlie Jane: [00:19:39] Her avatar… right.
Annalee: [00:19:39] I mean, it's possible that her avatar was getting some humping in, but I don't think so.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:47] I mean, you know, we'll just have to wait for the ultra ultra extended cut of the first Avatar to find out.
[00:19:53] But yeah, I mean, so I wanna quote like, kind of continuing on the theme of race in this film, which is such an important part of it because James Cameron has stated explicitly that this is a kind of fictionalized version of the settling of the west of the Western United States and it is a fictionalized version of contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans. Like he's straight up about that.
[00:20:16] And I want to quote like a funny line from The Verge’s review of Avatar: The Way of Water by former io9 writer Charles Pulliam-Moore, who gave it a mostly positive review, but he then said, “It's both funny and cringe inducing to watch Jake Sully unironically pontificate about the dangers of the invading sky people with a straight face while his alien dreadlocks are blowing ever so slightly in the wind.” And you know, when I saw those dreadlocks, I had this moment of like, woof. And then there's actually a white kid named Spider who also has dreadlocks. And you know, at this point I've had a couple decades of being told by Black people, among others, that white people with dreadlocks is just, it's, it's—
Annalee: [00:20:55] It's a red flag.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:58] This visceral sign of appropriation and of course it does get complicated because in the film we meet a seagoing tribe, the Metkayina, who are very closely based on Maori traditions. To this film's credit, Maori actor, Cliff Curtis, plays the leader of the Na’vi, Tonowari, but at the same time, many indigenous activists, especially in North America, are criticizing the film as viewing indigenous history through a white lens and have been urging a boycott of it.
[00:21:30] And here's a, a segment from City News featuring native civil rights attorney Brett Chapman, speaking about it.
Brett Chapman: [00:21:36] They're appropriating, what appeals to the white gaze historically about indigenous people. They’re appropriating that and then they're putting it in outer space, right, to make a movie and sell movie tickets.
Annalee: [00:21:47] Yeah. You know, and we recently watched a science fiction movie that was made by and starring indigenous people called Slash/Back, which was…
Charlie Jane: [00:21:56] It was so good.
Annalee: [00:21:59] It was so incredible. It was a really interesting portrait of an Inuit community that's very remote, that has a deeply scary encounter with aliens. And it has so many commonalities Avatar in some ways, but just takes them in a really different direction. Like it has a lot of cool scenes of hunting and creating identity through hunting, but it just… I don't know how to quantify it. But what did you think? How did it take it in a different direction than Avatar?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:30] Yeah. I mean, Slash/Back, it's obviously a very low budget film. I think you can, you can watch it on PPV or whatever, and I highly encourage you to watch it. It has a lot in common with The Thing.
Annalee: [00:22:44] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:44] There's an alien that can, shapeshift, that can take on the appearance of other people, and it is very much about like, kind of a monster that is assimilating itself, but not really. And these teenagers who have seen every horror movie ever use their knowledge of horror movies but also their friendship and their understanding of the local terrain to trap and kill this creature. And yeah, so I think if you want to see science fiction made from an indigenous perspective, highly recommend Slash/Back.
[00:23:15] So, you know, one thing I noticed this time around is that the refusal to kind of accept Jake and his family is depicted as a form of prejudice on the form of the Metkayina. And like people keep pointing out that they have the wrong number of fingers, and it's shown as being kind of like, oh, they're being unreasonably, not accepting Jake and his family, even though we know Jake and his family are such good people.
[00:23:37] Do you feel like that that kind of says something about how this film handles issues of assimilation and appropriation?
Annalee: [00:23:44] Yeah, I mean, the thing that really struck me about, say, appropriation in this film is the fact that it uses this kind of pan-indigenous identity for the Na’vi. The Na’vi are just this mishmash of Maori and rainforest tribes and some aspects of North American tribes.
[00:24:11] There’s no science fictional reason for it. It's not like they're the descendants of indigenous people from Earth. Like why do they have Maori tattoos? It feels like actual indigenous people are being turned into kind of simulations. They're being turned into fantasy characters. And I mean, there's a lot of ways to appropriate, but that one felt particularly dehumanizing to me because it's sort of like saying actual human identities are in truth, just science fictional fantasy identities. Does that make sense?
Charlie Jane: [00:24:51] It does. And we've talked about this in our episode. I feel like we did an episode where we talked about allegory. Like how on Star Trek, often you have aliens who are like, these aliens are Jewish people.
Annalee: [00:25:00] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:02] These aliens are Black people or you know, or in Star Wars you have the Chinese aliens. And I feel like it’s an oft-criticized trope and I feel like Avatar does skate kind of close to it in a lot of ways.
[00:25:17] But I'm also just interested in the thing of like, for example, the film doesn't really want to grapple with, is there a meaningful distinction between Jake who was born on Earth, who's a human wearing a Na’vi meat suit and the kids who were born on Pandora, who have never known anything else. There's something, there's an interesting story there about like the first generation of immigrants or colonizers or whatever, and the second generation and do we view them the same way? And the film just really doesn't want to get into that.
Annalee: [00:25:49] No, it really doesn't. And I think this is, again, to go back to the white fantasy of going native. I think that's part of it, is that we're just supposed to accept that Jake is now Na’vi and that there's certain people who might not accept him for one reason or another, but that it's not because of his human privilege. It's because he comes from the forest and they come from the sea.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:15] Right.
[00:26:16] Okay. We're gonna take a real quick break and then when we come back we're gonna talk about environmentalism, gender, and colonization versus resource extraction.
[00:26:25] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:26:31] So one of the reasons why I have a huge soft spot for the Avatar films is that they are such strong environmentalist parables, and they're not subtle about it. They are very kind of in your face about like environmentalism and saving our natural habitat, and they've sold on an order of magnitude, countless more tickets than say An Inconvenient Truth.
[00:26:31] But this time around the environmental parable is a little different. Apparently in between the first and second movie where they found another source of unobtainium. Like they, they renamed Obtanium because they could just get it somewhere else. And so now…
Annalee: [00:27:04] Wait, did they really do that? No.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:07] No, I’m just joking. I'm just joking that like—
Annalee: [00:27:10] Did I miss that?
Charlie Jane: [00:27:12] Nobody talks about unobtaining.
Annalee: [00:27:13] No, they don't.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:16] Maybe they're still mining it, but we don't hear about that. This time around the focus is much more on whaling, which leads to some scenes that were really, really upsetting.
[00:27:23] And Annalee, how do you feel about this whaling storyline?
Annalee: [00:27:27] So, the thing that really bugged me about all the scenes of hunting the Tulkun is that we're supposed to understand that this is a terrible thing that we're doing. The Tulkun are human creatures, basically. They have art and philosophy. So they're hunting people and yet the film focuses so much for so long on all the cool machines they're using all the cool like deadly weapons and it's like really exciting. It kind of is reminiscent of some of the action scenes in Aliens and it just feels like there's too much loving focus on this thing that we're not supposed to like. And the violence is so intense and in your face, and I felt like it turned the corner from saying, this is a horrible, brutal thing, to being like, hey, this is kind of awesome. It was celebrating the thing at the same time that it was condemning it, and I just felt like it was too ambivalent. It was too in love with the technology and in love with the hunt for me to be comfortable.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:30] Yeah. I actually am gonna push back on that because I feel like, I mean, James Cameron really, say what you want about him, he knows how to kind of manipulate the audience or kind of how to kind of get the audience in the palm of his hand. And I feel like he is very consciously, on the one hand, creating a sequence that's exciting, but that's also horrifying and revolting. And he keeps finding ways to remind us, mostly through having the character of Spider, who is there on the kind of bridge of the whaling ship, just reacting with utter horror every step of the way.
[00:29:03] I feel like we keep being jabbed with this reminder that this is horrifying. This is like a sentient, more intelligent than humans. We're told over and over again that this is a sentient person who is being murdered in this gruesome, awful way in order to harvest this tiny amount of this life extending substance that can be used to make humans immortal.
[00:29:25] And I feel like the film is actually very intentional about kind of drawing us in and making us kind of identify with the humans doing this, but then stabbing us in the face with the realization that this is an atrocity. And I feel like Cameron wants us to kind of see both sides so that he can see our complicity in this kind of environmental destruction back on earth.
[00:29:46] But you know, I think that you can read it both ways.
Annalee: [00:29:50] I think that as I was watching it, it kept reminding me of movies that show rape scenes where we're supposed to understand that rape is bad. And yet the movie will spend a long, long time showing us the scene and it almost feels like it's getting off on it, even though of course it's very bad and we're condemning it.
[00:30:09] And that was how the whaling scenes felt to me, was that it was… There’s ways of showing that something is terrible without getting us to see that it's also cool. I just think that it could have been handled a lot better and I wound up feeling really grossed out by it.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:27] Yeah. I mean, you know, I feel like, in a way, how you feel about that whaling scene is gonna shape how you feel about the entire film. Because I feel like even apart from all the questions around appropriation and colonizer narratives that we talked about in the first half, that's really the heart of the film in a way. And if you view it my way and see it as, this is the film really kind of hitting us with this environmentalist message in a way that's seductive and then horrifying, then you'll like the film and if you don’t, you won’t.
Annalee: [00:30:56] Maybe, so.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:57] To me, part of what made it work was that we have that character played by Jemaine Clement, who just straight up is like, these are beautiful, super intelligent creatures that have mathematics and philosophy and music, and I'm participating in killing them because it funds my research.
[00:31:14] And I was like, that character who we don't spend a lot of time with, is such a monster that it just kind of like shapes how I viewed that entire sequence.
Annalee: [00:31:23] See I felt… I totally agree. I thought his character was fascinating. I did wish that we'd had a little bit more of him and I actually felt like he was the point of view of that scene and that he was like, yep, I'm just doing it anyway, ‘cause money , and you know—
Charlie Jane: [00:31:41] I mean, yeah.
Annalee: [00:31:41] And that like, he's like, yeah, these are great creatures, but killing 'em is worth so much cash. So I’m not sure that that scene is what made me not like the film, but I see what you're saying that that’s kind of the aesthetic of the movie is to suck you into every scene with the action and then occasionally tell you no, but that was bad action. And oh, but this other action is really great. And it's like, well, how am I supposed to tell the difference when you film everything exactly the same and all of it is really violent.
[00:32:17] So, you know, with a few exceptions, of course, ,
Charlie Jane: [00:32:20] I read an interview with James Cameron where he kind of says that he cut 10 minutes of gun violence out of this film because he didn't want to celebrate gun violence. He feels like he has done that too much in his career. He doesn't wanna show guns as cool.
Annalee: [00:32:31] That's cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:31] So he clearly was thinking about this.
Annalee: [00:32:35] It's funny because as I was watching, I kept thinking this movie is like, what if Terminator 2 and Titanic had a baby? And you know, it's like, because there's all this stuff with like dun, dun, dun dun dun dun [Mimicking Terminator theme]. And then at the same time there's all this like beautiful ocean stuff and happy people dancing.
[00:33:00] So I think the aesthetics sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. And I fell through a lot of the cracks where it didn't, and I think you just jumped over 'em. And both are fair ways to watch the film.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:11] Yeah. One thing I found a little frustrating about this film is that we were kind of teased with the idea that we would learn more about like the world mind of Pandora, which is, we know that there's something going on there. That there's some secret about how this planet is kind of sentient and because there's five, five films in this series, I'm gonna guess we're not gonna really know what the deal is with Pandora until 2028, when Avatar 5 comes out.
[00:33:39] But you know, Kiri the virgin, Jesus, the Jesus child played by Sigourney Weaver.
Annalee: [00:33:44] The virgin birth has this special connection with Eywa, the spirit of Pandora.
Avatar 2 clip: [00:33:51] But I feel her. I hear her heartbeat. She's so close.
[00:34:11]So what does her heartbeat sound like?
[00:34:19] Mighty.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:24] So what do we think about that?
Annalee: [00:34:25] I think this is probably my favorite part of the Avatar series. I can't wait to know more. I love the idea of a planet where all the life forms are networked, either through some kind of magical hand wavery, or maybe it's ancient technology. I am very much there for it. I still, not to keep beating my anti-Christian drum, I still wish that we didn't have to have virgin birth Jesus girl lead us through it.
[00:34:56] Like I could really do without the, like somehow for some reason the Na’vi have Catholic rosary beads that they pull out a couple of times.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:04] Oh, I forgot about that.
Annalee: [00:35:06] I was just like, dude, stop it! Why did the Na’vi have Catholicism?
Charlie Jane: [00:35:13] I mean there's… lots of cultures have beads, dude. Beads are [crosstalk].
Annalee: Yeah… Did you, anyway, that scene, it was very clearly like an homage to kind of rosary counting, which again, is a very beautiful tradition. I just didn't think it belonged in the hands of the Na’vi. So, I'm psyched for this. I hope that these movies can get back on track with paganism. Okay. Can we just like get rid of all the Christian allegory please? Thank you.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:39] I mean, you know, it's hard because it's so baked into our culture, but, so now I wanna get into a thing that like is kind of the heart of what I found most troubling about this film, other than all the stuff about whiteness that we talked about in the first half, which is, gender.
[00:35:55] This is a movie about fathers and sons, and it sets up this very clear parallel between Jake, who's the good father, according to the movie, and Miles Quaritch, who's the bad father according to the movie. And I came away from this thinking that even though the movie wanted us to think that Jake was the good father, I felt like they were both terrible dads.
[00:36:14] And Annalee, what do you think about that?
Annalee: [00:36:16] I wanna hear why you thought they were both terrible dads. Like, I’m here for it,
Charlie Jane: [00:36:21] Okay, so Miles Quaritch, obviously terrible dad, because he shows up. He finds out he has a son, and he immediately starts just brutalizing his own kid and nearly murders his own kid at one point. And then we're supposed to think that his own kid has decided that they're okay because he doesn't actually murder his own kid. And that's a whole thing.
Annalee: [00:36:39] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:39] But Jake is supposed to be the good dad because he's protecting his family, and the film tells us this every five minutes.
Annalee: [00:36:46] Yeah, I wanted to just, I actually, as we were watching, I wrote down this line that he repeats again and again, and the line is, “The father protects. It's what gives him meaning.”
Charlie Jane: [00:36:57] Oh my God. Every time he said that, I like bit my own tongue so much that I was like tasting just like blood.
Annalee: [00:37:01] I kept hearing like the Terminator music as he said it. Dun, dun, dun dun dun. “The father protects.”
Charlie Jane: [00:37:08] Yeah, it's a weirdly patriarchal film. Yeah. And Jake, like, there's a couple moments where Neytiri or someone else pushes back on this idea that he's trying to turn his family into like a military unit. But only a little bit. And the film seems to be on Jake's side and Jake the dad. He's also the leader of their military company. And it's all about, he's the father. His job is to protect his family and he kind of is an asshole to his kids over and over and over again in the name of protecting them. And the film thinks he's right.
[00:37:43] And Neytiri, who was such a huge awesome badass with her own point of view in the first film is kind of pushed to the margins and what happened to all the matriarchy?
Annalee: [00:37:54] Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. Neytiri is definitely marginalized, as is Kiri, baby Jesus girl.
[00:38:05] She gets to have a few moments, but really it's all about the two warrior sons of Jake. And which of them is gonna live up to the patriarch’s expectations and like you said, the film does not question this. The boys call their father “Sir” which seemed so upsetting, especially in light of the anti-militarism of the first film.
[00:38:29] And also I, to return to my obsession with Terminator 2, it really felt like backtracking from Terminator 2 because Terminator 2, among other things, was kind of a celebration of found family and of reformed masculinity. The figure of the Terminator is a man who has been reprogrammed to be a mother and to be a protector.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:54] Yes.
Annalee: [00:38:56] And he's—
Charlie Jane: [00:38:56] Oh my God, yes.
Annalee: [00:38:59] He's like this, this model of masculinity. And then of course Sarah Connor is this kind of masc woman who is butch and is a fighter and is there to basically protect the family.
[00:39:15] And her kid is a kind of adult and has his own role. And so it's weird to see the same mind that created that coming back to the nuclear family in Avatar: The Way of Water and just being like, nope. Actually it's the dad who's in charge. The mom just kind of gets to whine once in a while. The little girl has to just be kept safe and the boys must go fight.
[00:39:39] I didn't… and I think the final thing I'll say about that is I feel like this goes back to, once again, the gone native white fantasy.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:50] Mm-hmm. I was about to say that.
Annalee: [00:39:50] Which is, I was about to say that this is a fantasy about indigenous culture and about how indigenous culture has traditional essentially Christian values, which, hello? This is not, first of all, there's no one indigenous culture. Second of all, lots of indigenous cultures are matriarchal, like you said.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:09] Well, and in the first movie, I feel like I went and did a word search on the script for the first Avatar, which you can read online, for the word matriarch, and the word matriarch is used a lot in the script, mostly in the descriptive stuff, but it's very clea. The character played by CCH Pounder in the first film is a matriarch and she's important and she has power.
[00:40:32] And you know, that thing about assimilation that we talked about? I was kept waiting for there to be a scene where the Na’vi are like, this is not how we raise our kids. You're not actually adhering to Na’vi child raising practices. You're bringing in your own weird Earth bullshit that we don't approve of or that we don't agree with. And nobody ever says that, and nobody is ever like, dude, Jake, what are you doing?
[00:40:56] So the final thing that I wanted to kind of talk about, that I think is really interesting in this film, which I thought was actually, again, I'm gonna stick up the for the film a little bit. It was a smart thing, was this kind of progression from resource extraction to colonization.
[00:41:08] And this did happen in the colonization of North America in history. Europeans originally just came to the Americas to get gold and go home. But then they started putting down roots eventually and started farming and growing tobacco and other crops. So how does it change things when we're told by Edi Falco that the humans are gonna stay on Pandora, where they're gonna put down roots there?
Annalee: [00:41:29] Yeah. This is one of the things that really annoyed me about the movie, because remember how I said, oh, the plot was sort of meandering and it started off one way and ended up a different way.
[00:41:41] And I felt like that was brought up at the beginning of the film. We're told that the reason why they've reanimated Colonel Quaritch is because they are going to be settling the planet. And the only thing that's stopping them is that Jake is leading this insurrectionary force. And so the Colonel has to go out and stop Jake and destroy Jake's family, and then the insurrection will be over apparently.
[00:42:04] And that just kind of disappears from the narrative. It becomes a kind of cat and mouse chase between the Colonel and Jake's family. And then it becomes the story about the whales, which again, I actually think that my problems with the aesthetics aside, I think that the stuff around the whales is very interesting and I think very well observed.
[00:42:27] But yeah, I was like, okay, so what is happening with that colony? I don't know. We just dropped that.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:32] Yeah, I mean, I would love… I hope since there's three more movies, I hope we do get into this. I would love more of a serious focus on, what is it gonna take for humans to colonize Pandora? Are they gonna try to change the atmosphere to be more breathable to humans? Are a ton of humans gonna get Na’vi bodies and like start… Is there gonna just be a swarm of humans in Na’vi bodies? And if that happens, how does that change Jake's status, since suddenly he's not like one of two or three humans who are living in Na’vi bodies. He's one of like a million. Like, how do the Na’vi feel when suddenly a million humans show up in Na’vi bodies? I don't know if we're gonna get there in Avatar 4, but I kind of hope we do because I feel like that's kind of the question these movies have not quite gotten to, yet, that they're dancing around.
Annalee: [00:43:22] Yeah, I also think, I mean, just to have a really kind of like sci-fi wiener type question…
Charlie Jane: [00:43:31] Go for it.
Annalee: [00:43:32] So, if they can put somebody's brain into a Na’vi body, or if they can upload the Colonel's mind into a Na’vi body or upload Jake's mind into one, why can't they just build human bodies that can metabolize the atmosphere on this planet?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:49] I mean, why can't they also just like take a sample of the brain chemical from the whales and just like replicate it in a lab? But, you know?
Annalee: [00:43:57] Like I said, it's kind of a wiener question, but it's like I am left wondering, like there's a lot of kind of weird loose ends. And again, you know, I criticize because I love James Cameron's work. He’s usually incredibly meticulous about every detail and trying to have everything feel very scientifically plausible or if not plausible, at least have it be coherent. And this just felt kinda all over the place.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:31] I mean, I felt like it was more coherent than you did, but I also feel like there were certain unexamined things that James Cameron was just not thinking about as he made this film. And I think that's really what it comes down to, is that a lot of thought went into the ecosystems and the creatures and into the military hardware and some other aspects. And then there were other things in the film that were kind of unexamined and unconsidered.
Annalee: [00:44:55] I just wanna say to you, Charlie Jane, I'm a sea person, now.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:59] Same. Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:45:02] That's literally like, I mean, you've agreed to have spoilers if you've listened this far in the episode, and that is literally the last line of the film is, oh, we're sea people now . It's like, okay, go for it.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:13] I mean, Kernighan and Ritchie never did me wrong, so you know.
Annalee: [00:45:16] We’re just sea people, it’s fine.
[00:45:20] And thank you for that reference. That was beautiful. They’re not C++ people, they’re C people.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:26] We're not C++ people. Yeah. So, okay.
[00:45:29] So thank you so much for listening and if you're on Patreon, we'll see you in the Discord and we'll talk about this episode. We'll hash it out. If you're not on Patreon, we don't even know where we'll find you.
[00:45:40] Maybe we'll find you on TikTok—
Annalee: [00:45:40] We'll hunt you down.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:42] Or Instagram, or Mastodon where we’re wandering.shop @ouropinions. But we'll find you somewhere and if you really wanna have more of us and more of our interactions, please do support us on Patreon. It makes a huge difference. Thanks so much to Veronica Simonetti, our incredibly long-suffering and heroic and brilliant producer.
[00:46:08] Thanks so much to Chris Palmer for the wonderful music. And thanks again for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. And if you're on Patreon, we'll talk to you in Discord.
Together: [00:46:16] Bye.
[00:46:16] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]