With all the legendary and landmark films that have been released since the birth of cinema, the honor of amassing the largest worldwide box office falls on a most unlikely candidate. Avatar, released in 2009 and written/directed by James Cameron, quickly rose to the top of the list after its initial premier, becoming the first film to break the two-billion-dollar mark. Avengers: Endgame briefly surpassed it, but a 2021 rerelease of Avatar in China pushed the film back into the number one slot, just shy of three billion dollars worldwide.
While everyone agreed that the special effects of Avatar were groundbreaking and awe-inspiring, the plot of the film – white colonialism has extended to other planets throughout the galaxy, threatening the indigenous people of Pandora – elicited varying viewpoints. The film was blasted by the conservative right as anti-American, for instance, while many on the liberal left bemoaned the white savior syndrome that Avatar embraced.
Sandwiched in between were indigenous cultures around the world who identified with the basic message of Avatar despite any deficiencies and simplifications contained within the plot. The most visible example occurred in February 2010 when five Palestinians and Israelis painted themselves blue to resemble the native Na’vi of Pandora and then marched through the occupied West Bank village of Bil’in in the Middle East. They were met with tear gas and sound bombs fired by the Israeli military.
A video camera recorded the confrontation, and the footage was then interspliced with scenes from Avatar before being released on the World Wide Web. The protesters wore traditional keffiyehs to compliment and contrast with their Na’vi tails and pointy ears, while the characters in the film shouted, “We will show the Sky People that they cannot take whatever they want! This, this is our land!” The resulting video quickly amassed over 250,000 views in a relatively short period of time.
“The Bil’in protesters recognised potential parallels between the Na’vi struggles to defend their Eden against the Sky People and their own attempts to regain lands they feel were unjustly taken from them,” comparative media scholar Henry Jenkins wrote afterwards. “The film’s larger-than-life imagery, recognised worldwide thanks to Hollywood, offered them an empowered image of their own struggles. The sight of a blue-skinned alien writhing in the dust and choking on tear gas shocked many into paying attention to messages we often ignore.”
Jenkins dubbed the Bil’in protest as “Avatar Activism,” and noted that similar demonstrations were held in China to combat government tyranny and in Brazil against logging companies. Two months after the events in Bil’in, meanwhile, the Ninth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues included a panel entitled, Real Life ‘Pandoras’ on Earth: Indigenous Peoples Urgent Struggles For Survival. The resulting discussion included Avatar director James Cameron and was sponsored by Amazon Watch, the Indigenous Environmental Network, Cultural Survival, and the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development.
“It has been very, very interesting for me in the last couple of months to see how many people have come to (my wife) Susie and myself asking if there is something we can do in association with Avatar because so many people around the world working with indigenous issues have seen their reality in the film – even though the film is a fantasy that takes place on a mythical world – people are seeing their reality through the lens of this movie,” Cameron said. “I never really dreamed that a Hollywood film could have that significant of an impact. Not only is this an opportunity, it is a duty. I do have a responsibility now to go beyond the film, because it doesn’t teach, and to become an advocate myself and use what media power I have to raise awareness.”
Cameron also addressed the controversy of the “white guilt” aspect of the film. “I understand the white messiah argument but in this movie, I am trying to make everybody a white messiah, for everybody to have the sense of responsibility to help with the problem,” he explained. “I tried to go behind the normal Hollywood paradigm and have Jake work within the leadership system of the Na’vi by not displacing the leader Tsu’Tey who had taken over leadership of the clan when the patriarch, when the father dies, as he stands up with him and asks him to translate for him, so that the message comes from both of them together. I tried to show two cultures meeting halfway to find a solution. And perhaps Hollywood can go further in that regard. Maybe it’s my own parochial, chauvinistic perspective as a writer. As an artist, it is very important to write from the heart, and Avatar is what came out.”
Cameron then added, “Through my art as a filmmaker, I decided to finally say something to express my moral outrage about what was happening on this planet to the natural world and to the indigenous people who are the best stewards of that natural world. But unfortunately there are still resources in the ground that are yet to be dug up and plundered if you will. It is so critical that we deal with these issues now. I think time is running out for our civilization to shift its set of values – this is what I was trying to say with Avatar.”
It wasn’t just indigenous peoples struggling against colonialism who recognized the inherent potential of Avatar but those within the environmental movement as well. Pandora is a lush, vibrant moon filled with rainforests and floating mountains, and that ecosystem is threatened by the colonialists’ intent on extracting minerals from the ground and essentially destroying the environment. CNN reported a “Post Avatar Depression” affecting those who saw the similarities between the plight of Pandora with our own planet.
“The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don’t have here on Earth,” Philippe Baghdassarian – administrator of the online forum Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible – told CNN. “I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed.”
“I actually dreamt of being on Pandora last night, and I felt so happy,” one forum poster wrote. “When I woke up this morning however, I felt a terrible sense of loss. I had this EXACT depression feeling like so many of you have described. It felt like I did nothing with my life. I’m studying game design, but now this feels so… meaningless. I also thought of Earth as an incredibly ugly place…I think that I will be a better person henceforth.”
Another forum member added, “Be the change you want to see in your world. There are only so many people on this earth, the more of them that are doing positive things, the less of them that are out there doing negative things.”
James Cameron agreed with the sentiment. “As a storyteller, as a media guy, I’m now going to put all my energy into telling this story at a grassroots level,” he told People magazine. “I don’t think (Avatar) told you specifically what to do, but what I do think it did was remind us how important nature is to us, in our kind of true hearts as human beings, and how we’re drifting away from it.” He then added, “I think Avatar allows us to reconnect spiritually. And then all of our other activities with documentaries and so on will be about giving people actual, proximal things that they can do.”
Including, no doubt, new forms of Avatar Activism.
Anthony Letizia