Introduction
Sci-Fi buff and ‘amateur’ film critic that I am, two theologians and fellow friends of mine (Brian Bantum of Seattle Pacific University and Willie Jennings, my colleague in arms at Duke University Divinity School) told me that I had to check out the movie Avatar. I finally got around to it, and I’m so glad I did.
The film is food for thought in trying to understand what lay at the heart of some of the deepest questions of identity, the deepest questions regarding what Hannah Arendt called “The Human Condition,” that still confronts us. The film is a cinematic window, an aesthetic tour-de-force, into matters of identity (especially around race and gender), sexuality (particularly, boundary crossing love), ecological concerns and land issues, nationalism (especially regarding militarism and the performance of citizenship), and finally globalization (particularly, the intersection of globalization and capitalism). But perhaps, most interesting of all is the religious aesthetic, and more specifically, the troublesome Christian social imagination that underwrites the film, an imagination that goes back to the dawning moments of New World conquest.
Indeed, the film raises what in Christian theological parlance are questions of soteriology: What does it mean to be saved? What are the social processes and the processes of identity formation and construction linked to Christian rhetorics of salvation, which this film provides a window into? And is their a way to imagine soteriology, or what it means to say “I am saved” and “I am Christian,” beyond what is disclosed in this film?
That Avatar provokes these issues and questions means that it requires serious theological analysis, which I will not pretend to fully offer here. I offer just a few thoughts about the film.
Avatar in 1492
Avatar is a film that in effect tries to renarrate modern colonialism into the ‘New World,’ or in the Americas. The date associated with this is 1492; the figure, Christopher Columbus. (There was also the conquest just preceding the conquest of the Americas in the mid-15th century when the Portuguese first took black bodies as its cargo from Africa into Lisbon, thus beginning modern chattel slavery. But I need not go into this here.) It was during this time that the racial imagination as we now know it in all of its complexities and the very of the human as we know perform and live into it, was first born. Key to this was the Iberian, and more particularly the Spanish, invention of whiteness.
Vitruvian Man, 1487
"America," 1575
We know of the horrors that ensued from this moment of conquest: land taken from native peoples, the genocide of many of the native populations, hierarchies and systems of valuing and evaluation being socially constructed and performed within the human, the dawning of modern capitalism, and finally all of this being enacted in deep connection with Christianity, indeed, as a Christian social performance tied to white masculinity. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” done in 1487, just on the eve of Columbus’s Iberian adventure across the Atlanta Ocean, and the painting by the Renaissance artist Jan van der Straet in 1575 on the “Discovery of America,” are perfect bookends around this world-changing event conquest that gave rise to the modern world.
These pieces represent a cultural aesthetic of “the good, the true, and beautiful” as bound to the figure of the European (and eventually the Euroamerican), or put in racial-gendered terms, the white masculine. Such a figure is the social space into which all others must enter. Further still, the van der Straet painting portrays this figure as a warrior-Christian, a figure of violence and a man of war, who stands sexually over against the bear-breasted native woman in an edenic scene in which she is connected to the earth, to the land, and he is poised, at her seemingly inviting arm (note her left arm) to take it (see the image in this post). But his militarism is masked (his sword is hidden behind his cloak, invisible to the native woman, but visible to the viewer of the painting). What is displayed are the two sides of the project of Western civilization: science and knowledge in the discoverer’s left hand (the astrolabe; internet technology in the 15th century) and religion (the crucifix staff in his right hand, which imperceptibly merges into the sheath of the sword hidden behind the cloak). Both science and knowledge function are tied to commerce and trade in van der Straet’s painting. They are tied to an emergent capitalism internal to which is a profound hierarchical vision of the human and a system of evaluating and thus valuing the human.
Avatar’s Basic Storyline
As a film, Avatar is trying to overcome this narrative. In the genre of science-fiction, it’s trying to tell a different story, one that redeems the narrative that I’ve given in rough draft here.
Staged on another “New world” paradise, which is a different planet that humans are colonizing, the film tells the story of Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), a crippled ex-Marine who was wounded, interestingly enough, on a military adventure in Venezuela in South America. As a result of the Venezuelan adventure, Jack finds himself in a wheel chair. With his usefulness exhausted on Earth, Jake enlists in an inter-plantary science/military operation that if all goes well, his legs will be medically treated back on Earth. He will be healed. The wounded one will become the healed one.
But what must he do on the planet?
Jake is caught between two masters, as Daniel Mendelsohn recently put it in a New York Review of Books essay, between two ways of pacifying the planet and its inhabitants, the Na’vi. The one road is the way of science (don’t forget: the van der Straet’s Discoverer carried an astrolabe or the instruments of science and civilization) and the other is the way of violent, military conquest (again, the don’t forget that van der Straet’s Discover was also a warrior, carrying a sword). Jake is caught between these two modes or styles of conquest, between military imperialism and cultural imperialism.
The avenue of science is where the avatar comes in. A team of scientists, lead by a chief scientist and specialist on the Na’vi played by Sigourney Weaver (who conjures all of the Alien movies and who plays the role of the white feminine), have figured out a way to clone creatures using DNA from humans and DNA from the Na’vi. The clones or avatars look just like the Na’vi. Indeed, they are in every way like the Na’vi except that they lack mind and soul. They lack mental faculties and consciousness. Solution to the problem: the scientist have found a way to transfer brain functions from a human being into the avatar, the clone. The human-occupied avatar can now infiltrate Na’vi society and negotiate peacefully—this the wish of the scientists—with the Na’vi to resolve their cultural and political impasse. Jake’s avatar plays this key role. He is to be the cultural infiltrator and negotiator with the Na’vi with a view to avoiding violent, all-out war with them.
Avatar & the Struggle of Imperial Man
The Militarized White Man
But let’s get back to the cultural and political impasse. What impasse? Why is war even on the table?
Well, as it turns out the place where the Na’vi live sits on a vast reservoir of minerals that the humans want, for it will turn a vast profit and cause the stock prices of the company backing the venture on this planet to sore. We are no longer dealing with global capitalism; this is now inter-planetary capitalism.
On the other side of things is the military, which is clearly working with this unnamed business company. With little patience for diplomacy (because it believes it won’t work), the military is ready to go in and take the land from the Na’vi by force.
The Militarized White Man
The movie chronicles Jake’s vacillation between two masters or loyalties, the military master or the master that is science and civilization. As he continues to be embedded or become more and more “incarnate” (my christological language is intentional here) in Na’vi society, eventually taking up a love interest with a Na’vi women (you know this had to happen!; it’s a stable of genre; and remember again van der Straet’s Discoverer is sexually positioned in relationship to the native women) and becoming one of them, Jake moves toward a shown down with the military officer, the symbol of the old order of white male, warrior existence.
Jake and his Love Interest
This struggle takes place near the end of the movie, when Jake-the-Avatar or Jake in a Na’vi’s body and the military officer in a robotic or machine body fight to the death. But it is Jake’s love interest who finally saves Jake in the battle and ultimately facilitates his struggle to become permanently one of the natives, one of the Na’vi.
There is much more that could be said about this movie. And heck, I have a feeling I’ll have more to say about it. But this is the point I want to make for now:
When all is said and done, Avatar turns on this motif of the healing (or not) of a white man, of white male existence, and if so, how shall that healing take place.
David Brooks in a New York Times op-ed was not far off the mark in identifying a “Messiah Complex” in the movie, a messianism aimed at “saving” the natives of the planet, who are called the “Na’vi.”He’s absolutely right that
“Avatar” is a racial fantasy par excellence.
And further still, he’s right that
It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.
It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains.
As far as this goes, Brooks has some good points. But what’s troubling about this film works at an even deeper level, for what Brooks totally fails to grasp is that the messianism of James Cameron’s 3-D adventure, which itself (that the movie’s in 3D) is vitally important because it enlists the viewer as participant, is aimed not just at the culturally different, the Na’vi, which surely it is. On this level this is a film about how white male identity functions as the space in relationship to which other identities are constituted. But beyond this, and this is what Brooks altogether misses, the movie’s primary target is whiteness itself and the meaning of white existence for the future. The movie is about the future of whiteness.
This is an epic that has at its heart a basic question: Can white existence be save? Can the white masculine be redeemed? Can it overcome its wounds, it wheel-chaired status? Will it walk, stand erect, again? And if so, what will its redemption look like? The movie, in short, is trying to imagine the next phase of white (male) existence. The movie portrays whiteness in this regard at war with itself regarding its future (see image below).
What answer does it offer to this problem? Avatar proposes what may be called a benevolent imperialism.
Such an imperialism is not unlike that form of imperialism proposed at the dawn of the 19th century by Friedrich Schleiermacher in Germany and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, and by a host of subsequent intellectuals (like Matthew Arnold and even some contemporary intellectuals). This new mode of empire was being imagined as the next phase in the History of White People, to invoke the title of the brilliant, recently published book by historian Nell Irvin Painter. In this next phase, domination takes place on a global scale through and as difference itself.
As an aside, I’m reading a lot by theologian Karl Barth these days. And it strikes me that his critique of religion and of the “No-God” in Roman II, written in the post-World War I moment, has precisely this phase of domination in the crosshairs of its critique of ideology.
But to return to this film, it seems to me that Avatar answers the question of the redemption of whiteness with a hard-fought, and an aesthetically “beautiful,” Yes. What does this redemption look like? It is represented through the protagonist Jake, who casts his lot with the Na’vi. He makes their existence his own, thus making the avatar or the mask of difference the new form of his being. Now one with the Na’vi, he rides in on the proverbial white horse—in the film, this is the wild bird-like that even the Na’vi had been unable to tame—to save the day against the militaristic form of imperial domination (as embodied in the military colonel).
Conclusion
Avatar is an amazing, aesthetically robust, but profoundly troubling film—both culturally and theologically.Culturally, because the film does not escape the history of imperialism. It reinscribes it precisely in the register of difference, in the register of becoming one with the Na’vi, the natives, those deemed different. Difference becomes the form of conquest. Theologically troubling because, Avatar continues the narration of white male existence as soteriological space, the space of the atonement, or more simply, the space where salvation happens, where what it means to be saved takes place. White existence continues as the space of redemption. However, now the space occupies or is the multiculture itself.
Paul Laurence Dunbar once wrote a poem, We wear the Mask, the second stanza of which says,
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
How right Dunbar was. His poem haunts us in the wake of this film, which I hear director James Cameron is planning fill out into a trilogy. The movie leaves us with continuing questions of representation, what social processes are being performed inside and in relationship to claims of salvation, and the continuing New World saga of identity as extended into our postcolonial moment. This film acknowledges the the ground is shifting around whiteness. However, the film makes the shifts part of the strength of whiteness. It remains the space of salvation even as it incorporates the logic of difference as part of its ongoing saga and history. And through 3D, it incorporates us into the story. We participate, as actresses and actors ourselves, i the story—which raises a whole host of new questions about agency and participation.
I’m not done thinking about this movie. But I am done for now.
My verdict—Avatar: an amazing and profoundly troubling film.
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i’m not quite sure I understand how avatar proposes benevolent imperialism. since the main character not only ceases being white, but everything white is completely repudiated, defeated, and sent back to earth to reap the death that it has sowed.
and it’s not true that the na’vi had been unable to tame that bird he rode on. it had been tamed 5 previous times by Na’vi people. In fact, Jake was able to tame it only because of the knowledge he learned from the Na’vi in taming a different type of bird. that seems like a small point, but it’s actually quite large given the importance Carter assigns it.
and it is not technically true that he makes the avatar, the form of difference his being. the na’vi people’s feminine deity chooses to re-create him as one of them. this same deity also chose not to re-create sigourney weaver’s character. also, one could argue, that in the film, the ultimate decider, the ultimate victor, is the navi people’s God. The na’vi people would not have defeated the earthlings if not for their god’s decision to join their forces. remember, before she enlisted all of nature in battle, the na’vi were on the verge of defeat and ruin.
how can someone who is made to leave the physical markers of whiteness behind (god did this, not Jake), who renounces the entire white worldview, who is literally baptized into a new mode of being, who lives with the na’vi people as a na’vi person, who does not change na’vi culture but actually draws on its resources (the taming of the pivotal bird) to preserve it be considered imperialist?
as Carter suggests, what would the redemption of whiteness look like? since he rejects the avatar solution, what would it look like? basically, carter’s reading of avatar leads me to believe that he thinks it is impossible for white people to act in solidarity–that their whiteness dooms them to damnation.
what would have been the moral thing for jake to do? simply leave and not fight with the na’vi people in their struggle for survival? refuse the na’vi god’s decision to re-create him as a na’vi person?
also, in terms of masculinity, I can’t believe carter dismisses how well gender is done in this movie. women are fighters, scientists, resisters, imperialists etc. women are not merely love interests of the men. jake is saved by zoe saldana’s character more often than she is saved by him. in the na’vi culture, a woman is the high priest who is the primary and authoritive interpreter of god’s will. god herself is feminine.
benevolent imperialism is when white people try to change a culture for their own good. there is nothing even remotely like that in avatar. if anything, that is what sigourney weaver, the scientist does, and she is rejected by the na’vi god.
also, the fact that jake used his knowledge of “white” military tactics is in fact quite radical–it serves to reverse the imperialist myths of pocahontas and malinche. in this case, jake, a white man, rather than an indigenous woman, is the race traitor (in fact, jake is accused of this in the film.)
imagine if the white middle class and the white poor had joined forces with american slaves in their rebellions? what if they had refused the category of whiteness itself? (early on, white indentured servants were more likely to identity with and even intermarry with black indentured servants than they were with the wealthy white. to break this solidarity, servitude started being applied to people with black skin for the duration of their lives and incentives were given to white people for thinking themselves white.)
what if white people had rejected that? would not the history of our continent have been so much better? what if they had refused the bodies the wealthy were trying to assign them?
this is what the military colonel was trying to do for jake: he told him if he carried out his orders of gaining intelligence on the na’vi so that they could be destroyed, the colonel would make sure that he got his legs back when they got back to earth.
jake rejected that and instead received his new body not from the god of the white man (technology and the science that enabled the surgery he would have received) but from the life-giving powers of the na’vi deity.
race is about bodies; it’s about identities. white skin is not the problem; its what white skin means. in order to be something different, whiteness has to mean something different. i think this is what jake’s reincarnation as a na’vi can be read to signify.
Greetings K. Grimes:
Thanks for your comments and for challenging how I’m interpreting the film at various points. Much appreciated.
A few responding remarks.
Let me begin with “benevolent imperialism”. As a contrasting term to an in-your-face violent imperialism, this term, as I’m using it, points to the civilizing dimensions of empire. That is to say, empire was never only a military venture; it was also a “civilizing mission” tied to capital and commerce. Not only this. Empire is a pedadogy, an education of desire, a forming of the subject. This film is invested in this trope. It doesn’t abandon it.
However, it carries it forward with a new, shall we say, 21st century twist: the subject being (re-) educated is, as it were, not the unenlightened native, but Jake, the white male subject. And his pedagogy into a new form of existence is carried out in relationship to the body of the other, in relationship to what is different.
Now, I don’t want to take your point away, because it’s vital. Your point may be summarized under the notion of “racial transgression.” Jake is doing a kind of trading against his people, against his race, so that he can be joined to another people, the Na’vi. This is very important. You’re right. There is that element of the film.
However, my concern with the film is ultimately twofold. First, the body of the avatar, and therefore the body that represents what is different in this film, is in the control of Jake at the level of his intellectual capacities and consciousness. The avatar body is fully the product of human (!), scientific ingenuity. This is difference, but under our control. It continues to work within a master-slave logic. The avatar, as a feat of modern technology, is the result, as one philosopher has put it, of “bio-power,” power exercised through and on bios (life) itself. Difference is registered through the power of scientific control, manipulation, and domination. This means that difference itself is being staged here within the dominion of white (scientific) masculinity. It is a moment within, not outside of whiteness.
But second, we must ask what it means that once science is exhausted, once it has come to its end, at the end of the film, the Na’vi God then renders Jake permanently one of the Na’vi. This is also a point you make—an important, no doubt. Jake now lives permanently in the ‘beautiful,’ blue and green and pastel-colored dreamworld of non-human difference—the Na’vi world.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that at its most serious level in this film, difference or what is different is in the end non-human. It is alien, but of a particular sort. It is dreamworld or romanticized alien. The film presents difference as romanticized alienation—and here the fact that the movie is in 3D is vital. Therefore, to take difference seriously in this film means living in such an aesthetic, technologically constructed dreamworld. Difference is under the dominion of technology and the non-real dreamworld, the ‘utopia,’ it creates. But the key here is the non-realism of it all.
Let me press this point even further by turning to another aspect of the film. This concerns the vital issue of gender that you raised in your comments. This is an important issue, and it comes into play here.
Interestingly, save Jake’s love interest (I’ll return to her in a moment), women in this story fall away. The chief scientist played by Sojourney Weaver, who wrote the book on the Na’vi: the Na’vi nature God is unable to save her when she is mortally wounded as the great battle scene commences near the end of the film. This is all the more interesting since the nature-God is about to save Jake. The other key woman in the film, the helicopter pilot (whose name I’m blanking on right now): she dies in combat.
What does the death of “real” women in this film mean? How might we think about this?
I contend that the dreamworld of non-human difference is a strangely feminized world. We see this in the very eyes of the Na’vi people. They are cat-like, feline (and thus feminized?) eyes. As a non-human but noble-savage species (I was thinking of Rousseau as I pondered this part of the film), the Na’vi are at once masculinized as warrior-like, but we interact with them as “strangely” feminine. In fact, Jake’s encounter with the Na’vi is in the form of the feminine. To look into the eyes of a Na’vi is to look into the feminine.
This femininity is embodied most powerfully in Jake’s love interest. Racially we could say, his love interest is Cameron’s upgrade on the Amerindian woman in van der Straet’s 1575 painting. But the actress playing this character is the black woman Zoë Saldana (she also starred in the recent Star Trek movie as Lieutenant Uhura, love interest of Commander Spock, the human-Vulcan interracial/inter-species figure).
So what do we have here? We have a feminized, 3D dreamworld, stripped of human women, and in its quasi-real, but dreamlike state constituted by the a less-than-human feminine difference that is performed as a black woman actress (Saldana) becomes a kind of unwitting ‘avatar’ in the body of a dreamworld native woman.
This is all a complex representation of identity staged in non-human terms and on the body of a collapsed representation of the black feminine and the native feminine. This collapsed femininity is the dreamworld, the utopia. It is a ‘non-human’ femininity wherein ‘real’ women are actually killed off. This representation of the feminine is all carried out in the interest of Jake, as white male, being narrated into a different vision of the masculine, masculininity beyond white male existence. Here, at a very deep level, we are brought face to face with the co-articulation of race and gender as a singularly connected problem.
Let me sum up. My claim here is that violence, or the problem of the white masculine as warrior, is not gone. It’s just been aesthethicized, rendered “beautiful” as Jake becomes Na’vi, as non-white ‘alien’ difference itself becomes the site of whiteness.
This is profound—profoundly troubling, for at the moment when difference is seemingly embraced in this globalized, inter-galactic moment, domination can still be at work. Stated differently, the film demands a rethinking of how dominance works and how its logics play out. We must ponder what this means, what this vision of difference and its celebration in this film means in our present cultural moment. Much of it, I contend, is bound up with the social performance of incarnation (Christology) and redemption (Soteriology or Atonement). it is bound up with a problematic social performance of Christian identity that Cameron’s film does not escape, but reinscribes, renders ‘beautiful,’ and through 3D technology signals our participation in this logic and its aesthetic.
Thank you so much for your response.
First of all, let me say that I do not think this is a perfect film. I do not think it totally avoids the racism, imperialism, and sexism that you accuse it of. If I had directed the film, I would have changed a few details. One, the scene in which Jake tames the bird and the Na’vi people bow to him as though he were some kind of sacred and awe-inspiring god. I thought that was really horrible and I would have omitted it. Two, it would have been better had the hero been a woman. It may have even been better if the earth-human woman fell in love with a Na’vi woman or maybe there should not have been a romantic relationship at all.
My point is simply that I do not think the film simply reinscribes the white man as savior of the helpless savages trope that has appeared in so many other films, like Dances with Wolves. I think this movie does something new. I am not suggesting that Cameron intended this, just that the movie can, credibly, be interpreted as anti-imperialist–a way to imagine a way out of whiteness.
I think the crux of our disagreement lies in our different interpretation of the fact that Jake gets re-created or resurrected or reincarnated at the end of the movie. I see it as a repudiation of the very problematic things you point out, whereas you see it as an affirmation or perpetuation of those things.
I am not persuaded that we encounter the Na’vi people as feminized. But, even if they are, remember that Jake ultimately is given a Na’vi body. The white male body does not colonize the feminine body, the white male body no longer exists, it is eliminated and rejected. A white male body is reborn as feminine via a feminine deity. This is an interesting contrast to certain gnostic traditions of the early christian era, who thought that women had to shed their female body to be holy according to the standards of a male deity. One could argue this continues in certain Christian traditions even today, for example, Roman Catholicism, who argue that precisely because of her feminine body, women cannot be priests and stand in persona christi at the altar.
And yes, I agree that the scientists were invested in a civilizing mission in the way you describe and I agree that this is odious. But the film does not validate this mission; this mission not only fails, but also it is exposed as being complicit in the violently imperialistic designs of the military-corporate alliance. In fact, in the movie, it is explicitly stated that Weaver’s work is funded by the profits extracted from unobtanium. If we could turn this gaze onto our own anthropologists and scientists, it could be very powerful.
I also agree that Jake’s use of the mindless avatar body is problematic in the way you describe, but, this imperialistic exploitation of the indigenous body for the white man’s uses is ultimately shown to be immoral. And by the end of the movie, Jake is no longer doing this. He has become a Na’vi person. Much in the way a Gentile, through baptism, becomes grafted onto Israel. As with baptism, this new identity is not achieved by human beings but a gift of God. Previously, Jake had been trying to earn his new identity, through his inhabiting an avatar and through the works-righteousness of “learning the na’vi’s ways.”
And the Na’vi people are definitely depicted as different, but this difference is not evidence of their inhumanity. At the beginning, the military guy calls them “humanoids.” I cringed at this. Clearly, the military classifies them as the sub-human other who are dangerous and exotic. The CEO guy thinks them not only sub-human but completely disposable. But I don’t think the film approves of these positions. In fact, the film discredits these views and vindicates their humanity. The Na’vi humanity is one that is not forged over and against nature but in intimate cooperation with it. ( I don’t think this is racist, I think this is a legitimate critique of Western philosophy and similar to what thinkers like Jacques Ellul argue–the fall and Cain’s murder as the loss of this natural order.)
Certainly, the Na’vi are different, but I don’t see why this, in and of itself is problematic. Who would deny that the various indigenous groups of the Americas are not only different from one another, but also from the first Spanish conquistadors? The problem is not cultural difference per se, but the turning of difference into race, the belief that difference means inferiority or inhumanity, or as you show in your chapter on Kant, the belief that other people’s difference is a curiosity which needs to be explained, as though somehow it is bizarre that my way of being is not the universal way of being. Who would deny that the Spanish were different from the French? or that Irish immigrants were different from German immigrants. The problem was when all these culturally and linguistically different groups became white.
And yes, the Na’vi world is stripped of earth human women, but it is also stripped of earth human men. Although yes, it would have been better had Michelle Rodriguez lived or had Jake been a woman.
I guess I am wondering what you think the salvation of whiteness would look like? What would it look like to be baptized out of whiteness? To eliminate Christianity’s unholy alliance with whiteness? To undo the de-Judification of Christianity that you detail in your book?
And I guess I don’t see the beauty of the Na’vi world as being problematic necessarily. In Avatar, there’s a moral quality to the beauty that is lacking in earth humanity. Their world is beautiful because it is ordered and harmonious. The live in nature not over and against nature.
And yes, this film is a product of technology, but aren’t all films? Is there something about Avatar in particular that troubles you or would this particular critique extend to all film in general? Or maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at there.
Once again, K. Grimes, thanks for your comments.
Allow me to respond this way. I think that this film might be fruitfully set against or in relationship to another film that at the intersection of xenophobia and social death is also wrestling with difference. This is the film District 9. Both Avatar and D-9 are working between corporate capitalism and the military industrial complex, and both films concern entry into difference. And both are executed in the genre of sci-fi, and thus rely heavily on modern cinematic technology. (I have no qualms with technology as such.)
But here’s what strikes me. At the heart of what distinguishes these two films is the mode in which difference is dealt with. I’ve talked about how I see this working in Avatar. So let say a little about how it work in D-9 to set up the contrast, and thus maybe clarify myself a little more.
In D-9, the main character Wirkus is brought into the situation of difference, the situation of becoming an odious “Prawn” creature, in a way that is not of his own choosing and under terms that are not under his terms of control and mastery. In D-9, there is profound cost, profound loss in entering into the life of the alien species, the Prawn.
In fact, Wirkus’ wish is that the accident that started his transformation into a Prawn never have happened. So much so does he resist the transformation into being different, being a Prawn, that he’s undergoing that he fights it tooth-and-nail. Indeed, at one point in D-9, he tries to cut off his hand, but settles for cutting off his finger (a phallic object).
Wirkus then thinks he can negotiate the terms of his difference with the main Prawn figure, Christopher (note the Christological valence of his name: Christos-ferens, the bringer of Christ). He strikes a deal with Christopher: I’ll help you break into MNU to get the fuel canister; in return, you help cure me—restore me back into full humanity.
Christopher’s response: Deal—Let’s go get the canister.
After a show-down at MNU, they get the canister back. But there’s a problem. They can’t both get to the space ship to medically heal Wirkus and get the ship itself launched to return Christopher’s home world so that Christopher can bring about the salvation of his people. Christopher’s priority is with the latter. When Christopher breaks this news to Wirkus, he gets enraged, in response to which Christopher tells Wirkus, basically, that this mission is not about him. It’s about me, says Christopher in effect. It’s about my greater mission to get my people home. (The echoes of what Jesus says in the Gospels can be heard: “I came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”) Wirkus doesn’t take kindly to this; he hits Christopher over the head, knocking him unconscious, and tries to seize the mission for himself.
In all of this we see that the terms of difference, what it means to enter into the life of another people (here, the Prawn), being estranged from oneself and from one’s people, entry into a grotesque looking life—all of this is out of the grasp and control of Wirkus. As a result he’s spinning out of control. Like the Syro-phoenician woman in the gospels, Wirkus must learn a profound lesson about being bound to another people; namely that it’s not about you. In fact, it’s not even about me making myself better, as it were, by entering into the life of another. Not that this isn’t a good to be aspired to, but that insofar as it is something that remains about us and our powers to manage the terms of my becoming better, the inhabitation of difference still functions under the dominion of sin and death.
It is this lesson that basically is not on the table in Avatar. The Avatar story remains about Jake and what he represents. Difference functions as a kind of staging ground for his story.
Let’s stay with D-9 a second longer so that I fill this out just a little more.
The action in the second part of D-9 is all about Wirkus basically making the transition of truly being bound within Prawn existence, indeed, to the point of putting his own body, his own life, on the line to ensure that Christopher makes it to the ship to save the Prawn people. He puts his own body between the MNU military people who is shooting at Christopher to stop his efforts to launch the space ship and Christopher himself. He must protect Christopher to ensure that his—Christopher’s mission—succeeds. A profound transformation has been wrought within Wirkus.
By the end of the movie, Wirkus, who is now virtually fully transformed physically into a Prawn, is protected by them once Christopher has left.
The only posture left to Wirkus by the end of the film is one of eschatological waiting in hope. He must wait for three years until the “second coming” of Christopher. His life is one of total surrender to living into a mode of life that is utter beyond his control and mastery. His life is one of utter humility, patience, and waiting. It is one of utter trust that Christopher will do what he said he would do. All control is taken from him. And indeed, he surrenders to this. He now must live into the fact that Christopher’s promised return to save his people is now Wirkus’s own redemption and salvation. His redemption is bound up with theirs in a way that neither remaining Prawn nor Wirkus (who is now a Prawn) have control over.
What does Wirkus do in this time between the times? He must live in D-9 as a Prawn. His life is hidden in their in eschatological expectation, hope, of what will yet be, in expectation of a new creation. He lives into a life not of his own choosing: Prawn existence. Moreover, the aesthetic of such a life contrasts powerfully with the aesthetic of Avatar. This is an aesthetic more in accord with the second Isaiah (Isa. 53). “He has no form nor comeliness, no beauty, that any would desire him.” But yet, this is the life in which Wirkus’s salvation is being worked out in fear and trembling.
There is a profound realism to this, which is lacking in Avatar. Jake’s transition into Na’vi existence, into life lived through difference, is a transition into a kind of dreamworld.
Not so with Wirkus. At the end of the movie there’s this moving scene in which as Wirkus begins his life of waiting as a Prawn, he makes a flower (an object of beauty) out of the garbage in District 9, the garbage that now defines his embodied existence. He leaves this beautiful object on the porch of the house his human wife lives in. His is a life of continued reaching out to her, of unrequited love. She has a sense that the flower’s from Wirkus. But, as she sees it, he is lost to her. A tear moves down her face, if I recall the scene properly, for Wirkus the human being is no more, only Wirkus the Prawn, and between us and them is the barrier of alienation, the barrier of being an alien.
But from Wirkus’s side of life now being lived out as Prawn, he still sees himself as connected to her even as he’s connected to the Prawn, for he is now Prawn. He is both/and. He is already/not-yet, a both/and and an already/not-yet that binds all together through the hope of Christopher who has come and is coming again. She sees this not. For though connected to her, from her vantage point she sees him as estranged and cut off from all things human—not because Wirkus rejects her and all things human, but because she/the human reject him. He is Prawn.
In the time between the times, Wirkus is given the task of existing in this space of death even as he witness to another reality, which is deemed (aesthetically) grotesque to the world about him.
My point here is that D-9 gives us no romanticization of difference, no false beautification of it. It’s not the site that remains under our control. Nor is it the place where my own subjectivity, which I retain a hold on as my ‘property,’ remains under my control and mastery. Being bound to another people entails an estrangement to the ways in which the logics of identity around race, nationalism, being a citizen (or an immigrant), and family are upended. D-9 points to both the pain and the possibility within this, within being bound to another under conditions not of my choosing, but that are the conditions of my salvation. In Karl Barth’s language, the destruction of the “No-God” entails death, living sub species mortis, under the aspect of death.
But the death of what? The death of those forms of agency, subjectivity, and identity that remain under our grasp and control by which we can continue to function “like God” or within the space of the knowledge of good and evil, as both Barth and Bonhoeffer put it. The death of what? The death of the Ego of the “old man” (Romans) which stabilizes itself by a will to power, a will to mastery and control, a will to be like God.
What I see in Avatar is an aesthetically seductive refusal of this of this mode of existence, life from the Cross. But the genius of the film is that as a film it positions difference as the natural unfolding of the self, and thus as the new space in which the subject in control of itself will have to imagine its future. In this new form of the mastery of the subject and of agency, difference is without transcendence, and thus difference yet functions within structures of control and domination.
What then does it mean to follow the God enfleshed as the man Jesus and thus as the Jew whose very life is in the form of the slave? I interpret it as meaning something closer to what we see in the more aesthetically unappealing D-9. It’s something closer to Ruth the Moabitess, who leaves her people and to be bound to Naomi and her people.
thank you for your response. I will rent District 9 ASAP.
To jump in–maybe another way to summarize the problem here is that, to K. Grimes question, what would “the salvation of whiteness would look like?,” Avatar answers from within the resources of whiteness itself. In Avatar, Jake is given two options for the rehabilitation of whiteness (the regaining of his legs, his strength and mobility, his position as a master over others). One is to realign himself with the brutal, imperial adventure that cost him his brother and crippled him (the leader promising him the funds to get new legs if he continues to cooperate). The other option is worked out through the Avatar, that is, through the imaginative and technological projection/entrance into the space of the others, the Na’vi. Jake originally explores this world in the Avatar without a commitment to it–he is still in the service of the one, the army leader, who can restore his masculine strength. However, as he learns to master the Na’vi culture, language, and world, his allegiance switches. The competence (physical and intellectual) and affirmation (encouragement and love) he lacks in his own world, he finds through his virtual life among the Na’vi. The pursuit of mastery–white imperial mastery–has now been rehabilitated, not through a kind of more brutal affirmation but in a kind of embrace of the other, the native. However, this embrace is the celebration of a “difference” that whiteness can claim as its own, that it can enter into and receive the healing it wants, a rehabilitated sense of mastery and power. The space of the “other” has been entered into through the avatar, that is, through the means of technological, imperial mastery. And as the “difference” was explored through the avatar, the difference was found “hospitable” to Jake’s own quest: rehabilitation to a position of mastery. Jake can enter into and even “submit” to the culture and religion of the Na’vi because that culture is already seen as oriented towards him. He is the fulfillment of its basic desires and fundamental structures: what he is is what all cultures aim to produce, and hence he can enter into an “alien” form without actually losing himself, and he can come as the culmination (recapitulation) of its history and save it from destruction. He can reconfigure himself as a messiah within their history and culture because ultimately, what they hope to produce is…someone like him.
What Avatar refuses to consider is that whiteness may not be the universal horizon of all creaturely difference. Avatar seems to be seeking a salvation from whiteness (from imperial mastery); however, by staying within the resources of whiteness itself, its imagined liberation from imperialism is simply the “resuscitation” of whiteness under the form of “difference.” By looking within the immanent resources of white masculinity for the solution, Avatar refuses to imagine that the salvation of whiteness may actually be impossible.
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.’” (Matt. 19)
What Avatar misses but D-9 puts on the table is that the salvation cannot be an outworking of our own possibilities (it is, in this sense, impossible–impossible for us). If it comes (as, in Barth’s words, “the impossible possibility”), it will be an alienation we refuse, that we fight against, that comes to us from without, overpowers our defenses, and yet brings us to a new life, a life lived in hopeful expectation of the savior’s return, a savior whose role we cannot think to usurp but on whom we depend. If it comes, we will live in a strange identification between two peoples, with our old lives oriented towards this new form and this new form not being the total eclipse or undoing of our past but its strange clarification and reorientation (the final scene in D-9, where he continues to make his wife gifts).
In short, what Avatar does not see is that the “exiting” of whiteness can be just another splendid display of whiteness, now under the guise of difference. What Avatar cannot explore is how this new display of whiteness under the form of difference works only as the real difference is erased, the native other rendered a mere body (an avatar) into which whiteness can insert its own logic, history, and identity. Whiteness is not lost, only transformed, and the “natives” once again prove to be the (feminized) bodies through which (masculine) whiteness reconfigures its own existence.
Tim:
Thanks very much. In many ways, you’ve made my point better than me. You’ve nailed it. Difference from within the resources of whiteness itself—this is the problem with Avatar; this is how it continues tropes, in its own ‘new’ way, of imperialist Orientalism; this is how the movie represents the white masculine renegotiating the terms of its future. And yes, this is what D-9 calls so much into question, which all may also explain why the cinematic guilds won’t show no love (i.e, awards) to D-9: it challenges so much of how their world/our world operates.
Moreover Tim, you’ve captured quite well how being “in Christ,” to use St. Paul’s language, upends and challenges this. Atonement and soteriology—what it means to be saved—intervenes into the vision that Avatar offers, to even radicalize the discourse of difference itself, which so often proves to a discourse of the same.
Dr. Carter,
Thanks–I’m just summarizing what you’ve put on the table. As I continue to reflect on the film, I think what is deceptive about the movie is that it presents such a stark, clear, and repulsive figure of the white, imperial masculine that we think switching the allegiance from him to the Na’vi is itself a shift away from imperial whiteness, whereas, in reality, whiteness is precisely the form of agency that can easily switch allegiances as long as those to whom it is aligned recognize their dependency on it: whiteness can come in many forms as long as it maintains its position as the horizon/telos of all forms. This is what you are pointing to with the civilizing mission going hand in hand with the brutal colonial reality: the shared common point is that the white, imperial man is the form from which and through which all other creaturely identities are secured. Brutal imperialism, scientific/benevolent imperialism, and the Na’vi’s own existence all hinge on Jake’s allegiance. It is never questioned whether Jake is a savior, but only whose project he wants to save. And that is precisely the form or agency of whiteness, which is why it can dispense with the tough, violent militaristic approach without losing itself, why it can endlessly mutate itself even into the form of difference, and also why it is a Christological heresy.
Bingo. You got it, Tim.
And it’s worth spelling out why this is a christological heresy (your last point, and something I have been at pains to stress).
In a nutshell, it the heresy of false mediation, the belief that one particular form can be the mediating point of all forms, rather than the human form being constituted from beyond itself by the Spirit who gives life and by the hearing of the Word of God.
In classical theological terms, the movie begins in a kind of docetism, in which Jake’s avatar is only seemingly, not really, Na’vi. The space of this “seeming-ness” is the space of Jake being in control. But then we also see something like Apollinarianism, in which , the heresy by which Jesus had as it were a human body and soul, but his mind and reasoning functions were of the divine Logos, the Christ. Athanasius held the line against this (not always successfully, mind you; but he saw what was at stake, and this is the important point). And what was at stake? Whether beyond our ability to control, whether God as Wholly Other really meets us, or whether the one met in Jesus is but the outworking of our own will and subjectivity. For it is the latter, we are never put in a place of crisis, having been confronted by one who pronounces a NO to our will to be “like God,” which expresses our will to be in control and to be master.
This brings me to ultimate Christological problem with this vision of the human: the anhypostatic and enhypostatic constitution of the human. Hammered out in the post-Chalcedonian moment (especially by the likes Maximus the Confessor) and profoundly rehabilitated by Karl Barth, the first term points to the fact that Jesus does not acquire his center of agency, subjectivity, consciousness, etc from himself. In himself as human being, he is without (an-) hypostasis. This means as human being he is in profound dependence upon the agency and action of God to constitute him as human being. Jesus’ humanity doesn’t have its principle in him as such.
The second term points to the fact that he surely though is truly human, but his agency as human is a agency within and being and becoming into (en-) the personal life, agency, and action of God, the ‘hypostasis’ of the Son of God. So radical is the dependence that Jesus life as a human life lives into, that his human life rests on the Marian fiat, on Mary’s Yes. But this Yes of Mary is also by itself insufficient. It rests in God’s Yes. It is inside of God’s Yes: this is the descent of the Holy Spirit to overshadow Mary.
In all of this Joseph, the would-be Father, the patriarch, is set aside—and unlike Zacharias, husband of Elizabeth, parents of John the Baptist, accepts being set aside. Kyriarchy/Patriarchy (Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza), or in our moment the problem of the White imperial masculine, is subjected to ideological critique, and is upended. Christ himself is the revolution against it.
And Joseph accepts this. He accepts that the redemption of Israel through the coming of the Messiah, and thus his own salvation, will happen in a way that in no way comes from him, his resources, or is subject to his control. This is the recreation of the human. This is salvation.
Hi Tim and Professor Carter. I watched D9 last night so I can follow your arguments.
Some clarifying questions for both of you: Tim, could you elaborate a bit more on what you meant on “from within the resources of whiteness itself?” I am understanding you to mean that Jake is seeking his salvation in a sort of pelagian way, an assertion of his own will. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean something different? How do you interpret the Na’vi god’s decision to “recreate” Jake as a Na’vi person–seemingly, as was the case with Weaver’s character, this is something Jake has no control over and something that is done to him. In my reading, Jake did not make himself a Na’vi, the Na’vi god did. The ultimate power in Avatar is not Jake or even the Na’vi people, but the feminine deity. In D9, technology is God. Whoever has the biggest guns, wins.
I also felt that Jake and Wirkus’ were equally heroic and salvific. The “prawns” could not have left without his use of sacred masculine violence. Do not both movies present white man as hero? The scene in which Wirkus and Christopher break into the lab also parallels Avatar–Wirkus, like Jake, has to undo something he has done. In Avatar, Jake gave the earth military crucial info that they could use to destroy the Na’vi; in D9, pre-virus Wirkus “confiscated” the tube of black juice or energy which he then had to get back. Also, in D9, as in Avatar, the Na’vi/prawns take Jake/Wirkus in to their community. In D9 much more than in Avatar, salvation is something that men do; women are nowhere to be seen. At least in Avatar, women were also warriors. Also, in D9, the “prawns” escape completely due to their technological mastery–in Avatar, the Na’vi win against the earthlings due to the intervention of their deity.
And could you explain how the Na’vi society was “already oriented toward Jake?”
Also, could you explain your definition of whiteness? I am a bit baffled as to how someone who no longer has a white body and who has worked to help defeat white power and who has been baptized/inducted into a non-white community can be called “white under the guise of difference.” Would you say that a person born with the body of a man who transitions into the body of a woman is still a man? How can you have whiteness without a white body, without allegiance to whiteness, and without privilege/domination?
Wirkus, on the other hand, no longer has a white body, but he wants it back. It is unclear to whom he is loyal–he is being sheltered by the “prawns” because he has nowhere else to go and because only they can save them. He has not necessarily undergone a moral conversion.
I am equally baffled as to how Wirkus escapes this. Is he not still white? yearning for a return to whiteness?
Again, in D9, Christopher’s christ-like concern for the salvation of his people happens because of his own will and because of technology. It is completely pelegian.
Also, whereas Avatar provides us a way to re-imagine the use of intelligence in nature, D9 makes our current technological regime seem inevitable–even the “aliens” have the same type of technology as we do…it’s just better. D9, like almost every “action” movie completely glorifies the masculine. The only two women in the movie (besides those who appear in the mock-documentary scenes) are Wirkus’ wife, a beautiful and clueless token blonde, who has no existence apart from her husband and father. In fact, as with many action movies, she exists just so we can feel sympathy for her husband. She is completely instrumental. The other is the shaman, priestess, who, I think perpetuates the dichotomy between masculine christianity (wirkus/christopher) and the pagan/demonic feminine. Also, D9 also perpetuated troubling stereotypes about white and black women. The Afrikaaner woman was prim, thin, blonde, well-mannered. The African woman was heavier, wild, blood-thirsty.
Also, while Carter has a problem with the way Avatar idealizes or makes difference beautiful, I was quite uncomfortable with the way that D9 made difference almost unbearably grotesque. In my mind, the message of D9 was: even though the alien other is grotesque and savage, if we get to know a “good one” of them, Christopher, who is marked as being more intelligent than the other “prawns,” (he is also the only one shown being paternal–something that makes him much more sympathetic), we will see that they are really not that bad. As an allegory for apartheid, this is troubling. If beings like the prawns landed on earth, it would be reasonable for people to be fearful and suspicious of them. It would be reasonable not to know “what to do with them.” Yet, indigenous South Africans were not at all like “prawns.” First of all, they were there first–they were not accidentally stumbling upon someone else’s society. Second of all, they were actually human. Race is an artificial and devious creation, human/prawn difference is not.
Even if the prawns were treated justly, it would still be undeniable that they were different. Such difference would not be a historical construction as was the case with race, it would be legitimate. I think D9 actually lets whites off the hook–it makes their racism actually seem reasonable–in fact, it makes race seem legitimate. If anything, I think the D9 legitimates the white racist imagination–the way the prawns appear is the way non-whites appear to the white racist imagination; grotesque, barbaric, unintelligent, etc. But in D9, the prawns really ARE grotesque. In Avatar, it is much more clear that the earthlings disdain for the Na’vi is the result of the earthlings’ inability to control and dominate them.
D9 presents a world in which people can’t change on their own. Conversion is chaotic, the result of a hideous virus. Jake’s conversion in Avatar occurred both with grace and through his own free will. Could not Avatar be read as Jake’s response to grace?
And D9 ultimately is just as much about Wirkus’ redemption and restoration to bodily wholeness (humanness/whiteness) as Avatar is about Jake’s. The main difference is, for Wirkus, to be whole is to be human/white. Jake has found a way to be whole outside of the white body and outside of white power. The movie begins with Wirkus and ends with Wirkus. The salvation of the prawns is just a means to an end for him. He waits for their salvation only so that he may be saved. His object of desire is still the white, blonde woman. To be loved by her, is to really exist. To me, that is racist.
I’m just not sure how a movie that exposes both the columbian conquest as well as American imperialism as motivated not by good, but by self interest and greed, which condemns technological rationality, which celebrates ecological harmony, which has as its good guys male and female marines who defect from the military and fight against imperialism, which celebrates the alien other not as grotesque and hideous but as beautiful and human, which gives sovereignty and power to a feminine deity, could be on the side of white masculine imperialism.
What does one do after watching D9? Wait to be infected with a virus?
K. Grimes,
You’ve asked a lot of really good questions and I won’t be able to field them all. Let me try to just capture a couple.
When I say that Jake is working to rehabilitate whiteness from within its own resources, I am pointing to the way that his “entry” into “the alien” is one forged through his control (the avatar) and in which he can test, examine, and probe “the alien form” to see if is receptive to his needs/desires/demands. He can elevate himself within the community through the avatar to be in position to be their savior. The “conversion” to alien form is thus the culmination and fulfillment of his own self-initiated project. The Na’vi society was “already oriented” to him precisely because he could fit himself within it as one of the leaders (and eventually the central leader).
If we look at missionary history, we can see the parallel in the donning of “confucian” religious outfits, and later the garb of the scholars, by the missionaries to China. It was only because they saw a form within the society that corresponded to their own sense of themselves that they would willingly “inhabit” the society and “become” Chinese. Contrast this to the missionary experience in Africa, where the people there were seen as lacking the “civilized” structures capable of bearing/supporting the missionary’s self-understanding. What I am suggesting is that Jake’s move is like the move of the missionaries to the Chinese. It has the appearance of a leaving behind of one’s culture but it is actually the manifestation of one’s culture, for it is the special prerogative of the “white masculine” to be the “universal” form and capable of being instantiated in any, proper/civilized creaturely form (and the propriety of the creaturely form is decided by its ability to support the white man’s sense of mastery and destiny). To put it most simply: Jake can want, properly display, and in a sense, earn, the alien form (it may be a gift, but it is a well-earned gift bestowed upon him after his salvific actions). And he can do precisely because the alien form stood in need of him. Its truest ambitions and desires could be fulfilled in him, and so he could enter into it, put on its clothes, because they in a sense already signified his dignity, leadership, mastery, competence, strength, success, intelligence and vigor.
D-9 portrays an alienation that will be refused, the coming of a form that does not affirm our cultural sense of self-identity (and strength), that renders us bound to a people we do not want, whose life we do not desire. Christopher is supposed to represent Christ (and hence we don’t have the worries of pelagianism), and Wirkus is left dependent on him, unable to be the savior, but waiting for him to come. The transformation is not an easy “moral transformation;” it’s not simply “becoming good” because this kind of moral victory is most often the affirmation of our sense of the best of ourselves. His whole “ethical” horizon has been collapsed; he does not know who he is or what to do and can only make sense of his life within the horizon set by Christ(opher). Obviously, the movie isn’t just a theological tract (e.g., no sustaining power of the Holy Spirit to keep us bound, and hence truly free–again, Barth–in this dependency). But what it tries to explore is an alienation that isn’t simply the culmination of the best of who we think we are (wished we were).
On the difference b/n race (as a constructed category) and alien: what the movie forces us to examine is just whether the social importance of “difference” actually hinges on whether the difference is “real” or “imagined.” The way in which you’ve criticized the movie (race is an arbitrary difference; human/alien is not) is precisely what the movie tries to make it hard to do: who determines what is a real difference and what is not; what difference is grotesque and what difference is pleasing; what difference is important and what difference is insignificant; what difference can be absorbed and what must be separated out and, if need be, abolished.
To answer your final question: I think the ultimate, theological answer is not “wait to be infected” but accept that you already have been and stop trying to find ways escape from dependence on your prawn savior.
Hi Jim:
I have to confess: I’ve not seen either dances with wolves or the last samurai. I’ve been told by friends that I need to check these films out as there are connections between them and Avatar. Your comments align with these suggestions. So I guess at some point this summer I’ll be checking out “dances” and “samurai”! Thanks for reading this blog post on Avatar and contributing with a comment.