‘Avatar’ in the Amazon — Public Radio International

Somebody set up an event where indige­nous leaders from the Ecuadorean Amazon were bussed in to Quito to watch Avatar. My first instinct, in imag­ining that sce­nario, is to feel a little uncom­fort­able. I found Avatar to be a grab bag eth­i­cally. It’s by no means an inten­tion­ally com­plex story — it’s all pretty black and white in Jim Cameron’s fan­tasy world — but responding to the nar­ra­tive might require some mildly tricky eth­ical parsing on the viewer’s part. This has been pointed out many times now, but to review:

• on the one hand, the basic plot of the indige­nous resisting the colo­nialist para­mil­i­tary forces of the white envi­ron­mental exploiters is obvi­ously benign, if a little pat. American forces get­ting whacked by the right­eous, in an American film!
• on the other hand, I can’t imagine a more full-​​bodied instance of the noble savage myth. I mean, these guys are thor­oughly in per­fect har­mony with their envi­ron­ment, thanks to their untouched uncom­plexity, and not having eaten the apple.
• and most sig­nif­i­cantly, and as has been pointed out many times, the indige­nous are pow­er­less to save them­selves until a white leader orga­nizes them.

The good news is that all of these ele­ments are pre­sented in such a heavy handed manner that you can pretty safely ignore them and get on with the busi­ness of watching what is, absolutely, an extra­or­di­nary 3d spec­tacle. The writing is too stupid to be insidious.

But what about if it was being shown to some folks from up river in the Oriente? The article points out that some of them had appar­ently never even been in a movie the­atre before. I’ll bet some of them had, espe­cially if they were local polit­ical leaders. Then again, a local Hourani headman once asked me if he could try my CD Walkman, and when I let him, he sat in my ham­mock and lis­tened to Johnny Cash and Willy Nelson’s Story Tellers Live from begin­ning right through to the end, clap­ping when­ever the audi­ence clapped, and giving the strong impres­sion of never having lis­tened to music on head­phones before. Or maybe he just really liked Johnny Cash and Willy Nelson (who wouldn’t?).

I digress. Point is, I wouldn’t know before­hand exactly how a room full of Ecuadorean indige­nous leaders would respond to Avatar. In 3d no less. According to whomever pre­pared the article/​audio/​video, appar­ently pretty well:

“Honestly, this is the first time I’m seeing this movie, and it’s reality, what’s hap­pening now just in another dimension.”

Others say there was at least one thing in the movie that veered from their reality. Achuar leader Luis Vargas says it’s where the white guy sweeps in to the rescue. But he says that’s to be expected.

“This is a Hollywood movie, so it’s prac­ti­cally a given that a mes­tizo comes to the defense and leads [the people] to tri­umph in the end.”

Still, he liked the film, and his fellow Achuar leader Ernesto Vargas says he hopes another group will get a chance to see it.

“Think of how much better it would be if we showed this film to people who actu­ally want to exploit petro­leum. I think it would serve them very well, even more than us.”

Also very interesting:

As for Ecuador’s President Correa, he saw the movie with his chil­dren the day after it pre­miered in Ecuador. No word yet on what he thought of it.

Correa is a smart guy, it’s going to be pretty clear to him that Ecuador and the petro­leum and mining strug­gles there are an obvious sur­ro­gate for Pandora in the western mind. Many, many western minds have now imbibed Avatar. Western per­cep­tion, and Correa’s per­cep­tion of western per­cep­tion, counts highly in the out­comes of those struggles.

As well as the full text at the link, there’s audio:

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and this video: