Sucker-punched by Avatar

BY ED FELIEN

I took my daughter and grandson to see “Avatar.” I came out of the movie wild-eyed and exuberant. This was a movie that showed the folly of U. S. imperialism. It showed how indigenous people (and Cameron’s production company is called Indigenous) will always defeat an aggressor—even an aggressor who builds them roads and schools and hospitals. I was thrilled with the message. It took three years to make, and it seemed a direct response to Bush’s wars in the Middle East.

My daughter was strangely silent. She wanted to know how her son liked the movie. He’s 11 and, predictably, he loved the action scenes. He’s looking forward to seeing it again in 3-D. She didn’t want to talk about the movie around her son, because she didn’t want to spoil it for him.
But, when we were alone she asked if I knew the film was made by Rupert Murdoch.

I didn’t. But what difference did that make?
She answered, Murdoch wouldn’t make a film that didn’t project his values, so there’s probably a hidden message in there somewhere that I’m not seeing.
I thought maybe Murdoch wanted to be first out the door with the new filmmaking technology.

The technology is not that new; it’s been done before, she answered.
Look, I said, it’s a film about people freeing themselves from a colonial oppressor. How could that be a reactionary theme?

She said, maybe the message is that “the other,” the people being colonized, the brown people, the racially different people, can’t really succeed at throwing off their oppressor until some white guy helps them? Maybe that’s the real message of the film? Maybe Murdoch is trying to tell us that all other cultures really are inferior to ours, and they don’t stand a chance unless we help them.
OMG (as they say on Twitter).

That was a learning moment. She’s right, of course. When Americans think about the Vietnam War, the strongest images we have are of the protest movement that tried to end it. Both the left and right believe the protest movement was the reason the war ended. But the reason the war ended was because the Vietnamese won. It wasn’t a protest movement that forced the U. S. evacuation from the roof of the Embassy in what is now Ho Chi Minh City, it was the Vietnamese people. But Americans are so ethnocentric, so convinced of their own superiority, that they have to believe that somehow they caused it. It’s inconceivable to us that an indigenous population could do something like that on their own. Of course Americans should protest U. S. imperialist adventures in the Middle East, Colombia, etc.

We should do this because if we do not object, then we are accomplices in the murder and genocide of another people. And we should elect people who will put an end to war as an instrument of government policy (we thought we did that with Obama). But we should understand that it is only the people of Afghanistan, of Palestine, of Colombia that can make decisions affecting their own destiny. In “Avatar” the white demi-god makes all the decisions and organizes the revolt. That’s not the way it happens.

A sucker-punch is when someone slugs you when you’re not looking.
I learned that the next time Rupert Murdoch offers me something on a silver platter, I’ll look at it more closely.

I also learned that my grandson has a pretty smart mommy.