11:47 AM |
Avatar - also known as indigenous issues 101
By KARLO MILA - The Dominion PostOPINION: This week James Cameron's movie Avatar has become the highest-grossing movie of all time. The movie has allegedly killed a man in Taiwan who died from "over-excitement". It has spawned depression en masse among viewers, paralysed by the fact that they're stuck on the disconnected and dying planet. Unfortunately, Pandora, Cameron's moon, is only in theatres.
China has banned it from more than a thousand screens at the urging of propaganda officials worried about its influence.
Cameron's moving metaphor has opened a number of Pandora's boxes, in particular, highlighting the plight of displaced and indigenous people. While Avatar is described as sci-fi or futuristic, it didn't feel to me like anything lost in space. Rather, it told a story as old as our hills, not one often sung from the treetops, but the one buried deeper beneath our green pastures.
A friend of mine who works in development in the Pacific described Avatar ultimately as outreach. It is indigenous issues 101 for mainstream in 3D technicolour. This is what happens when different world views and ways of knowing collide. Popcorn is optional.
Cameron has admitted that he modelled the indigenous alien-speak of Avatar on te reo Maori. The Avatar linguist (who appears to have Klingon aspirations) laid claim to the syntax and grammar but admitted that Cameron chose the first 30 words.
The linguistic remix of syntax and sounds in Avatar has nothing on the whirling pastiche of indigenous and native images, from the whooping, war-crying Last of the Mohicans (blueskins not redskins) saddled up with dragons between their legs, to the chiefly Lion Kings and purring feline queens sourced straight back to the Circle of Life.
There's the Naomi Campbell- esque Pocahontas princess in her own shade of indigo, complete with bare breasts, beads and strategic nipple-slips (some poor sod on the internet counted 26 times).
There's the flash of the Braveheart blue-face, mini dreadlocks and war plaits flying in the heat of battle.
Yes, it all feels very familiar, but in a lovely alien kind of way. Far from being fantasy about fantasy, Avatar is the native blue movie par excellence.
Throw in G.I. Joe, Top Gun, Star Wars, Ramboesque hand grenading and knife-wielding Transformers. Add lush, seductive scenery so surreal you can reach out and touch it - and you can see why you've got a blockbuster on your hands. Yes, Avatar relies heavily on a rehash of familiar archetypes and worn formulas. But one only has to watch a Sir Peter Jackson film to see how Hollywood usually does ooga-booga.
It's the familiar fail of Russian ice-skaters in brown body tights, leaves and loin cloths. It is ill- conceived mumbo-jumbo served up on ice. It is zeroes all round on the placards. Cameron said: "I try to live with honour, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time." Not a bad approach to life if you can afford it. And if you can't, a little love and respect go a long way.
* * *
After watching Avatar, we went to Te Papa and saw the long-term exhibition Blood, Earth, Fire. Like Avatar, it invokes the extended metaphor of an "alien" species. We played the interactive Survivor computer game: You are an alien. You're going to live on a new planet. You can choose species to take with you for food. You travel via rocket to a new planet (shaped exactly like New Zealand). Notably, many species you may have selected, such as the Choc Bar Vine, end up being rabid, noxious and disastrous to the environment.
The exhibition documents the colonial "delight of burning" virgin forest into pastures. The before and after maps of deforestation communicate strong, cartographic messages of waning green.
I listened to the lament for lost species and pondered the Pandora depression pandemic. As the te reo echoed over the frail bones of the long extinct huia bird, I meditated on why, when writing Avatar, Cameron, "maybe had some Maori in his ear".
It is a credit to us, that at the Museum of New Zealand we are not afraid to open our own Pandora's boxes. The stories we tell about ourselves are becoming less one- dimensional. Like Avatar, I think they are much more compelling, reflective and honest than many of the ooga-booga narratives that preceded them.
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1 "Gone With the Wind" (1939) 202,044,600 2 "Star Wars" (1977) 178,119,600 3 "The Sound of Music" (1965) 142,415,400 4 "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) 141,854,300 5 "The Ten Commandments" (1956) 131,000,000 6 "Titanic" (1997) 128,345,900 7 "Jaws" (1975) 128,078,800 8 "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) 124,135,500 9 "The Exorcist" (1973) 110,568,700 10 "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) 109,000,000 11 "101 Dalmatians" (1961) 99,917,300 12 "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) 98,180,600 13 "Ben-Hur" (1959) 98,000,000 14 "Return of the Jedi" (1983) 94,059,400 15 "The Sting" (1973) 89,142,900 16 "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) 88,141,900 17 "Jurassic Park" (1993) 86,205,800 18 "The Graduate" (1967) 85,571,400 19 "Star Wars: Episode I" (1999) 84,825,800 20 "Fantasia" (1941) 83,043,500
Furn Gully + $35,000,000 = Avatar (awesome)
Simon
Just curious to know where you got the stats about ticket sales and Avatar coming in at 26. Not disputing your stats, but would be keen to see the list.
Cheers
Avatar is a tired old story with some new clothes, if it is indeed "indigenous issues 101" then so is Dances with wolves and Pocahontas.
Or you could see it for what it was, a bad story, with fancy clothes.
And by the way it may of made the most money, but by ticket sales, Avatar only comes in at 26
Avatar = dances with Smurfs!!!
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aotearoa, new zealand
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