Are we going to keep ignoring the white savior (and white director) in blockbuster movies about POC/Indigenous people?
Colonization happened. Genocide happened. Segregation, discrimination, and exploitation happened (not to mention, still do). This is our history, and we cannot ignore it. However… do we have to keep reviving it? Movie after movie continues to portray this history, spend time and money to keep it alive, and ultimately glorify it. This is not awareness. This is greed.
Let’s talk about Avatar and its new sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water. The films’ main character, Jake Sully, is our classic ‘white savior’. In the first film, he was part of a team tasked with extracting a precious chemical from a nearby planet called Pandora, as it would be worth billions of dollars back on Earth. All the team had to do to obtain the chemical was get past the aliens (Na’vi) living on this planet– here are our classic ‘savage POCs’. Long story short, Jake decided that he liked the Na’vi way of life and wanted in on it, so he joined their sacred community and also somehow became king. In the newest film, he is being punished by his white human peers and they are trying to kill him. What this actually results in, however, is countless Indigenous people and animals and lands being destroyed as he moves from village to village and involves them in his war. Rather than turn himself in, which would probably stop the war entirely, he calls on all his new followers to fight for him, sacrificing themselves and everything that is sacred to them. Do we see the problem?
Writer and director James Cameron has said that the films are a sci-fi retelling of European colonization of indigenous peoples. Apparently he spent some time traveling in other countries to get inspired by their misfortune. My words, not his. Now, nobody will say that this movie sides with the colonizers or makes them look like the good guys. There are hours of violent bloodshed to prove that they are not. However, this truth does not mean that the movie is a great step of progress for indigenous people in society. Not only are the Na’vi a physical and cultural hodge-podge of many non-white peoples, swirled together to Cameron’s heart’s content, but their likenesses are both being (primarily) portrayed by white voices and crafted/edited by white minds. This is pretty much the definition of cultural appropriation. Yes, the movie depicts the truth of white people coming in and ruining everything for indigenous people, but let’s think about who is telling and profiting from this story… Suddenly the cycle has continued.
Growing up as a white kid, I viewed many racially-problematic movies as perfectly inspiring stories of the world’s journey towards equality. And I felt that it was pretty much on the horizon– equality, that is. The Help, The Blind Side, Green Book– all of these movies gave ‘representation’ to people of color, yet again, the profits of this representation went directly into the pockets of those who created this brutal inequality in the first place. Profiting the same way their ancestors did, just a new method which happens to disguise itself in a narrative-flipping way.
Being a much more informed and educated white kid now, I realize how dangerous this actually was. If the media depicted race relations in a way that made my developing brain believe that racism was almost over, then we have a problem. That means that I grew up thinking people of color were having about the same life experience as me, and though there were bad things in the past, white people ultimately stood up for what’s right and created equality. What a beautiful story I had been fed.
These non-factual movie tropes are almost rewriting history. For the privileged and gullible, like my kid self, there is no reason to believe that white people weren’t the best thing to happen to people of color/Indigenous people. Sandra Bullock saved that poor Black kid! Emma Stone defied all odds by befriending her housekeepers! Jake was exactly what the Na’vi had been waiting for! These were my takeaways back then. These movies taught me that white people have the right to explore and infiltrate any culture, as long as they are curious and intelligent enough. It often even does the POC a favor, it seemed. Since none of this violent segregation, discrimination, or exploitation goes on anymore, we can look back and honor the white people who stood up to their peers and made things right. Thank God for them. As long as the story gets a happy ending, the young minds of today can keep eating their Cheerios in peace and not give the actual storytelling a second thought.
I don’t know about you, but this is not what I want to be feeding the future of our society. I want the glorifying to stop. The history of white supremacy is an evil and ugly one, and that is what kids need to learn. Not from a white guy voicing a DIY Indigenous person, but from accounts written by POC telling their own stories. I want to see those voices on the big screen, and I want blockbuster profits to be going into those pockets. I don’t want sequels of stories that do not need to be continued, their capitalistic creators thinking that it’s not enough to make billions of dollars off of the stories of the colonized just once. This phenomenon is not only tone-deaf, but it is an erasure of the hurt and loss and fear of so many communities who aren’t experiencing any change after these movies come out. It is not a call to action; it is entertainment for profit.
If you are thinking of seeing Avatar: The Way of Water, I’d recommend stopping while you’re ahead and instead watching a movie that is actually made by a person who shares an identity with the people or culture that it represents. Spoiler alert: no more happy endings.
Emma Tremont 