44 | NEW STATESMAN | 8 MARCH 2010

The Critics

James Cameron’s Avatar tells the story of a dis-abled ex-marine, sent from earth to infiltrate a race of blue-skinned aboriginal people on adistant planet and persuade them to let his employer mine their homeland for natural re-sources. Through a complex biological manip-ulation, the hero’s mind gains control of his“avatar”, in the body of a young aborigine.

These aborigines are deeply spiritual and livein harmony with nature (they can plug a cablethat sticks out of their body into horses andtrees to communicate with them). Predictably,the marine falls in love with a beautiful aborigi-nal princess and joins the aborigines in battle,helping them to throw out the human invaders

and saving their planet. At the film’s end, thehero transposes his soul from his damaged hu-man body to his aboriginal avatar, thus becom-ing one of them.

Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, withits combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be comparedto films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit(1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and animagined universe – of cartoons in Roger Rab-bit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the dig-itally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mindis that, although Avatar’s narrative is supposed

to take place in one and the same “real” reality,we are dealing – at the level of the underlyingsymbolic economy – with two realities: the or-dinary world of imperialist colonialism on theone hand, and a fantasy world, populated byaborigines who live in an incestuous link withnature, on the other. (The latter should not beconfused with the miserable reality of actualexploited peoples.) The end of the film shouldbe read as the hero fully migrating from realityinto the fantasy world – as if, in The Matrix,Neo were to decide to immerse himself againfully in the matrix.

This does not mean, however, that we shouldreject Avatar on behalf of a more “authentic”acceptance of the real world. If we subtract fan-tasy from reality, then reality itself loses its con-sistency and disintegrates. To choose between“either accepting reality or choosing fantasy” iswrong: if we really want to change or escape oursocial reality, the first thing to do is change ourfantasies that make us fit this reality. Becausethe hero of Avatar doesn’t do this, his subjec-tive position is what Jacques Lacan, with regardto de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the herostarts to feel a weird discontent and to miss thecorrupted human universe. The source of thisdiscontent is not only that every reality, nomatter how perfect it is, sooner or later disap-points us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints usprecisely because of its perfection: what thisperfection signals is that it holds no place for us,the subjects who imagine it.

The utopia imagined in Avatar follows theHollywood formula for producing a couple –the long tradition of a resigned white hero whohas to go among the savages to find a propersexual partner (just recall Dances With Wolves).In a typical Hollywood product, everything,from the fate of the Knights of the Round Tableto asteroids hitting the earth, is transposed intoan Oedipal narrative. The ridiculous climax ofthis procedure of staging great historical eventsas the background to the formation of a coupleis Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), in which Holly-wood found a way to rehabilitate the OctoberRevolution, arguably the most traumatic his-torical event of the 20th century. In Reds, the couple of John Reed and Louise Bryant arein deep emotional crisis; their love is reignitedwhen Louise watches John deliver an impas-sioned revolutionary speech.

What follows is the couple’s lovemaking, intersected with archetypal scenes from therevolution, some of which reverberate in an alltoo obvious way with the sex; say, when Johnpenetrates Louise, the camera cuts to a streetwhere a dark crowd of demonstrators envelopsand stops a penetrating “phallic” tram – all thisagainst the background of the singing of “TheInternationale”. When, at the orgasmic climax,

CRITIC AT LARGE

Return ofthe natives

Beneath the idealism and political correctness of Avatar, in the spotlight at the Oscars on Sunday,

lie brutal racist undertones. By Slavoj Žižek

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8 MARCH 2010 | NEW STATESMAN | 45

The Critics

Lenin himself appears, addressing a packed hallof delegates, he is more a wise teacher oversee-ing the couple’s love-initiation than a cold rev-olutionary leader. Even the October Revolutionis OK, according to Hollywood, if it serves thereconstitution of a couple.

In a similar way, is Cameron’s previous block-buster, Titanic, really about the catastrophe ofthe ship hitting the iceberg? One should be attentive to the precise moment of the catastro-phe: it takes place when the young lovers(Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), imme-diately after consummating their relationship,return to the ship’s deck. Even more crucial isthat, on deck, Winslet tells her lover that whenthe ship reaches New York the next morning,she will leave with him, preferring a life ofpoverty with her true love to a false, corruptedlife among the rich.

At this moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to prevent what would undoubtedlyhave been the true catastrophe, namely thecouple’s life in New York. One can safely guessthat soon the misery of everyday life wouldhave destroyed their love. The catastrophe thusoccurs in order to save their love, to sustain the illusion that, if it had not happened, theywould have lived “happily ever after”. A further

clue is provided by DiCaprio’s final moments.He is freezing in the cold water, dying, whileWinslet is safely floating on a large piece ofwood. Aware that she is losing him, she cries“I’ll never let you go!” – and as she says this, shepushes him away with her hands.

Why? Because he has done his job. Beneaththe story of a love affair, Titanic tells anotherstory, that of a spoiled high-society girl with anidentity crisis: she is confused, doesn’t knowwhat to do with herself, and DiCaprio, muchmore than just her love partner, is a kind of“vanishing mediator” whose function is to re-store her sense of identity and purpose in life.His last words before he disappears into thefreezing North Atlantic are not the words of adeparting lover, but the message of a preacher,telling her to be honest and faithful to herself.

Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism(his crude privileging of the lower classes andcaricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath thissympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth,first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Cap-tains Courageous. It concerns a young rich per-son in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality restored through brief intimate contact withthe full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is theirvampiric exploitation.

But today, Hollywood increasingly seems to

have abandoned this formula. The film of DanBrown’s Angels and Demons must surely be the first case of a Hollywood adaptation of apopular novel in which there is sex betweenthe hero and the heroine in the book, but not in its film version – in clear contrast to the oldtradition of adding a sex scene to a film based on a novel in which there is none. There isnothing liberating about this absence of sex; weare rather dealing with yet more proof of thephenomenon described by Alain Badiou in his Éloge de l’amour – today, in our pragmatic-narcissistic era, the very notion of falling inlove, of a passionate attachment to a sexualpartner, is considered obsolete and dangerous.

Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creat-ing a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and itsstory of a white man marrying the aboriginalprincess and becoming king, make it ideologi-cally a rather conservative, old-fashioned film.Its technical brilliance serves to cover up thisbasic conservatism. It is easy to discover, be-neath the politically correct themes (an honestwhite guy siding with ecologically sound abo-rigines against the “military-industrial com-plex” of the imperialist invaders), an array ofbrutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast fromearth is good enough to get the hand of a beautiful local princess, and to help the nativeswin the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is

The plight of the Na’avi in Avatar (above) resemblesthat of the Kondh people of Orissa (opposite)

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do not fight for their land, they will beannihilated . . . their ragged, malnutritionedarmy, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.

The Indian prime minister characterised thisrebellion as the “single largest internal securitythreat”; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism”, replacing storiesabout “Islamist terrorism”. No wonder the In-dian state is responding with a big military operation against “Maoist strongholds” in thejungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in thisbrutal war, that the “people’s justice” of theMaoists is harsh. However, no matter how un-palatable this violence is to our liberal taste, wehave no right to condemn it. Why? Becausetheir situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starvingtribal people, to whom the minimum of a dig-nified life is denied.

So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere:in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waitingfor white heroes to seduce them and help theirpeople, just the Maoists organising the starvingfarmers. The film enables us to practise a typi-cal ideological division: sympathising with theidealised aborigines while rejecting their actualstruggle. The same people who enjoy the filmand admire its aboriginal rebels would in allprobability turn away in horror from the Nax-alites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists.The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the filmsubstituting for reality.lSlavoj Žižek is a philosopher and criticThe Academy Awards ceremony is on 7 Marchnewstatesman.com/culture

to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they canchoose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the whiteman’s fantasy.

At the same time as Avatar is making moneyall around the world (it generated $1bn afterless than three weeks of release), somethingthat strangely resembles its plot is taking place.The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa,inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, weresold to mining companies that plan to exploittheir immense reserves of bauxite (the depositsare considered to be worth at least $4trn). In re-action to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armedrebellion exploded.

Arundhati Roy, in Outlook India magazine,writes that the Maoist guerrilla army

is made up almost entirely of desperatelypoor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges onfamine of the kind we only associate withsub-Saharan Africa. They are people who,even after 60 years of India’s so-calledindependence, have not had access toeducation, health care or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilesslyexploited for decades, consistently cheatedby small businessmen and moneylenders,the women raped as a matter of right bypolice and forest department personnel.Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoistcadres who have lived and worked andfought by their sides for decades.

If the tribals have taken up arms, they havedone so because a government which hasgiven them nothing but violence and neglectnow wants to snatch away the last thing theyhave – their land . . . They believe that if they

The Critics

46 | NEW STATESMAN | 8 MARCH 2010

FILM

Adventures inslumberland

Tim Burton comes acropper with his foray into

3-D, writes Ryan GilbeyAlice in Wonderland (PG)

dir: Tim Burton

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has alreadyinspired a pair of probing films, each deliciousin its own way – the Dennis Potter-scriptedDreamchild (1985) and Jan Švankmajer’s herky-jerky Alice (1988) – so perhaps it’s greedy to expect another film-maker to conjure miraclesfrom the same text. Even so, Tim Burton’s Alicein Wonderland, needlessly shot in 3-D, is acrushing disappointment. It exposes the direc-tor at his lowest ebb, artistically speaking, sincethe double non-whammy of Planet of the Apesand Big Fish at the start of the Noughties. Anapparent wealth of funds and technology hasresulted in a fantasy drained of the fantastic;the wonder is how so little of what makes thisdirector special could have reached the screen.Only a fool would go to a Tim Burton film forelegantly tailored storytelling, but now eventhe visuals are off-the-peg.

Linda Woolverton’s sketchy screenplay sendsthe 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) tum-bling back down the rabbit hole of her child-hood dreams. Once in “Underland”, there issome confusion over whether she is the sameAlice, the “right” Alice. Her validity is calledinto question, as is her certainty that everyoneis merely a walk-on in her dream.

The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) realises withmuted alarm that, if this were the case, then hewould be a figment of her imagination. It is ameasure of Depp’s mastery of nuance that hecan still transmit, from beneath a vomit-orange

Going under: Alice (Mia Wasikowska)

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