Zizek on Avatar

Here’s something Slavoj Žižek and I have in common. We’ve both seen Avatar. I was not totally bewitched by it, maybe because balancing a pair of 3-D spec­ta­cles on top of another set of glasses while sitting two meters from the screen, tilting my head at a 30-degree angle in order to see it, detracted a bit from the visual expe­ri­ence. But still, Avatar was excellent: a sledge­ham­mer of an assault on American corporate impe­ri­al­ism, the exo-skeleton clad high-explosive-wielding security forces a straight­for­ward proxy for the American Army, engaged in a murderous resource grab.

Dud dialog and slightly heavy-handed (the never-to-be-obtained mineral named Unob­ta­nium)? Sure, fine. But the plot’s lack of subtlety wasn’t the point, not amidst its political content, presented alongside stunning visuals: hal­lu­cino­geni­cally colorful flora, chunks of mountains phan­tas­magor­i­cally floating in a thick fog, and blooms of shim­mer­ing jelly-fish-like spirit-seeds that alight on the pro­tag­o­nist, Jake Sully, blessing him, and even­tu­ally anointing him. Their presence prevents the Na’vi—Hebrew for prophet—princess from shooting him dead with a bow and arrow. The Na’vi are humanoid blue creatures living in a pre-lapsarian rela­tion­ship with their planet, capable of con­nect­ing to the biosphere and its fauna through their hair. They link directly to Aywa, the earth-goddess, a direct analog for James Lovelock’s Gaia. “We have nothing they need,” says Jake, bemoaning the inability of the corporate mer­can­tilists to make an exchange to get the Na’vi out from the tree in which they make their home. Indeed: “You are so stupid!” the Na’vi princess lashes into Sully. Fair enough. They had already destroyed their planet—earth in 2154—and what could be dumber than to destroy your home and render it unlivable? Can an eco­log­i­cal criticism of corporate impe­ri­al­ism be more powerful than to simul­ta­ne­ously highlight its genetic avari­cious­ness and its viral nature, destroy­ing the world that birthed it?

Žižek did not like Avatar, but perhaps we saw different films. (Perhaps also one of us saw it and the other did not). When he glanc­ingly touches on the film’s theme, he gets it really wrong. He writes that Pandora is “populated by abo­rig­ines who live in an inces­tu­ous link with nature… (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.)” What an “inces­tu­ous” link with nature could mean is unclear. Meanwhile “actual” exploited peoples, usually invisible in the Žižekian imaginary, do tend to have more sus­tain­able con­sump­tion and pro­duc­tion patterns, if we take per-capita CO2 emissions as any metric.

Meanwhile, Žižek’s approach to ecology is habit­u­ally poorly con­sid­ered. Stuffed under­neath the gestures to stereo­types about abo­rig­ines is a stunning lack of awareness about what kind of planning patterns might truly be sus­tain­able. Small com­mu­ni­ties living in home­o­sta­tic rela­tion­ships with nature? Small is Beautiful? That’s just treacle, and anyway, there’s some posturing to do.

Amidst a bewil­der­ing, figure-eight tour, selected stops on Titanic, The Matrix, Dances with Wolves, Reds, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Žižek writes,

Cameron’s super­fi­cial Hollywood Marxism (his crude priv­i­leg­ing of the lower classes and car­i­cat­ural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reac­tionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Coura­geous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality restored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the com­pas­sion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.

I had not thought to see the day when a major leftist intel­lec­tual dis­par­ages the best-selling movie of all time for its director’s deploy­ment of insuf­fi­ciently nuanced Marxist politics. Nor is the movie’s Marxism as “crude” as Žižek would have it. It’s obvious that cap­i­tal­ism rests on a systemic ego­tis­ti­cal logic, and radicals tend to think that the lower classes will be the ones to make the revolution—hence, “priv­i­leged,” whatever that means.

Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the abo­rig­i­nal princess and becoming king, make it ide­o­log­i­cally a rather con­ser­v­a­tive, old-fashioned film. Its technical bril­liance serves to cover up this basic con­ser­vatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the polit­i­cally correct themes (an honest white guy siding with eco­log­i­cally sound abo­rig­ines against the “military-industrial complex” of the impe­ri­al­ist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a para­plegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of a beautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the abo­rig­ines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of impe­ri­al­ist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.

This is weird. There is nothing “con­ser­v­a­tive” about an audio-visually stunning attack on cap­i­tal­ist mil­i­tarism. Why is the “military-industrial complex” rendered in scare quotes? Inveigh­ing against the pre­vail­ing social system usually doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “political cor­rect­ness,” and the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia would probably be surprised that their invo­ca­tions of Pachamama are “political cor­rect­ness.” The Ecuado­rian CONAIE would be shocked to find that its denun­ci­a­tions of the Correa government’s policies towards the Yasuni-ITT are belittled as “eco­log­i­cally sound” abo­rig­i­nal ten­den­cies. Anyway, is it really true that “The film teaches us that the only choice the abo­rig­ines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them…the victim of impe­ri­al­ist reality” or a “role in the white man’s fantasy”?  The people of Bil’in, mas­querad­ing as Na’vi several weeks ago in a self-conscious and cunning ploy to play to the Western imaginary, aim to save them­selves, with, yes, Western sol­i­dar­ity activists sup­port­ing their efforts. Same with the Dongria Kondh.

Avatar has its issues. It is, in part, a film playing to a colonial mindset—the white man as hero. But the hero in a sci-fi bang-up thriller that viciously attacks a vicious social system in a manner that no one can miss. Moreover, Avatar re-codes typical impe­ri­al­ist memes. It is the natives who have an advanced society, and they who civilize the invader, who can only fight with the invaded, for their land, after becoming one of them. This is not so much against the typical pattern as the creation of a totally new one.

Žižek knows his Freud/Lacan et al., and knows too that the­o­ret­i­cal pyrotech­nics can enliven any argument. Or at least impress other smart people. But he must also know that sometimes a cigar is a cigar, and a main­stream critique of corporate impe­ri­al­ism is just that. Give it a rest.

Technorati Tags: Avatar, ecology, James Cameron, utopianism, Zizek

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