Bougainville & Atavar
Despite selling out every night it screens at the cinema on Courtney Place and becoming the highest grossing film of all time, few have picked up on Avatar’s blatant allusions to the historical drama of Bougainville that happened on New Zealand’s doorstep thirteen years ago. The films names, plot and characters are almost direct references to the 1997 Bougainville crisis yet no one seems to have drawn the dots between science fiction and south Pacific fact. Until now.
DeAnander:
I remember the documentary “Evergreen Island” — well worth the time to track down and watch. It told the story of the Bougainville resistance and the long blockade imposed by PNG/Oz. The ingenuity and resource of the islanders was/is inspiring, heroic, marvelous. I have not seen Avatar yet — wrote it off as just another Hollywood clichefest — but this review makes me (somewhat) more interested in it.
10 February 2010, 11:48 pmSean:
Also google “Bougainville: Our Island, Our Fight.”
11 February 2010, 1:44 amAvatar is still a Hollywood clichefest reliant on the spectacle of violence rather than deeper discussion but nevertheless represents some “progress” in the emergence of an anti-imperialist public consciousness.
Winston Warfield:
I have seen “Avatar” and highly recommend it. Many of my leftie friends have tended to dismiss it as just more Hollywood techno-trash, and some of the more ultra-orthodox reviews slammed it as racist because of the Lawrence of Arabia theme of the white “Westerner” Jake Sully former-Marine leading the natives in combat. While there’s a grain of truth in these crits, I think they miss the larger didactic impact of the film on a worldwide mass audience, especially in so-called “developed” countries. Yeah, it relies on violence-as-spectacle in part, but that brings in the young white male audience, steeped in cultural, racial and gender supremacy, and pulls them into a very sensitive and compelling story condemning through metaphor the ruthless depredations of imperialism and industrialism itself on nature and indigenous peoples. Who could not be emotionally affected by Neyteri’s grief, shock and horror at the destruction of the Na’vi “Home Tree”? That message reaching a mass audience is a million times more important than whether the film has certain drawbacks. I would hope that all members of the armed forces see the movie, and suspect they have, given the hunger for mass entertainment. It may just add to the cognitive dissonance roiling in their indoctrinated minds, just as happened many years ago with soldiers in Vietnam, who, like Jake Sully and Trudy Chacon in Avatar, realized through direct experience and observation that we were on the wrong side of morality and justice, and went into resistance mode. While seldom as dramatic as in Avatar in real life, when you added together millions of small acts of disobedience, it became a “morale” problem and eventually spelled doom for the imperial project.
11 February 2010, 8:15 amCurt Kastens:
Sean, well said.
11 February 2010, 9:36 amlatte lenya:
I saw Avatar and found it the inevitable Hollywood celebration of masculinity & violence, albeit greeenwashed, New Age-ified violence. It reminded me of the antiwar movies that followed Vietnam, which were then used a generation later to jin up soldiers to fight Iraq. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”
11 February 2010, 9:44 amA guy named Mark Rudd has written recently about the confusion that happened in the left in the 60s, when self-expression replaced organization as the prinicpal means of social change, concerts instead of strikes, for instance, and how ineffective and even counter-productive self-expression will largely be to accomplish either peace or justice.
An interesting connection to the real story, though. A rare victory, a battle which sounds like it was won the old-fashioned way, through action, not movies about action. This is not to judge: we all act in the ways we can. But it’s important to know the difference and not be deluded.
Don:
I find this completely bizarre. Didn’ Omar (and everyone else) realize that resource extraction and native people almost always lead to the same result? Dozens of examples are out there for Cameron to have looked at, but I doubt that it in any way did.
It’s a trivially simple plot and all these equivalences are not different from people who find images of the Virgin Mary or Jesus in chips and snacks.
It’s ridiculous.
“Our Island, Our Fight” is worth watching. “Evergreen Island,” less so — that film was a quick in-and-out (less than a week on Bougainville) and is a superficial treatment of one small area. Still, watch it if you can.
Bougainville was, and is, a complex place. Silly comparisons to popular movies advances Bougainvillean causes not at all, nor does it inform interested outsiders.
11 February 2010, 10:58 amDeAnander:
I wonder about that anti-imp consciousness. I mean, the cringeful Ewok subplot in Star Wars 3… talk about a condescending, patronising, imperialist mindset wrapped around the Heroic Underdog story. Once again the “primitive” people with their logs and stones manage to fight off the huge, mechanised, robotic forces of the Evil Empire; but only with the aid of the Anglo heroes. Americans (gringos generally) have a strong sympathy with the victims of mechanised warfare (leftover I think from the anti-German propaganda and WWII social engineering); but they seem (large numbers anyway) incapable of perceiving their own mechanised, overwhelming forces, projected into other poorer people’s countries, as the Darth Vader gang. Suddenly the underdog sympathy disappears when patriotism rears its bloody head; or by bizarre twists of imagination they manage to make the US the “underdog,” in danger, attacked on all sides, full of self pity and righteous “self defence.”
So I’m wary of feeling encouraged by people’s sentimental responses to media portrayals of underdog struggles.
11 February 2010, 11:48 amDeAnander:
For Example: Mega and Micro Bases Proliferate, Projecting US Power in Middle East/Central Asia:
This is absolutely Darth Vader stuff. And yet the people doing it — most of whom probably just loved the Star Wars flicks — somehow convince themselves that they are not the evil empire, but some kind of goodguys. How they do this is beyond me. But there it is. People can love narratives of heroic resistance to colonisation, cheer on the cute little animated pseudo-indigenes bringing down the killer robots, and then drive their SUV with its prominent “Support Our Troops” sticker off to their job at the munitions plant. Why their heads don’t melt from cognitive dissonance, I dunno.
11 February 2010, 12:23 pmMark:
Hey Stan, one of your fellow Christians explained the connection between Avatar and Haiti.
Link
STAN: This bears no resemblence between to my understanding of Christ. But you knew that.
11 February 2010, 1:15 pmm.c.:
I just thought of ‘The Mission’(1986) with Robert DeNiro as the ex-spanish mercenary who teaches the locals to fight. Jeremy Irons plays the main priest.
11 February 2010, 1:37 pmxenia:
As the Americas go, the prototype is Gonzalo Guerrero, who joined the Maya against the Spanish in the early 16th century. See Bernal Diaz (the original source) and Inga Clendinnen.
As one may expect, Clendinnen is a lot sharper when it comes to analyzing the Spanish conquest of the Americas (“Ambivalent Conquests”) than when it comes to her own Australian turf. Although she sympathizes with the Aborigines, she also extols Australia as exceptionally egalitarian land of opportunities (“Dancing with Strangers”, also see her interviews on the net).
12 February 2010, 2:15 amWinston Warfield:
Regarding “Avatar’s” theme, I agree it’s hard to believe some kind of meaningful opposition within the military is possible, but we don’t have to go as far afield historically as some of the above examples, to find it. “Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War”, by David Cortwright, is an excellent, eye-opening history, broad and deep in its scope, of resistance within the U.S. military to the destruction of Southeast Asia in the 60′s and 70′s. Cortwright chronicles everything from asassinations of officers and NCO’s (“fraggings” – there were over 700 recorded), to sabotage to stockade uprisings. Passive resistance was the norm. Sometimes there were direct refusals of orders. The Army and Marine Corps essentially stopped fighting, at least to the extent necessary to “win”. As a result the war morphed into massive bombing, but resistance spilled over into the Air Force and Navy. Pilots deliberately dropped their bombs over unpopulated jungle, and targeting groups purposely misdirected B-52 runs. I’m telling you, the sweep of the thing was dramatic. Popular culture, in which category Avatar falls, informed and reinforced resistance, in a continuous feedback loop. Then it was music and drugs and peace symbology. Much of the revolt was given militant energy by black soldiers, and those of us whites whose consciences were hurting, tended to hang out with the brothers. As in Avatar, many of us fell in love with Vietnam, its beauty, and could not tolerate the suffering we were visiting on its people. I related on a deep, gut level to what happened to Jake Sully, and found myself crying in parts of the movie. To me, that’s powerful art.
12 February 2010, 10:20 amm.c.:
Yesterday I read a book review of the new Mark Twain biography by Michael Shelden. After the Spanish-American war (esp. in the Philippines) Twain was scandalously quoted as saying in the press, “If America is a Christian country, so is hell.”
12 February 2010, 12:38 pmCurt:
Eye Luv that quote
12 February 2010, 4:43 pmJim Barnes:
For myself I felt that Avatar pulled on most of the cinematic Western Frontier/ Goldrush /Indian wars events of the American 1800′s. From the moment the greedy corporate suit type calls the material “unobtanium” through to the scenes of village life and warrior activities and the destruction of the Home tree I believe there are parallels akin to just about every “Western” film made.
Looking deeper one may find similarities to other “real” events that happened such as Bougainville but lets not forget Dili, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In fact every imperialist action or “expansion” that has occurred over the past two hundred years has its echoes in this film. Of course the message is obscured by the CGI but not completely hidden for the informed or those willing to be informed.
On a note of “American” imperialism there are maps available that show the establishment of military bases around the world and it illustrates the point perfectly, where there is a base so to has there been some conflict where America has gone to save the poor and huddled masses, but it also shows their proximity to resources.
Remembering of course that it is not just movies that smack of propaganda it is the mainstream press who do the most damage e.g when we saw scenes of iraqis supposedly pulling down the statues of Saddam it was in reality a bunch of American engineers who attached chains to tanks and then called on the public to celebrate, but all we saw was the falling statue and a bunch of iraqis jumping for joy.
Anyway it isn’t what your thinking but what your doing that counts.
22 February 2010, 1:34 amTony D:
“The Coconut Revolution: Bougainville: Our Island, Our Fight” can be downloaded here: http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/1505/Coconut-Revolution–Bougainville-Our-Island-Our-Fight
27 February 2010, 3:08 pm