I See You, Avatar, And Your White Savior Bullshit, Too

James Cameron gives us a visual extravaganza as colonial gaze

James Cameron’s Avatar sequel is coming, and so I thought it was past time to watch the first one. Which is really long!

I had more to say about it than just “it’s really long!” though. If you like the essay below, consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can continue to write about old movies that lack a news hook.

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I See You, Avatar, And Your White Savior Bullshit, Too

“I see you,” Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) says to Jake (Sam Worthington) in the mega-blockbuster 2009 James Cameron special effects bonanza Avatar. Among Neytiri’s people, the blue-skinned Na’vi, “I see you” doesn’t just mean that they visually perceive you; it means they understand your inner self, your soul, your character, and your virtue. That conflation of surface spectacle and inner wisdom functions as a kind of anticipatory defense and justification for Avatar itself, a movie that prioritizes CGI special effects over narrative or acting. “You teach me how to see all that's beautiful/My senses touch a world I never pictured,” as the theme song “I See You” puts it. To see (awesome FX) is to see (truth, beauty, new perspectives.) Eyesight isn’t just metaphor. It's ethos.

That ethos, in this case, is the familiar one of the white savior. Avatar’s vision is a colonial one, even as its narrative is nominally anticolonial. Cameron equates visual consumption with understanding of and salvation of the colonized. Jake sees, and through seeing becomes more Na’vi than the Na’vi. Seeing is both empowering and redemptive, which means that the person who gazes is more virtuous and more worthy not just than those who refuse to see (like the bad colonial invaders) but also than those who are seen.

Jake’s position as site of identification, and surrogate viewer, is carefully framed in the narrative. He had a twin brother who was murdered on the verge of heading out to a lush moon of Alpha Centauri known as Pandora. Jake takes his brother’s place at the last minute, which means that, like the filmgoer, he is entering the narrative with little knowledge or preconceptions—he sees with fresh eyes. The parallel with the movie-goer is underlined by the fact that Jake, a former marine, has lost the use of his legs. The movie doesn’t spend much time on his disability, but it does mean he is (at least initially) always seated, watching, just like all those in the theater.

Jake is brought onto the program despite his lack of knowledge because of the avatar program. Pandora is home to indigenous, very large, very tough blue humanoids—the Na’vi. Human scientists have been trying to contact and connect with them by growing artificial human/Na’vi hybrid bodies, with which humans can psychically bond. The bonds are personalized, which means Jake is the only replacement for his twin.

In his new body, Jake is asked to study the Na’vi on behalf of human scientists led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), and to infiltrate and gather intel on behalf of the security forces, led by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang.) Ultimately the humans want to move the Na’vi away from their sacred tree so the humans can mine “unobtanium”—which yes, it’s really called that.

A big chunk of the (extremely long) film is Jake exploring Pandora under the guidance of Neytiri and/or of other humans. Flying mountains, gloriously enormous trees, elephant/rhino/dinosaur things, and for that matter the Na’vi themselves; Cameron ushers you and Jake together through a CGI wonderland of stunning visual set-pieces. Jurassic Park is a clear predecessor; there too, the film positioned you as spectator (on tour through a theme park) as a way to center spectacle. Narrative is harnessed to visuals, rather than the other way around.

Jurassic Park is much less focused on one person’s seeing though; Spielberg’s film moves from character to character at the director’s whim. Avatar is more rigorous. Jake isn’t always the point of view character, but you never cut away from him for long. The Na’vi are visible for the most part only through him; when he is jerked out of his avatar, you’re generally jerked out with him, back to the boring humans. You see wonders with his eyes. Without his eyes, you don’t see much.

Jake’s vision is privileged, first of all, because the filmmakers have a very low opinion of their audience. The assumption throughout Avatar is that the (presumed white, colonial) viewer can’t appreciate indigenous perspectives, or indigenous worlds, without a lot of handholding. Neytiri’s nickname for Jake in her own language while she’s teaching him is “moron”, and that sums up the film’s attitude towards the people out there sitting and watching it. Jake, and you, need surrogates to see the worth of people who are (the film assumes) not like you. You can’t see the colonized as human, so you need to have a stand-in paint himself blue and undergo ritual adoption into the tribe to get the point across.

The other reason that Jake must be the one who sees is because the whole point of white savior films is to hold up a mirror to the colonial gaze so it can recognize its own virtue.

This is exactly what happens in Avatar. The nefarious greedy human colonizers destroy the Na’vi’s sacred tree in a visually lavish and emotionally wrenching portrayal of colonial violence and genocide. Neytiri and the other Na’vi realize that Jake knew that the humans were planning this all along, and they condemn him despite his protestations that he now has seen them, and been converted to their side.

Jake is forced out of his Na’vi body by his human minders, who are angry at him for helping the Na’vi. He and some other dissidents are imprisoned, but manage to escape with the help of still other good colonizers, who somehow didn’t realize what they were signing up for when they agreed to go on a colonial mining mission?

In any case, Jake is able to get back into his avatar, at which point he decides to tame a gigantic dinosaur bird dragon thing called a Toruk, which he captures, notably, by sneaking up on it out of its blind spot. He then brings the Toruk to the Na’vi, who are duly impressed with his awesomeness. It’s at that point that Neytiri tells Jake “I see you,” affirming his moral worth as one of the #notallcolonizers.

This kind of moral recognition is crucial to white savior narratives, and to Hollywood in general. You see it in the epilogue to Schindler’s List, for example, where a group of Jewish people tell Schindler how important and good he is. In Avatar, as in its predecessors like Dances with Wolves, the moral recognition is established by a marginalized or colonized person affirming that the savior is virtuous.

That virtue though, is itself a kind of seeing.  Neytiri sees Jakes virtue, and that virtue is precisely the ability to see Neytiri; he has recognized her and so she recognizes him. The viewer, who also sees Neytiri, is therefore also seen by Neytiri. Jake is our avatar; we see through him, and since seeing is virtue, his virtue is also ours.

When I say his virtue is “ours”, I mean that Jake’s “virtue” is the collective fantasy of collective virtue shared by an imagined community of colonizers, who want the pleasure of a colonial gaze—omnipotence, mobility, dominance, narrative primacy—without the guilt. Movies, though, don’t have to be constructed with that audience or that gaze in mind. A counterexample is the recent Predator franchise film Prey.

Prey does not privilege the gaze of the colonizer. Instead, the main point-of-view character, Naru (Amber Midthunder) is a young Comanche hunter. Naru is stalked by the Predator—who is, importantly, invisible.

The Predator’s ability to make itself disappear is a useful hunting tactic. It’s also a metaphor, though, for the unseen colonial watcher who controls the narrative through both the gaze and violence. The Predator is the avatar here—it’s the audience stand-in. But in this case the invisible avatar colonizer is exposed as a colonial tool. To see it—or to look for it without seeing— is to recognize, not virtue, but violence.

At the conclusion of Avatar, the Na’vi use their semi-mystical connection to all living things to move Jake permanently from his human body into his avatar. The last frame of the movie is of Jake’s new eyes opening; he looks into you and you look into him. It’s supposed to be a recognition of virtue. You see the new Jake, and he sees the new you, recreated by your experience of seeing Cameron’s film.

You could also see that final shot, though, as an admission that the movie was never about the Na’vi or their world, but only about Jake’s eyes, which are also your eyes. The indigenous people and their world are erased. All that matters is the eye of the colonizer, which sees, at last, only itself.