Five Palestinian, Israeli and international activists painted themselves blue to resemble the Na’vi from James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar in February, and marched through the occupied village of Bil’in. The Israeli military used tear gas and sound bombs on the azure-skinned protesters, who wore traditional kaffiyehs with their Na’vi tails and pointy ears. The camcorder footage of the incident was juxtaposed with borrowed shots from the film and circulated on YouTube. We hear the movie characters proclaim: “We will show the Sky People that they cannot take whatever they want! This, this is our land!”
The event is a reminder of how people around the world are mobilizing icons and myths from popular culture as resources for political speech, which we can call “Avatar activism.” Even relatively apolitical critics for local newspapers recognized that Avatar spoke to contemporary political concerns. Conservative U.S. publications, such as National Review and The Weekly Standard, denounced Avatar as anti-American, anti-military and anti-capitalist. A Vatican film critic argued that it promoted “nature worship,” while some environmentalists embraced Avatar as “the most epic piece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid.” Many on the left ridiculed the film’s contradictory critique of colonialism and embrace of white liberal guilt fantasies, calling it Dances with Smurfs (from the simplistic pro-native-American 1990 movie success Dances with Wolves). One of the most nuanced critiques came from Daniel Heath Justice, an activist from the Cherokee nation, who felt that Avatar was directing attention to the rights of indigenous people, even though Mr. Cameron oversimplified the evils of colonialism, creating embodiments of the military-industrial complex that are easy to hate and hard to understand.
Such critiques encourage a healthy skepticism toward the production of popular mythologies and are better than those of critics who see popular culture as trivial and meaningless, offering only distractions from our real-world problems. The meaning of a popular film such as Avatar lies at the intersection between what the author wants to say and how the audience deploys his creation for their own communicative purposes.
The Bil’in protesters recognized potential parallels between the Na’vi struggles to defend their Eden against the Sky People and their own attempts to regain lands they feel were unjustly taken from them. (The YouTube video makes clear the contrast between the lush jungles of Pandora and the arid, dusty landscape of the Occupied Territories.) The film’s larger-than-life imagery, recognized worldwide thanks to Hollywood, offered them an empowered image of their own struggles. The sight of a blue-skinned alien writhing in the dust and choking on tear gas shocked many into paying attention to messages we often ignore.
By appropriating Avatar, activists have made some of the most familiar criticisms of the film beside the point. Conservative critics worried that Avatar might foster anti-Americanism, but as the image of the Na’vi has been taken up by protest groups in many parts of the world, the myth has been rewritten to focus on local embodiments of the military-industrial complex. In Bil’in, the focus was on the Israeli army; in China, on indigenous people against the Beijing government; in Brazil, the Amazonian Indians against logging companies.
Without painting themselves blue, people like the Indian writer Arundhati Roy and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek have used discussions about Avatar to call attention to the plight of the Dongria Kondh peoples of India, who have just won a battle with their government over access to traditional territories rich in bauxite. It turns out that the United States isn’t the only evil empire left on Planet Earth. Leftists worry that the focus on white human protagonists gives an easy point of identification. But protesters just want to be in the blue skins of the Na’vi.
