Begging the Question

15 October 2010 by Kári

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The deadline for submitting something to next year's NeMLA has already passed, and having looked at the panels on offer, I decided not to submit anything. Unlike the ACLA where everything is post-colonial this or gender that, NeMLA tends to attract extremely conventional topics ("Calvino and the city: new critical perspectives", for instance), and perhaps that is true of approaches to national literature in general. But there was one panel I was intrigued by:

Understanding Avatar: A Movie Made for the Masses

Are the primitive yet "linked-in" Na'vi of Avatar the manifestation of a form of nature now dreamed about by modern "users" dependant on the Internet for their understanding of the world? Did James Cameron select obvious metaphors and recycled themes to ensure Avatar would be understood by bloggers and "textrs" no longer capable of subtlety or wit? Does the popularity of Avatar represent to the "erosion of language" prophesized by Sven Birkerts as a morbid symptom of the electronic age? Please submit 250-500 word abstracts to ...

What a bizarre panel proposal! Its alleged object of inquiry, James Cameron's 3D epic Avatar, is seemingly just an excuse to rehash conventional fears about the degeneracy of Western culture, the decline of literacy and the intellect in the face of the unmanageable proliferation of text on-line. Who says "bloggers and 'textrs'" are "no longer capable of subtlety or wit"? The CfP begs this question entirely. Of the three rhetorical questions here, only the first is potentially interesting with regard to the film itself: A sort of reverse-ethnographic study of the "primitive yet 'linked-in' Na'vi" can indeed offer revealing insights into naive Western attitudes towards the 'natural' and the 'primitive'. The whole film is essentially a gigantic heap of white guilt, a redemption fantasy, where the white colonialist gets to 'save' the natives and save himself in the process. The story is a sad one, told many times. And, as Slavoj Žižek argued persuasively at the time, it has serious racist resonances. But even that is as old as the hills. There is nothing "new" here, and singling Avatar out as somehow more deliberately simplistic and indicative of cultural decline than any other Hollywood blockbuster seems blinkered and self-defeating.