Double feature: Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and Avatar

During the original release of Avatar, when everyone with a blog was either touting or condemning it ("Dances With Smurfs!" Ouch.), I thought up my own annoyingly Twitter-appropriate review: "Everything you have heard about Avatar — good or bad — is true." I liked Avatar and read or heard no criticism that I couldn't take for granted, nor which effectively undid what was good about the film.

I probably first watched Rambo: First Blood Part 2 on cable a few years after its 1985 release, though I can't remember — it was not a movie I was terribly interested in. I do remember watching it in college, however, as part of a class on "captivity narratives," and gaining a slightly better understanding of the Rambo phenomenon of the 1980's and beyond. I re-watched it a few days ago, enjoyed it despite some glaringly silly bits, and found myself thinking that my one-line review of Avatar also applied to it. And while the pairing of the two films hadn't occurred to me before, many likenesses came to mind. Both films transcended their status as box office hits to become "cultural phenomena," due in part to their polarizing effect on film goers (or maybe the polarization was a result of the phenomenon...I'm not sure it really matters). Each movie can be seen as superficial entertainment, or as a film with a social message, or both. Or, perhaps more critically, as superficial entertainment disguised as social message. (In an interview clip on the Rambo DVD, director George Cosmatos explains that he never thought of the film as political, but rather as just an action movie. James Cameron has been somewhat less coy about Avatar.) In any case, it is these messages — or "message wrappers," if you prefer — that really connect the two films.

Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (which for simplicity in this post will be referred to only as Rambo, not to be mistaken for the fourth installment of the First Blood series) presents a re-writing of the Vietnam war. Made in the mid-1980's amidst the reexamination of America's treatment of Vietnam veterans, the film offers not only a way to redeem the American public for its poor reception of returning soldiers, but a way to win the war itself. Rambo's mission is to find American POW's still in captivity in the jungles of Vietnam. His success in rescuing several such soldiers not only presents filmgoers with an American victory in Vietnam, but shows forgotten and mistreated vets being brought back into the fold.

Key to the film's rectification of history is the transfer of all responsibility for the war onto a single, un-American source. While America's culpability for the treatment of its veterans is embodied by Murdock, the bureaucrat in charge of the ersatz rescue operation, and while Rambo kills a fair share of Vietnamese enemies, the real power behind the POW camp is the Soviet Union, in 1985 still a hot adversary to the United States in the Cold War. In this way, present and past animosities are united and blame is simplified onto a single, sneering, Soviet bad guy, sparing the audience any need to consider a more complex reality.

Avatar, in turn, offers vicarious and fantastical redemption for White expansion into the American West. Much has already been written about the similarities between this movie and others, especially Dances With Wolves (I am guilty of contributing my own two cents), though suffice it to say that Avatar's Jake Sully, much like Dances With Wolves' John Dunbar and A Man Called Horse's John Morgan, offers white audiences a historical re-do: he acts out a racial guilt-purging fantasy that displaces wrongdoing onto a specific subset of white colonizers (led by corporate cog Parker Selfridge, a stand-in for Murdock), which bears not only the blame for past racial sin but for modern evils as well: corporate greed, environmental neglect, and the questionable and excessive use of military force. When Jake is accepted into the native Na'vi tribe — when he is in fact accepted as their "chosen one" and defends the tribe against the invaders from Earth — he gains the forgiveness and redemption we desire.

Other similarities strengthen the connection between the two films. Rambo and Jake are both injured Marines — Jake's injuries are physical and visible, while Rambo's pain is emotional and mental — recruited to help in missions that will give them a "second chance." For Rambo, the mission is an opportunity to be released from prison and to finally get to "win" a war. For Jake, a tour on Pandora is a chance to leave the bleakness of an environmentally ravaged Earth and possibly have his injured legs repaired. Both heroes are sent to fulfill the orders of a military or corporate "machine" (both of which are headquartered in military-style bases carved out of and fenced off from the surrounding jungle), but each redefines his mission according to his conscience, putting him at odds with his own society. Rambo, like the Na'vi, is more at one with the natural environment than are his adversaries. He hides from enemies by covering himself in mud or by lurking underwater. He uses nature as a weapon, making traps and weapons out of tree roots and vines. Both the Na'vi and Rambo use simple weapons like bows and arrows and knives against the high-tech weaponry of their enemies (there is at least one instance of rack focus between shooter and arrowhead in each film!). Rambo repeatedly shows his disdain for technology by cutting loose his gear, shooting up a control room, and declaring "I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon." (Rambo is adept, however, at flying military helicopters, which are emphasized in both films as an important way of travelling between the two worlds straddled by the heroes). And it is probably not insignificant that Avatar writer/director James Cameron also co-wrote the screenplay to Rambo.

Four hallmarks of James Cameron movies

Alongside the action and record-setting box office numbers that typically accompany a James Cameron movie can be found some consistent themes and motifs. Here are just a few.


Relentless Soldiers
Colonel Miles Quaritch (Avatar), Lt. Coffey (The Abyss), T-800 (The Terminator), and Spicer Lovejoy (Titanic): These guys just don't quit. No matter what happens, they stay focused on the mission, only stopping when they are finally killed or destroyed. While they often fill the role of "the bad guy," they can also be seen as very capable and dedicated. They are all professional and unemotional, unswayed by factors that influence the films' protagonists, but not essentially evil. If they didn't fall on the opposite side of the movie's sympathies, these guys would be heroes.

Evil Corporations
Corporations are the ultimate evil entity in several of Cameron's movies, pursuing higher profit at the expense of human lives. Take, for example:

• the RDA from Avatar, which destroys a people's homeland in order to mine a valuable mineral,
• Weyland-Yutani from Aliens, which sacrifices the crew of the starship Sulaco in order to capture the ultimate bio-weapon,
• Cyberdyne Systems from Terminator 2, caught in the blind pursuit of a dangerous technology that ultimately spells doom for humanity,
• and the White Star Line from Titanic, which forgoes safety equipment and protocol in favor of luxury and prestige.

Female Heroes
Ellen Ripley (Aliens) and Sarah Connor (Terminator 2) top this list, though Lindsey Brigman (The Abyss), Grace Augustine (Avatar), and Neytiri (Avatar) can also be counted among female characters who are often tactically smarter, cooler under pressure, and more effective at saving lives than their male counterparts.

Advanced Technology
Certainly Cameron's movies are made with groundbreaking technology, but they are also about technology. The plots of The Abyss, Avatar, Titanic, and Terminator 2 are all driven by a breakthrough piece of technology — the underwater drilling rig, the avatars, the world's biggest passenger ship, and time-travelling cybernetic assassins. Each time we are shown a fantastic vision of technology's power — but we are also shown that in the wrong hands, it all goes south.

James Cameron photo used with the permission described here.

Avatar, white redemption, and social critique

Avatar is the latest Hollywood movie to carry out the ritual of what could be called the "white man's Native American guilt redemption fantasy," a narrative convention seen previously in Dances With Wolves, A Man Called Horse, and Little Big Man. There are other movies that use elements of this ritual — Broken Arrow, Cheyenne Autumn, even Disney's animated Pocahontas, though Avatar adheres to a more strict formula set down by movies in the former group.

This fantasy is typically set in the Old West, and requires a white man to be captured or adopted by American Indians, to go through a trial of assimilation and acceptance, and finally to emerge as a respected member of the tribe, one who in many cases uses the sk/ills of white society to defend his adopted people against attack by outsiders, even against his own white civilization. This fantasy serves as a form of confession, and allows the white audience to confront the injustices perpetrated against American Indians during westward expansion, to refute those injustices with a modern sensibility, and to return to its own culture appeased that a long-standing debt has been paid, if only on film.

To accomplish this purging of guilt it is important that the ills of white society be vividly demonstrated, most often by showing white violence toward Indians or the white bureaucracy's unquestioning commitment to what is depicted as an outdated and senseless doctrine of expansion at all costs. Further, the American Indians need to be inversely mythologized as the opposite of whites: they must be shown not only as victims justified in their resistance, but often as embodying a way of life that is steeped in tradition, balance, and spirituality — namely, all that ostensibly has been lost by white society. Finally, the white emissary must then undergo a transformation, whereby he comes to realize that his adopted culture is more worth fighting for than the white one he leaves behind. There are variations, but that is the basic structure.

While Avatar is applicable to the historic relationship between whites and American Indians, and while the story of Jake Sully fits neatly alongside the stories of John Dunbar (Dances With Wolves) and John Morgan (A Man Called Horse), its use of a fictional alien race instead of American Indians gives it distance enough to use the fantasy not primarily to comment on historic white/American Indian relations, but to protest what its makers view as the evils of modern society in general. To that end, the film glorifies the fictional Na'vi culture as the extreme opposite of an exaggeratedly corrupt human society. By doing so, the audience is able to side against those elements of white society which the film instructs are most abhorrent and to side with the Na'vi, who in turn represent our fantasized ideal, or rather a fantasized opposite of what the film suggests are our most ruinous attributes.

Avatar sets its sights primarily on:

1. Divorce from Nature
While the Na'vi believe in the interconnectedness of all living things and thrive in the lush forest of Pandora, the humans' only contact with the ecosystem occurs when they are out to destroy it. Scenes of huge mining vehicles razing the Pandoran forest, as well as the assault on and destruction of Home Tree, are very clear references to the real-life problem of deforestation. The fact that the Pandoran atmosphere is toxic to humans symbolically underscores how far humans have separated themselves from the natural world, and also echoes the concerns many have about the effects of rising CO2 levels in Earth's atmosphere.

2. Corporate Greed
The humans' interest in Pandora is due to its deposits of the mineral "unobtanium", and the force behind this pillaging is the the RDA, Avatar's evil corporate entity. RDA stops at nothing to attain greater wealth through unobtanium (valued, according to company stooge Parker Selfridge, at "20 million a kilo"). Avatar capitalizes on the idea of corporate greed in a timely manner, amid the financial crisis of the past few years. The Na'vi, by contrast, seem not to know of greed or even of commerce. While their Home Tree sits atop a massive deposit of unobtainium, the Na'vi appear not to value it at all. The economic workings of their society are not shown, though it appears that even benign capitalism does not factor in at all.

3. Dubious Use of Military Force
RDA brings its own mercenary force to Pandora to deal with Na'vi resistance, yet given the motives of the corporation and the relative naiveté of the Na'vi, the use of force is, at best, highly questionable. This reflects a skepticism toward military action that is firmly rooted in the Viet Nam era and immediately topical with US involvement in Iraq.

Jake's decision to fight with the Na'vi, then, is as expected as the similar choices made by Dunbar, Morgan, and Jack Crabb (Little Big Man), and his decision allows the audience to agree with — and be validated by — Jake's position against our world's problems.

Where Avatar veers from the strict ritual is in its ending — by letting Jake remain with the Na'vi. This is antithetical not only to the structure of the "strict ritual", in which the white emissary ultimately chooses to leave the tribe, but to many other Westerns as well in which the hero abandons society after briefly re-entering it — Shane and The Searchers come immediately to mind — and which adhere to the archetypical "walk into the sunset". (In a general way I am calling Avatar a Western, in so much as it fits the formula of the other films discussed here, and in that it deals with territorial confrontation along a frontier.)

The heroes of the strict ritual leave at the end because we know they have to — we know that the fantasy needs to come to an end because we know the reality of the American Indian and of westward expansion. These white heroes are our time-travelling ambassadors, armed with modern ideals and sent back to a West of our imagining to act the way we imagine white society should have acted in order to create a more peaceful coexistence and to spare us the guilt we now feel, but their remaining can only create a paradox — we know that any such "happy ending" is in conflict with what really happens.

Jake, however, is free to remain because Avatar is set in a fictional future, not on Earth but on a moon millions of light years away that is populated not by American Indians with a known past, but by an alien race specific to this one movie. It is therefore more immediately discernible as fantasy. Though we may have our doubts about how long the Na'vi victory will last, about how long the RDA will stay away from its valuable installation on Pandora, we have no corresponding historical record that forces deeper consideration of the moment.

Avatar photo used with the permission described here.