MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
Film Reading
‘Now We Are All Avatars’
James Der Derian
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
39(1) 181–186
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829810374793
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Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University
Abstract
The films Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Human Terrain are presented as critical intertexts for
understanding how the cinematic aestheticisation of violence can glorify as well as vilify war,
depending on how the spectator identifies with the protagonist and the investigator with the
informant. Estrangement from and entanglement with the other become key variables for
assessing the anti-war impact of a film.
Keywords
aestheticisation, Avatar, Human Terrain, imperialism, intertext, technology, war films
I believe in peace through superior firepower, but on the other hand I abhor the abuse of power
and creeping imperialism disguised as patriotism. Some of these things you can’t raise without
being called unpatriotic, but I think it’s very patriotic to question a system that needs to be
corralled, or it becomes Rome. (James Cameron on the theme of his film, Avatar)
Call it life copying art, a feedback loop or just another media spasm. Fans of chaos theory
might prefer ‘butterfly effect’, in which the beating of said insect’s wing in the Amazon
Basin hypothetically produces a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. However, in this simulacral instance, the storm precedes the flap and the story runs in reverse. Rewind to
Avatar, James Cameron’s multidimensional cinematic spectacle about the plundering
and occupation of a far-off planet by a corporation and privatised military forces, as it
becomes the highest grossing film of all time, celebrated in some quarters and vilified in
others as anti-imperialist, pro-environment, neo-pantheistic – and as an indictment of
US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fast-forward to Brazil, whose government announces
plans to begin construction of the Belo Monte dam, which will provide hydroelectric
power and further the nation’s effort to become energy-independent but also pose a grave
threat to the survival of the jungle and indigenous communities. Freeze-frame as James
Cameron arrives in Brazil to save the Amazon Basin from the plight of Avatar’s mythical
planet, Pandora, which he claims to be modelled on … the Amazon Basin.
Corresponding author:
James Der Derian, Brown University
Email: [email protected]
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(1)
News of the trip first appeared on the front page of the New York Times: ‘Amazon
Tribes Find Ally Right out of “Avatar”’1; from there it rippled through the infosphere,
receiving extensive coverage stretching from Fox News, the New York Post and rightwing shock-jocks, to ripostes from the Daily Show, Huffington Post and late-night
television talk-shows. The article features images of poisonous snakes falling from
trees and Cameron dancing in war paint alongside native chieftains. The voice-over
on the online slideshow accompanying the story shifts back and forth from New York
snark to Hollywood envy, mocking while simultaneously trafficking in Cameron’s use
of celebrity status to further a political agenda:
A nameless corporation bent on destruction of the natural world. A native uprising brings clans
together to fight a modern enemy. A passionate outsider changes sides to rally against his old
way of life. It could be real life, it could be a movie, and for director James Cameron, now it’s
both.2
Hyperbolic? Indeed. Further proof of Cameron’s hubrism? Absolutely. But after first
seeing the film in 2D (for the story) and then in 3D IMAX (for the joy of it), I am ready
to go out on a limb of the Tree of Souls and say Avatar is the best anti-war film since
Dr. Strangelove, a post-9/11 film with mass appeal. Like Stanley Kubrick, Cameron
manages to entertain and to critique, to revel in the pleasures and to expose the pathologies of the military–industrial complex within a wholly new media-entertainment matrix.
Who knows, Cameron might even save a few million acres of the Amazon Basin.
Yet the film got trashed by high-brow critics (including most of my colleagues) and
snubbed at the Academy Awards. I would not say Avatar is a ‘better’ film than Kathryn
Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker; nor would I declare, as Sigourney Weaver so injudiciously
did, that Cameron was robbed of an Oscar because he ‘didn’t have breasts’.3 My academic friends rightly went to town over the film’s orientalist, phallocentric and androcentric conceits. Why must it always take in Hollywood movies a white hero to save the
darker natives? Avatar was just Dances with Wolves, with blue Na’vi standing in for Red
Indians. But this easy dish – put into heavy rotation on blogs – misses the point. And
besides, would it not be just as easy (and just as wrong) to say that The Hurt Locker is
more of a documentary manqué – full of the genre’s jiggling camera-shots, quick-zooms
and jump-cuts – than a feature film, a Battle of Algiers without subtitles?
Declaring Avatar to be a better, if not the best, anti-war film for our times, is not to
overlook or underplay a primary, and in many ways, most problematic source of its
mass appeal. Feeding us speedballs of ultra-violence and anti-militarism, Avatar – as
well as The Hurt Locker – creates an addictive aesthetic of sublime destruction, like (but
1. Alexei Barrionuevo ‘Tribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of “Avatar” New York Times, 10 April
2010. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/americas/11brazil.html [accessed 30 May
2010]
2. Ibid.
3. ‘Sigourney Weaver Attacks Oscar Voters’, New York Post (13 April 2010). Grossing over $750 million in
the US and $2.7 billion worldwide certainly helped ease the pain of Avatar’s poor showing at the Oscars
(The Hurt Locker took in $16 million in the US, and just more than $40 million worldwide, making it the
lowest grossing film to win Best Picture at the Oscars).
Der Derian
183
not) war itself. Or as Walter Benjamin put it (in the original italics): ‘All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war.’4 It is more of a truism
than a critique to make this ‘point’, that audiences revel one moment and are reviled the
next by the continuation and aestheticisation of politics through war. Getting the dose
right, between critique and celebration, entertainment soma and political pharmakon, is
the trick.5
Avatar works on multiple levels, most of them fairly conventional: redemption
through suffering, love conquers all, superior firepower blows away inferior scripts.
But what makes Avatar a film that transcends not only its genre but conventional politics
is how spectacularly it repudiates the utility of war, a lesson that every great power –
especially the US after the Iraq and in the midst of the Afghanistan war – needs to be
taught. The film artfully reproduces the all-too-easy way by which one culture projects
its worst fears, flaws and, yes, desires on to another, until only violence can resolve
escalating states of mimetic estrangement. The message is as inescapable as it is difficult
to actualise: war does irreparable harm to all sides of a conflict, irrespective, as one
might hope President Obama took note during White House screenings, of which side
claims justice for its own. Ex-Marine Jake Sully in Avatar and Army Sergeant First
Class William James in The Hurt Locker are both perpetrators and victims of violence.
The battle-scarred antagonist of the film, Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of SecFor (the
extra-terrestrial successor to Blackwater and other privatised military forces) is as much
a victim of war as the indigenous Na’vi: less innocent to be sure but no less a creature
of his, and our, environment. Walter Benjamin again says it best (and once more in italics for emphasis): ‘Imperialist war is an uprising on the part of technology, which
demands repayment in “human material” for the natural material society has denied
it.’6 All of these characters pay a terrible price. They differ, however, in how they
respond to the allure and high cost of violence. James returns to the war, still trying to
make the best of a lost cause, no wiser or better for all he has suffered, and, worse,
unable to love. Jake, on the other hand, is able to make the leap from estrangement to
entanglement by using his techno-prosthesis to spark a revolt against technology. Hope
triumphs over violence when he is able and willing to become an avatar of the other.
We (in the Academy) might want to take more seriously, if not appropriate, the affective techniques of Avatar and The Hurt Locker. Increasingly the world is comprehended
and acted upon not through speech-acts but word-pictures. To cite Benjamin a final time:
‘History decays into images, not stories.’7 Rather than spend time refuting, celebrating or
simply resigning ourselves to this fact, we must stage our own ‘uprising on the part of
technology’. One way is to produce global interest media.8
4. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (second version), in
The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, eds Michael
W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 41.
5. No one does pharmakos better than Larry George: see ‘9–11: Pharmacotic War’, Theory & Event 5,
no. 4 (2001), 161–86.
6. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, 42.
7. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 476.
8. See globalmediaproject.net
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Our documentary film Human Terrain takes a first step in this direction.9 Like Avatar,
the film features a powerful corporation (in this case, British Aerospace System, or BAE)
who contract private military and civilian forces for a long-standing foreign intervention,
the purpose of which they spell out on their website:
The Human Terrain System (HTS) Program is an initiative of the Army Training and Doctrine
Command. It is designed to dramatically improve the methods, tools and means to understand
a foreign populace and its cultural dynamics (specifically in Afghanistan and Iraq), and to offer
socio-cultural expertise to U.S. command personnel. Those we select will participate in the
Cultural Operations Research component of the Human Terrain System program.10
Human Terrain also features a tragic hero who tries to do good in a war zone. Like
SecFor, HTS hires anthropologists, social scientists and ex-military to better understand
the cultures and to capture the hearts and minds of the local populace. The programme
comes under attack from critics who draw parallels with previous wars, like the ‘pacification’ campaigns of Vietnam that ended up being used to target enemy combatants.11 A
debate ensues on whether HTS is ‘weaponising’ culture or lowering casualty rates on
both sides of the conflict.
To be sure, Human Terrain has no blue creatures and was made for about US$299.9
million less than Avatar. But it poses similar questions and gets up close to the war
machine in search of answers. In the making of the film we (David Udris and Michael
Udris are the two other co-directors) embedded with New England Marine Reservists
from Charlie Company, 1st Division, 25th Battalion as they went through ‘cultural
sensitivity’ training exercises in mock Iraqi towns at 29 Palms in the Mojave Desert. We
gained rare access to urban warfare training at Quantico, Virginia, and followed human
terrain trainees as they were put through their paces at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, home
of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
We started off telling one story, but ended up with another. The first explores the
efforts of US policy-makers and the military, who, trying to understand ‘why they hate
us’, create the HTS as a critical component of the new counter-insurgency strategy. But
the film took a turn when Michael Bhatia was killed. After graduating from Brown
University magna cum laude, working as a humanitarian activist in Western Sahara,
Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study international relations at Oxford, Bhatia returned to Brown midway through his graduate
studies to collaborate on our new Military Cultural Awareness Project. We had set up a
small group of like-minded anthropologists and international relations experts at the
Watson Institute to research how the Pentagon was creating new doctrines, strategies and
organisations in an effort to return some symmetry to the battlefields of Iraq and
Afghanistan. During this period Bhatia continued to work on his doctoral dissertation
while travelling back and forth to academic and military conferences on the topics of
9. See www.humanterrainmovie.com, in particular the directors’ statements, which amplify this point.
10. See http://htscareers.com/
11. For a critique of HTS, see The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency
Manual (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009).
Der Derian
185
cultural sensitivity, awareness and competence. He would always return with a wealth of
information for the project and our film.
Unbeknownst to us, Bhatia was also being aggressively pursued at those conferences
by the military for his considerable expertise on humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping
and, given his numerous research trips to the region, Afghanistan. Bhatia’s fellowship at
Brown was coming to an end and, with no other academic options on the horizon, he
faced the prospect of unemployment. Bhatia had spent long periods in other war-torn
regions and had other skills as well as a sense of adventure that set him apart from many
of his academic peers. Moreover, he thought the dissertation would benefit from further
field research in Afghanistan. For one of these, for all of these, reasons, Bhatia decided –
fitfully, ironically and, ultimately, tragically – to leave the ivory tower to join this new
Pentagon programme, the Human Terrain System.
As controversy about HTS increased stateside, we stayed in contact by email with
Bhatia as he made his way through training and on to Afghanistan. We worked on getting
clearance to Skype a video interview when he was posted with a Human Terrain Team to
Forward Operating Base Salerno, located in the Khost Province of Afghanistan. It was
not to be: on 8 May 2008, Michael’s mother called to tell us the terrible news. The day
before a small convoy of 101st Airborne soldiers and a Human Terrain Team left base to
mediate an inter-tribal dispute. High on a mountain road the lead humvee hit a roadside
bomb. Bhatia and two soldiers were killed; two other soldiers lost their legs.
Binding these two stories together is a powerful intertext, one that came back to haunt
me after viewing Avatar and The Hurt Locker.12 As the triangulation between academic
researchers and film-makers (‘us’), the military and civilian defence experts (‘them’) and
the ‘indigenous’ subjects of our inquiry (‘the others’) began to shift, the lines between
what is known in anthropological parlance as ‘investigator’ and ‘informant’ began to
blur. Based on innate asymmetries of power and knowledge, this relationship is always
open to misinterpretations, misapprehensions and, to put it bluntly, mistakes. I think it is
a classic example of an ethnographic predicament that Clifford Geertz identified early
in his career as an anthropologist. The relationship between investigator and informant
often rests on a ‘set of partial fictions half seen-through’; and, says Geertz, ‘so long
as they remain only partial fictions (thus partial truths) and but half seen-through
(thus half-obscured), the relationship progresses well enough’. In other words, progress –
intellectual, moral and emotional – is largely illusory, an effect of what Geertz calls
‘anthropological irony’.13
As our own film ‘progressed’ as a research project, I think this ironic function dominated, distancing us from the actual costs on either side of the conflict. This distancing
was evident everywhere but most predominantly in how the Marines with whom we
12. It is also the main reason I accepted the invitation by the editors of Millennium to write about film,
providing a rare opportunity in IR journals to engage in the kind of performative ‘spectropoetics’ that
Derrida considered necessary in the face of hegemonic efforts to conjure up new fears and insecurities
with the end of the Cold War. See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1992); and Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994).
13. Clifford Geertz, ‘Thinking as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of Anthropological Fieldwork in the
New States’, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 21–40.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(1)
embedded would joke about killing but never discuss the possibility of their own – or a
friend’s – death. While studying others, soldiers or Marines, Afghans or nine-foot blue
aliens, we are ready to get close but not too close. We watch ourselves watching others.
But when one of our ‘own’ is killed, so too is irony and all the other distancing tricks: in
the burning desire to know why, we dropped our academic guard and opened up to new
possibilities, new mysteries, new identities. We were no longer investigators but participants in our own film. We too were forced to become avatars of the other.
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank Phillip Gara for his dialogical assistance and John Phillip Santos for
revealing the virtues of the avatar.
Author Biography
James Der Derian is Professor of International Studies (Research) at the Watson Institute
for International Studies, Brown University, USA.