From Pahá Sápa to Hometree: The Romanticized American Frontier of James Cameron’s Avatar and the Reproduction of Historical Amnesia
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Both high and popular culture have continuously encouraged the American public to romanticize the frontier as a place of exploration, redemption, and quintessential American self-making as well as to regard space as such a frontier. James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar, is located firmly within that tradition, setting its imperialistic narrative of invasion for commercial gain, complete with the subplot of ethnographic exploration in the name of science, on the fictional planet of Pandora in the futuristic year of 2154 as a new frontier for America. Cameron’s narrative, however, structured around the “going native” and intercultural romance themes, is in fact a retelling of the battle over Pahá Sápa during the Black Hills gold rush in the 1870s, culminating in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and a retelling of Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, or Marcus Nispel’s The Pathfinder. Cameron insists that while Avatar does implicitly criticize America’s role in the Iraq War and that Americans do have a “moral responsibility” to understand the impact of their nation’s military campaigns, that “that’s not what the movie’s about—that’s only a minor part of it” and that the film is about how we interact with nature and other human beings, and how we are “trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future”; Cameron does not acknowledge the parallels between his film’s plot and Native American history. This essay interrogates Cameron’s claims about the film’s central message and of its proclaimed progressiveness, and by offering a reading of the film that refuses to ignore the unacknowledged mix-matched historical context of the plot and that also exposes how Jake Sully’s “redemption” presents a much more colonial and imperialistic narrative than that of John Dunbar’s, John Smith’s, or Ghost’s, seeks to situate it within the myth of the romanticized frontier and identify it as an uncritical reproduction of the ideology at the center of such romanticization. Further, this essay discusses the implications and ramifications of both the public’s and the director’s inability to recognize such ideological reproduction, and of the impact of such narratives being misrepresented as progressive on the basis of innovative film technology or environmentalist concerns.
Abstract
Both high and popular culture have continuously encouraged the American public to romanticize the frontier as a place of exploration, redemption, and quintessential American self-making as well as to regard space as such a frontier. James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar, is located firmly within that tradition, setting its imperialistic narrative of invasion for commercial gain, complete with the subplot of ethnographic exploration in the name of science, on the fictional planet of Pandora in the futuristic year of 2154 as a new frontier for America. Cameron’s narrative, however, structured around the “going native” and intercultural romance themes, is in fact a retelling of the battle over Pahá Sápa during the Black Hills gold rush in the 1870s, culminating in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and a retelling of Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, or Marcus Nispel’s The Pathfinder. Cameron insists that while Avatar does implicitly criticize America’s role in the Iraq War and that Americans do have a “moral responsibility” to understand the impact of their nation’s military campaigns, that “that’s not what the movie’s about—that’s only a minor part of it” and that the film is about how we interact with nature and other human beings, and how we are “trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future”; Cameron does not acknowledge the parallels between his film’s plot and Native American history. This essay interrogates Cameron’s claims about the film’s central message and of its proclaimed progressiveness, and by offering a reading of the film that refuses to ignore the unacknowledged mix-matched historical context of the plot and that also exposes how Jake Sully’s “redemption” presents a much more colonial and imperialistic narrative than that of John Dunbar’s, John Smith’s, or Ghost’s, seeks to situate it within the myth of the romanticized frontier and identify it as an uncritical reproduction of the ideology at the center of such romanticization. Further, this essay discusses the implications and ramifications of both the public’s and the director’s inability to recognize such ideological reproduction, and of the impact of such narratives being misrepresented as progressive on the basis of innovative film technology or environmentalist concerns.
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