Avatar: white people ponder the predicament of the natives, aided by pugnacious Latina.

Avatar’s 3D wonderland may have won over the box office and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but some critics are troubled by its politics. Specifically: is it racist?

At SF blog io9, Annalee Newitz has a shrewd summary of Avatar’s flirtation with white colonialism, calling it “the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy”, which is “a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white”.

“When whites fantasize about becoming other races,” Newitz writes, “it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.”

In Britain’s Telegraph, Will Heaven has a similar concern. “The ethnic Na’vi, the film suggests, need the white man to save them because, as a less developed race, they lack the intelligence and fortitude to overcome their adversaries by themselves,” Heaven writes. “The poor helpless natives, in other words, must rely on the principled white man to lead them out of danger.”

While it takes a certain political disposition to feel persuaded by these postcolonial readings of Avatar, The Enthusiast was astonished by the viciousness of the comments repudiating both Newitz and Heaven. Many commenters opined that Avatar is ‘just a movie’ that’s not meant to be ’serious’, and that to bring up the issue of race at all is ‘over-analysing’, ‘reading too much into it’, ‘finding racism where it doesn’t exist’ and thus, even ‘perpetuating racism’.

What’s frustrating about these attempts to muffle debate is that no movie is ‘just a movie’. The history, philosophy and literature of European peoples’ first contacts with the non-West have directly influenced the ways that Hollywood crafts such stories and the ways audiences respond to them. What’s more, cinema has always been interested in symbolism and allegory, so it’s emphatically not ridiculous to suggest that Avatar contains meanings other than the most superficial and obvious ones.

However, The Enthusiast would suggest that few films are uncomplicatedly ‘racist’; rather, Hollywood visions of colonialism are drawn from a wide variety of themes and ideologies surrounding race.

Historically, European colonialism took place in two main bursts. The first wave of global expansion between the 15th and 19th centuries in India, the Americas and the Caribbean largely arose from mercantilism, Catholic evangelism and the Protestant desire for religious freedom. Then came the second wave of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia (and the continued colonisation of North America), which was largely driven by political strategy and resources-grabbing. Critics argue that colonialism continues today in the coercion of and intervention in smaller nations by more powerful ones – this was certainly the subtext of the debates at the Copenhagen climate change forum.

What has caught European imaginations, however, is the effect on individual morality when powerful Western economic and political machines first encounter – and irrevocably alter – indigenous cultures. So in this article, I’m not nearly as interested in films narrating events and attitudes during and after colonial settlement as in films that depict those personal encounters.

"I'm a fooking prawn!" Wikus van de Merwe sees how the other half live.

Arguably, alien first-contact films are allegories of colonialism. Some, such as Avatar and District 9 (2009), depict the human race as the white European conquerors, with the alien races they encounter standing in for the various indigenous peoples who’ve historically been colonised. Indeed, Avatar makes this analogy explicit: the blue-skinned Na’vi wear a combination of African and North American traditional garments and are bow-and-arrow-using, equestrian hunter-gatherers.

In other narratives the alien races represent the colonising West, with humans representing the colonised indigenes. Some stories, such as The War of the Worlds (1898), V (1993), Independence Day (1996) and Signs (2002), present the invaders as hostile and genocidal. Others, such as The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. (1982) and Contact (1997), choose to highlight the benevolent possibilities of first contact.

In his famous 1651 treatise of political philosophy, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes controversially opined that a civil society rescues people from a natural state of depravity in which their lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. On the other hand, humanist philosophers such as the Earl of Shaftesbury and Michel de Montaigne suggested that human morality is innate rather than indoctrinated by a particular culture or religion, and the practices of other cultures were neither more nor less moral than those of Europe. “One calls ‘barbarism’ whatever he is not accustomed to,” wrote Montaigne.

Ten Canoes (2006) is a recent example of a genre that takes place in non-Western cultures prior to contact with Europeans and falls into a roughly equivalent tradition of myth and moral fable to Bible stories or classical mythology. Some postcolonial critics welcome these mythic narratives because non-Westerners are ‘telling their own stories’. However, let’s face it – outside the festival circuit, Western cinema audiences are less interested in the intricacies of other cultures than in universal human experiences.

This runs the risk of essentialising indigenous cultures: reducing them to their most picturesque elements so that those ouside the culture can feel they ‘understand’ it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song Of Hiawatha (1855), while based on ethnographic research, owes far more to Norse epic poetry (even down to its trochaic tetrameter, the same as the Finnish Kalevala) than to Native American oral folkloric traditions. Yet to many Americans, Hiawatha is the quintessential Native American tale.

The figure of the unsophisticated but moral and honest person, at home in nature rather than in culture, had existed in the West for centuries; after all, the foundation myth of the Roman Empire is a pastoral idyll involving a wolf and a rustic shepherd. But by the 17th and 18th centuries, European intellectuals had begun to superimpose the classical Arcadia – a utopian ideal of unspoiled, bountiful, virtuous wilderness – onto the actual wilderness their countrymen were discovering and exploring. Literary romances, as well as the travelogues that became immensely popular among the book-buying public, used the ‘noble savage’ trope as a way to assuage the writers’ frustration about their own culture’s decadence.

Even whitey got to be a noble savage. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan Of The Apes (1914) is of noble birth (his parents were marooned by pirates on Africa’s west coast), but his jungle childhood moulds him into a paragon of manhood more virtuous than any product of European civilisation. Emmeline and Richard Lestrange of Henry DeVere Stackpool’s novel The Blue Lagoon (1908) are a picture of innocence, of Eden before the Fall.

The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) presents the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert as classic noble savages. But quite apart from the way it glossed over the fact that the San had been in contact with Europeans for decades, and the way its star, N!xau, became an object of Western curiosity in a contemporary echo of the distasteful Negro of Banyoles episode, the film itself feels as unsophisticated as it assumes its protagonist to be, relying largely on tired slackstick gags. The French film Un Indien dans le Ville (1994), remade in English as Jungle 2 Jungle (1997), also seeks to wring comic potential from an imaginary – and completely unrealistic – culture clash when indigenous people visit the contemporary West.

In the ‘benevolent’ genre of alien first-contact cinema, too, the wonder and bewilderment with which humans grapple with alien culture and technology recall the noble savage trope. In these films, it’s often children who first detect the presence of aliens – and to whom the aliens are drawn – which is significant, since Western colonialists often remarked on the “child-like” qualities of the indigenous peoples they encountered.

But many Europeans still saw the New World as an empty space for the projection of their own desires – a place where one could reveal one’s true nature or destiny free from the shackles of society and religion. First-person travel narratives – among others, Captain James Cook published his South Pacific journals – created a market for fictionalised tales of European adventurers in foreign lands, beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).

The pre-existing residents did not figure large in such fantasies. In some films, such as Lord Of The Flies (1963) and Van Diemen’s Land (2009), they are altogether absent; in others, such as the Paul Gaugin biopic Paradise Found (2003), they’re merely aesthetic props. And in the satiric tradition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), invented indigenous civilisations act as coded representations of the West, enabling political and social commentary. There is still a strong streak of political allegory running through many cinematic depictions of indigenous cultures.

Rapa Nui (1994) and Apocalypto (2006) explore cultures that are decadent and riven with civil conflict, acting as both allegories of Western decadence and justification for the real-life conquest of these civilisations. Rapa Nui is an interesting contrast with Avatar, because rather than depict an ecosystem despoiled by rapacious invaders, it paints a historically muddled (but roughly accurate) picture of an island civilisation that plundered and squandered its own natural resources.

Apocalypto, meanwhile, begins with the epigraph, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”. Gibson implies that we oughtn’t feel guilty for destroying the Aztec civilisation; they did it to themselves. However, there’s a strong streak of Western guilt running through the bowdlerised aspects of Mayan culture that are the basis of 2012 (2009), in which “the Mayans” correctly predict that Western civilisation itself will crumble.

Click here for Part 2: Cinema of Western Progress.