In The Time Machine, Guy Pearce wakes in a hut to find himself being tended to by an exotic native woman. Déjà vu?

Since Avatar has been accused of having racist tendencies, we’re investigating the ideologies and themes of colonial first encounters in cinema. Click here to read Part 1: The Noble Savage.

As the 19th century wore on, European thought abandoned the sentimental figure of the ‘noble savage’ and instead turned to human progress from primitivism to industrialism, as espoused by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel. Rudyard Kipling is often cited as one of the chief literary proponents of British chauvinism, and the imperialist overtones of his poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) are still fiercely debated.

Whether or not Kipling intended his poem to be ironic, very similar sentiments were used to justify the political and economic domination of cultures deemed less socially evolved. The second wave of colonialism was especially marked by Western powers intervening in local ethnic and religious disputes – the effects of which still reverberate today. At the same time, racist pseudosciences such as phrenology, eugenics and racial taxonomy lent white supremacy an air of authority.

King Kong (1933) is this kind of colonial allegory. “He’s always been king of his world. But we’ll teach him fear!” exults Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), the entertainment entrepreneur who subdues Kong and brings him to New York to be exhibited, much as non-Europeans were regularly displayed in human zoos. In some versions of the story, Kong is a terrifying monster; in others, he’s an Othello-esque tragic hero undone by his love for a white woman.

HG Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) reflects both Wells’s fervent socialist beliefs and his adherence to eugenic principles. Far into the future, his time traveller encounters the dialectical society of the beautiful, languorous Eloi and the ape-like, troglodytic Morlocks. He muses that this must be a socialist utopia, with the Eloi the descendants of the capitalists and the Morlocks the workers.

Yet the novel betrays a racial anxiety: is the Eloi’s fate as Morlock cattle the fate of the white race if we don’t suppress those Negro brutes now? The 2002 film version, starring Guy Pearce, has a certain white-guilt subtext: it depicts the Eloi as a caramel-skinned race whose ancestry is pleasantly ambiguous to the contemporary viewer, while the Morlocks are grotesquely pasty-white and led by quintessential perverted Englishman Jeremy Irons.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness (1902) offers a richly evocative pun. Parts of Africa were still uncharted late into the 19th century, and were thus ‘dark’ on a map; Conrad’s hero Marlow views the dark-complexioned locals as essentially unknowable and fundamentally unlike himself; the colonists consider local cultures to exist in an ignorant ‘darkness’ from which the ‘light’ of civilisation would deliver them; but the colonialist frontier also brings out the darkness in the souls of key characters. In shifting the scene to the Vietnam War – a controversial military intervention – Apocalypse Now (1979) underscores Conrad’s ambivalence about the entire colonial project.

In other narratives of colonial progress, Europeans hold all the moral authority. Local people appear as faithful sidekicks and retainers, although they’re brave, resourceful and sometimes wisecracking. Crusoe had reformed cannibal Friday; The Lone Ranger (1933) had Tonto; Kipling had Gunga Din (1892). Critics have also argued that the Star Wars (1977) universe unproblematically adopts the racial politics of Victorian-era adventure stories, since droids are represented as jolly slaves and with the exception of Yoda and Admiral Ackbar, no non-human character has any real authority.

However, H Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), which kickstarted the adventure genre in which the Indiana Jones quadrilogy (1981-2008) operates, is more nuanced. Haggard (or, rather, his protagonist Allan Quatermain) explicitly rejects the term ‘nigger’, arguing that some locals demonstrate far more nobility than Europeans, and the novel depicts non-Europeans variously as heroes, love interests, cartoonish villains and faithful retainers. Unfortunately, Spielberg’s treatment of race was not nearly as circumspect – especially in Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom.

Like Black Robe (1991), The Mission (1986) is ambivalent about the ‘civilising’ impetus of Catholic evangelism. In both films the Jesuit protagonists are idealistic to the point of fanaticism, and their actions are depicted as catastrophic for the indigenous souls they seek to ’save’. In Black Robe, a Jesuit priest survives sectarian warfare between the Algonquin and Iroquois before reaching a mission whose converts are dying of European-borne scarlet fever. Meanwhile, The Mission shows a Spanish Jesuit priest ‘civilising’ the Guarani people of South America through music before leading them to slaughter by Portuguese colonialists.

Perhaps the pessimism of these films better reflects Hollywood’s contemporary mistrust of organised religion and machine politics. But they do recognise and criticise the ideological motives of colonialism. “We must work in the world; the world is thus,” says Portuguese official Hontar in The Mission, to which papal envoy Cardinal Altamirano replies, “No, Señor Hontar, thus have we made the world. Thus have I made it.”

Tom Cruise tells all the ladies he's the last samurai.

Many Hollywood colonialist films explore notions of hybridity as white characters are adopted or assimilated into native cultures, and sexual or family bonds are formed across cultures. Hybridity can be treated with utopianism – the hybrid character, like Pocahontas (1995, and also in The New World (2005)), becoming a peacemaker and brokering cross-cultural understanding. This is the role Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) performs in Avatar.

However, other films, such as Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Bruce Beresford’s The Fringe Dwellers (1986), are more ambivalent, depicting hybrid characters as unable to find a place in either European or indigenous culture. District 9’s Wikus van de Merwe becomes a fugitive after he is hybridised against his will. While he shows compassion for the ‘prawn’ Christopher Johnson and his life is saved by other ‘prawns’, Wikus is still primarily motivated by the desire to return to his former life.

By far the most common Hollywood take on hybridity is a relatively unimaginative one: hybridity as the site of sexual desire. Sex tends to bind European characters to the cultures they encounter – whether permanently, as in Avatar, or temporarily, until the more urgent threats to the indigenous culture have passed.

In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last Of The Mohicans (1826), the heroine Cora Munro is of mixed African and European ancestry, and is desired by both the Huron chief Magua and by Hawkeye, the European-born adopted Mohican. In Dances With Wolves (1990), Stands With A Fist is a white woman captured by the Sioux as a child, and in Black Robe, Daniel, a young Frenchman who speaks Algonquin, falls for chief’s daughter Annuka.

It’s always the chief’s daughter – or some other noblewoman – isn’t it? Local plebs rarely seem to take a personal interest in our hero. In some films, such as Bird Of Paradise (1932) and The Last Samurai (2003), their cross-cultural attraction is taboo. Others, such as Mutiny On The Bounty (1962), depict ‘native’ women as compliant sexual partners for Western men; the alien sex comedy Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) makes a joke of what many colonialists genuinely believed.

These are the most problematic Hollywood colonialist narratives, because after his initial gaucheness, the European protagonist is often revealed to be better at being indigenous than the actual indigenous people. He’s stronger and more resourceful than their best warriors and smarter than their smartest elders. The locals learn to accept him after he has proven that he can master their ways of life – the wise chief or proud warrior often gets a dying speech in which he gives the newcomer his blessing.

These aren’t just fantasies of domination, but fantasies in which masochistic colonised people are shown to welcome their own subordination. So when we speak of ‘racist’ cinema, these are the kinds of narratives for which we should reserve our most scathing criticisms.