Still haven’t seen the movie, but ran prieur has some interesting observations:
“Did we conquer the Indians? When lefties say that Avatar purges white guilt, they are making several questionable assumptions: that we are white, that we feel guilty, and that white guilt is a good thing. This is an obsolete view of race. A more helpful view was pioneered in the zine and book Race Traitor: that “white” is a social class only loosely connected to pale skin, that thinking of ourselves as “white” makes us obedient to an unjust system, that the best thing “white” people can do is not to sit around feeling guilty for the crimes done in the name of whiteness, but to disown whiteness and take the other side. Every one of us has ancestors who lived more or less like the Na’vi, and who were violently conquered by disconnected, resource-extracting cultures. If we all stop identifying with those cultures, the whole game is over.
We did not conquer the Indians. The Babylonians, the Romans, the English, the Spaniards, the Americans conquered us… but not completely. The reason Avatar is so popular, and so important, is that it is helping us to remember who we are.”
Also check out these cases of strange Avatar specific depression: http://bit.ly/5v6kmg
Makes me think of something like stendhal syndrome.
Visually, the movie was indeed stunning. But as an overall movie, yr still better off watching The Abyss.
That link killed me. Really, people see that place as such a utopia that they get depressed that it’s not real? That is insane! The shit was aight but I never thought it wasn’t cg.