Movies & TV

At the time I remember a bunch of nerd reviewer types complaining about the movie's stereotypical portrayal of... US Marines as a bunch of violent rednecks :michael-laugh: They were also angry because they felt James Cameron was trying to make his white audience feel guilty over the genocide of the Native Americans. The Avatar Plinkett review did this too and even went "uhhh ackshually the Native Americans sometimes killed each other too so who's to say who the real bad guy is"

The overtly political right-wing reactionary YouTube guy did not exist at the time, and most of those people went on to become bog standard anti-Trump liberals with the associated baseline wokeness, which just goes on to show how reactionary nerd and broader culture were at the late 00s and early 10s and how it remained kind of unexamined until stuff like GamerGate

I totally agree that Avatar is pretty based, but I think Hollywood at the time was actually moving away from being pro-military. This is because people were pretty sick of the Iraq war and it had been revealed to be predicated on lies. Two years earlier Shooter was released, and that was all about how corrupt the government and the military were (the Chapo episode about it is great). Obviously that didn't last, perhaps not even up to the release of Avatar, but considering the script was written in 2006, it would make sense for the film to get caught up in the anti-imperialist tide.

The Chapo Trap House podcast had an episode in 2020 or maybe early 2021 about how based Avatar was, and they admitted it was weird it took that long for people to come to that conclusion

I mean... it's also basically just dances with wolves with blue body paint, and an extremely white saviour story. so I wouldn't go around calling it 'based'

Because people are really bad at reading into media

Even when it isn't subtle, they just go "This is entertainment and has no bearing on my actual life or beliefs"

That's why most of the discussion about the movie was that it retread the same ground as Pocahontas (which aside from the colonialism angle, isn't that similar) and not the actual themes of the film

The average American probably doesn't read political themes in media unless it's directly spelled out for them. They will however scan something as politically motivated if the protagonist is a woman, LGBTQ, or black.

When Americans do scan fictional media as political in its content, they will invariably read it as supporting their particular ideology. It wouldn't surprise me to hear chuds have an understanding of Avatar as expressing right wing ideology. They think The Matrix is right wing for God's sake.

Instead I think most Americans try to scan media as political outside its specific content, like they know actors express direct liberal values, so they assume the media itself presents liberal values because the actor is in it. Politics in America can't be expressed through the symbolic, because that entire field of expression has already been subverted to act in the interests of status quo capitalism. Things only seem political if they're expressed directly, in a clear voice, and literally.