Cross-Cultural Cinematic

The movie Avatar has made a gigantic cultural impact on us in the year 2009. After racking up major box-office bucks, the movie has touched our hearts now through our blue-ray/DVD-players for the subsequent years. The reason it has had a titanic impact, forgive the pun, is solely on the fact that it touched a racial segregation line between two different groups of people. The Na'vi, a born species to the world of Pandora, claimed the rightful throne of their homeworld until the human beings came in with their anthropocentric view of the universe and attempted an overthrow of its original inhabitants. This touched many people because, even though it had been shown through movies such as: The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, and even to a lesser extent, Star Wars, this one was the most recent "awakening" from the anthropocentric view we guide our children and grandchildren to believe day in and day out.

            As the Master Narrative tells us, through textbook, news casts, and even webcasts, the world we live in, or don't for that matter a la Pandora, seems to offer only one scapegoat of a persepective, "all shall bow to the humans." The major flaw in such a one-sided view is that the humans invading Pandora for their own means of gaining wealth and colonialism, do not live the life of the natives. Rarely do such exquisite stories get told, but in this case, Sam Worthington, or Jake Sully as he is known in the film, does experience such a tale, and even embarks on a heroic tale to recapture the land for the true colonists. The heroic ethics he taps into are needed to rectify his ineffectiveness of pleasing either side of the story which at one point left him with no home to call his own. This allowed the self-narrative to occur and guided him through wastelands left behing by his own race to approaching these drastic times with drastic measures. His careful preparation was unhindered and he managed to capture the biggest creature known to the Na'vi -- a creature that held a symbolic and even noble standing in the Na'vis' hearts. This allowed him to claim the title of "World-Traveler" and completely changed his philosophy on life and allegiance once sworn to the armed forces and human beings. Through his eyes, the narration exposes us to a not so anthropocentric view on matters, as an audience, rather it portrays a truncated narrative-- a view not seen often enough. As we are experiencing in Texas currently, Cesar Chavez, the pioneer extraordinaire, is being deleted from knowledge because of the state government. Known for hating illegal immigration with a passion, Texas government has moved forward with their blinded, delusional decision-making for this paradigm on the true forefathers to this great land. As the Tools for a Cross-Culture Feminist Ethics: Exploring Ethical Contexts and Contents in the Makah Whale Hunt states on paragraph two of the fifth page in the reading: "In 1979, the Makah Cultural and Research Center opened as a place to display the artifacts from Ozette, representing the 'historic continuity of Makah efforts to self-determine their ways of knowing and living in the world around them.'" Is that what we expect to do everytime a colonialism take place? To give back to them a grain of salt after we had taken the entirety of their existence? The Native Americans received sacred land to live on dozens of years after they were assimilated into a European, white-man culture. The Mexicans that once held Texas as one of their own properties were forced out at San Jacinto when Santa Anna declared defeat to the Texan hoards fighting for independence and sorrow in their hearts post-Goliad and post-Alamo. Are we to give them anything? We are seemingly still punishing them in Texas for their rule eons ago. Are the Na'vi just as unlucky? When their sacred tree is decimated through colonialization, are they to receive a small prize for playing the human's game centuries down the road? It isn't a good enough consolation to have your belief system wiped out by madmen with hovercrafts of destruction. The simple living the Na'vi led couldn't compare to the white man's technology. The only thing on their side at the climactic end was the knowledge of the white man's culture through their fearless, new leader, Jake Sully. Their heart, home-field advantage and tactical planning proved too much for the technological fleet of doom with their impending attack on the tree of life-- their sustenance on Pandora. They prevailed, but by a hair when the armed forces leader had his life taken away for his maniacal need to commit genocide; the karma finally caught up to him and hopefully enstilled a lesson in all audiences' minds.

              To have such a different understanding and going forward allows us to accept nature and its belongings as a possession of Gaia, and not Uncle Sam, or any human-made poster child. The feelings towards Avatar were mixed in that the political standpoint James Cameron decided to take this movie in either angered and offended some, or showed them a whole new perspective on the matter, which enlightened them. Either way, this movie made an impact in everyone's life, as it's safe to say, because the box office numbers reflect the massive quantities that viewed, and then reviewed this movie over the course of six months. A cultural impact, surely, it will be remembered as the new milennium's take on the dualisms that still remain in society, albeit a fictional society, it still revealed to us how even decades and centuries after how the Native Americans, African-Americans, and serfs were handled, we realized deep within ourselves that "HATE" is still a word that seems to be a self-proclaimed moniker even in today's standards when we are dealing with either each other's races, lands, or our fellow air-breathing comrades. A shame to admit this horrid truth it is, but to avoid it is futile.