Last night I finally watched Avatar-- a pirated copy, dubbed in Spanish, obviously not 3D, which was perhaps not ideal but sort of fitting because this is the way people watch movies here. The film itself was pretty much how I thought it would be: nothing we haven't seen before in Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, The Matrix (far superior but nonetheless very influential) etc., although it was nice to see the U.S. army get its ass beat by the N'avi with help from the entire fancifully-animated ecosystem. I watched it with Luchi, who was was slightly more impressed than I was: as an artist she appreciated Cameron's world-building skills, but she was concerned with the "caudillismo" of Jake's call-to-arms (actually, I tried to convince her, it's far worse than caudillismo, because it's literally puppet caudillismo, why the fuck do they need a Northamerican soldier in a borrowed body to tell them how to resist? Yeah, THAT has ever really happened in the history of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare) and particularly, since she is also a farmer, with the material UNreality of the N'avi and their world. What do they eat? She kept asking. Yes, there were some sexy bow-and-arrow scenes, but the film never showed the people eating, much less gathering, harvesting, doing any sort of food-related ritual that would seem important for a community this "close to the land." She was also very concerned that Jake simply turned in his old dragon for a more prestigious model (in order to get the entire N'avi community to bow down to him in a pivotal scene) without a backward glance. Her critiques, then, were actually about Cameron's inability to imagine a community with an actually sustainable connection to the natural world, which is kind of interesting. It's the same focus on the concrete details of work that I got when I interviewed Bolivians about Peace Corps propaganda photos that showed volunteers doing allegedly universal "development work": but what are they actually doing? What are those crops they're growing? Are they going to market? It doesn't make sense that they would be selling crafts in that space., etc, questions that expose the ridiculousness of any universal development idea and of plopping 20 year-olds down in the middle of a community and ecosystem they don't know anything about, expecting them to use some kind of inborn American ingenuity to "develop" it--actually, sort of the ethos of Avatar too, though they do pointedly refuse any and all development interventions, which was nice.
Despite my predictable annoyance, I was interested in watching Avatar here, because the comparisons between the N'avi and Evo Morales have been ubiquitous: Evo has stood up to the U.S. government in significant ways, defending their connection to the natural world against, for example, the DEA's "coca eradication" programs and other neoliberal imperialist projects; and MAS' color is blue, following an interesting post-Cold War global color-reversal trend that perhaps signals the new new left's (or, as Arturo Escobar posits here, the new post-leftist, post-development, and above all anti-imperialist politic which is most fully elaborated by Bolivian indigenista social movement politics ) focus on nature that Cameron also grasped, perhaps the reason the film has been embraced by insurgents all over the world, despite their lack of a an ex-G.I. savior to lead them.
Evo himself went to see Avatar, in supposedly only the third movie-watching experience of his life, and commented that "the film contains a high degree of fantasy, but is at the same time a profound depiction of resistance against capitalism and the fight to defend the natural world."
Evo is right that the film critiques the continued insistence that Bolivia "modernize" no matter what the cost to its land and people, by even liberal U.S. voices: a recent New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright on the possibilities of extracting lithium in Bolivia condescendingly calls Evo "a creature of his biography" with "a mystical attachment to coca," calls Evo's attempts at a social welfare state "out of date," and quotes an opponent (one of an overwhelming number quoted in the article) saying "Evo is Aymara, and the Aymara see the world as a fight between good and evil, like 'Star Wars.' For him, the forces of good are coca growers and the coca leaf. The evil is the D.E.A. and the U.S." It's worth noting that a) Bolivia is not the country that formulated either star wars or ANY of the manichean "you're with us or against us" justifications for pre-emptive war that define the era of U.S. hegemony; but that b) Evo was nearly beaten to death by D.E.A.-affiliated Bolivian troops for his work in the coca-growers union, so the shoe kind of fits here. See this excellent article by Suzanna Reiss to learn about how the Obama administration is, if anything, exacerbating the entirely imperialist--i.e. concerned much more with governments' attempts to hold onto and redistribute their resources than with stemming drug distribution and consumption--drug war.
Anyway, the New Yorker article: Wright refuses to budge an inch from the developmentalist paradigm, lamenting Bolivia's failure to emerge from its "pre-industrial cocoon"; worries openly that now that Evo has expelled the DEA, that "the drug trade" will "corrupt Bolivian society"; and, in perhaps the most disgusting and libelous move of the article, characterizes the entire cycle of anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal uprisings of the early and mid 2000s as about silly age-old anti-Chilean hostilities. Nothing could be further from the truth: the vast majority of Bolivians are attempting to reject neoliberal capitalism on purpose, in order to (re)conceptualize ways of life not based on modernization, endless accumulation, and environmental destruction. At least James Cameron gets that.
