Links of Interest: On The Book of Eli & Avatar

How The Book of Eli Got Into the Wrong Hands
by Yervand Kochar @ Big Hollywood

As with most current American artistic expression, The Book of Eli blindly follows the established academic elites’ anachronistic view of a cultural value as something belonging to a museum, library, archive, university and solely validated by peer views, professional commentators, Al Gore, and accepted intellectuals—basically, anyone but the people by whom and for whom those values are created.

Ironically and particularly with the Bible, it was a different story. The Word of God was delivered directly to the people who needed it, who in their despair and ignorance depended on it not as a cultural value but as a living breath of divinity upon which depended their very existence. It was given to the likes of people who inhabit Carnegie’s wild settlement and it was given to people like Carnegie, willful and often times evil kings, who nevertheless had the ability to deliver the Word to the people who needed it, because the Word had the power to cut directly to the people, bypassing those who tried to use It for their selfish purposes. It was given to ruthless emperors like Constantine and mass executioners like Paul and it transformed them.

To be honest, this didn't occur to me when I saw The Book of Eli on opening day and subsequently wrote my own review, but Kochar is right. Putting the Bible in a San Francisco museum (next to the Koran, no less!) is just about the last thing we should do with the Sacred Scripture.

When Will People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?

In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior. This is also the basic story of Dune, where a member of the white royalty flees his posh palace on the planet Dune to become leader of the worm-riding native Fremen (the worm-riding rite of passage has an analog in Avatar, where Jake proves his manhood by riding a giant bird)...

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

The above article is written from a left-wing perspective, so I imagine the author of this piece and our readers here will violently disagree over the question of the true nature and extent of European guilt, but I do find myself agreeing with at least one thing: the white guilt fantasy is a tired story. As soon as it became apparent to me that Avatar was written along those lines, I immediately lost interest.