Avatar, Joss Whedon, Stuff White People Like and Moses

Rod Dreher tips me off to this piece by Annalee Newitz about the tedious liberal power fantasy that energizes stories like Avatar:

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.
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege.

Yeah. Pretty much. Especially when it’s James “Ham-Fist” Cameron doing the story-telling. I had much the same sensation as I finished watching the season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last night. Joss Whedon is not only a feminist. He is *more* feminist than any of those wimpy feminist wannabes in the so-called feminist community of weak-kneed female feminists who don’t seize the power and send the Uber Misogynist Man in the Roman Collar to hell! He’s a *testosterone-driven feminist*. A mythmaker who creates goddesses and icons! He’s the Leader of Feminism! Follow Joss, women! (Not that I didn’t enjoy the series and don’t think Joss the best writer on TV. But sheesh! Okay! I get it. Joss has atoned for centuries of dead white male Abrahamic oppression of women that is the First Evil in the universe and now assumes his place as Atoning Savior of Women. Alright already.)

That said, I can’t help but notice that a similar dynamic occurs within Scripture as well, only without the dynamic of self congratulation. Moses, for instance, is precisely the guilty SWPL type in his universe. Fetched out of the Nile and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, he apparently knows, but doesn’t do much about the fact that he is a Hebrew. This goes on for forty years. The guy lives in the lap of luxury while his tribe is sweating as slaves. Then, one day, in a fit of social consciousness, the dilettante rich kid who wants to feel like he has a purpose murders an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave and ditches the body. Next day, this preppy from the Ivory Tower comes upon a couple of Hebrews quarrelling and deigns to swoop in and break it up. The slaves basically tell him to buzz off (“oh, and everybody knows what *you* did”). Turns out the whole “Brothers! Join me!” schtick doesn’t play real well in Peoria and people resent SWPL types working out their Hero’s Journey fantasies at their expense. So Moses the Savior Preppy gets scared and hotfoots it to the desert when he realizes his little Weatherman moment of Killing for the Revolution is likely to cost him something.

That’s not a very promising beginning for the story of the Exodus. But the thing is, from this frail clay vessel, God really does raise up a liberator for Israel. And likewise, from egocentric white guilt, it’s also the case that God has wrought rather impressive gains in civil rights here in the US. We have, after all, gone from separate drinking fountains to a black president in my lifetime. Yes, I’m perfectly aware of the many problems associated with the Amateur Presidency of the Son of Man. But still: come on. It’s an amazing feat for the American Experiment to have pulled off and we should be grateful to God for it.

More than that, however, is the curious Christian subtext that this particular SWPL fantasy has, probably without a shred of conscious awareness on the part of people like Cameron. Film critic Jeffrey Overstreet talks about what he calls the “inescapability of the gospel”. His point is that, because God is the Creator of the human person and the human person, made in His image, is a sub-creator, we simply can’t help putting themes into our stories that recapitulate the gospel. Often those themes will be torqued badly by human sin or stupidity, but nonetheless they are discernible again and again: themes like redemption through self-sacrificial love, the exaltation of the humble, the passage from sin to glory through redemptive love, the final judgment against evil, etc. Where would storytellers be without them?

And so, for instance, in the tale of Moses we find the story of a selfish man who is slowly brought by God to the place where he is willing to give up his life for his people. In this, he stands as a sort of dim foreshadow of the perfect sacrificial offering by the utterly giving and unselfish God incarnate in Christ Jesus.

Likewise, Avatar intuits something of the gospel in the notion of a savior who takes on the flesh of those he is to save and works from within, not from outside. It’s a little echo of the idea of the Incarnation, though garbled up with a lot of other confused echoes such as the dim notion that creation is sacred (packaged as Gaia worship), the dim notion that the humble are exalted (packaged as warmed-over Marxism and class struggle), and the dim notion that grace (packaged as movie romance) gives us the strength to do good and win through to the end. One can always find the gospel hidden in human storytelling if you try. But it’s often pretty well-hidden, sometimes at the conscious decision of the anti-Christian storyteller himself.

Still and all, God can’t be entirely repressed. Ultimately, he won’t be repressed a bit and even the knees of those “under the earth” shall bow. That’s how reality works.