Colonialism has been an ever present aspect of nearly all of the societies of the world in some form since it’s conception and spread across the world. It can even be found in cinema with films such as Avatar, and District 9. These two films offer the chance to see how a post-colonial world has effected films presently, rather then looking back at older films such as 1988's Chocolat or 2002's Rabbit-Proof Fence.
Both
of these films show different forms of colonialism and how it can
affect the plot or even be a main point in the plot of a film. How do the portrayals of colonialism differ in these two films?
Avatar
The White Messiah
In James Cameron’s Avatar we see the classic postcolonial plot of the White Savior: A white person, normally a male, comes to the aid of a “lesser” race out of the goodness of his heart and not only helps them but becomes the leader and the “best of” of them. This story has been repeated time after time with different films: The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, even a widely known film such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has it in the form of the Indian peasants that are saved from the cult that has been sacrificing them.
In Avatar,
we see it take the form of the main character Jake Sully. Sully is part
of a group of soldiers and scientists from Earth that have come to the
alien world of Pandora to colonize the planet and harvest its resources,
making the of man made bodies called Avatars that resemble the natives
known as the Na’vi. Sully is a white male that turns against his human
allies to save the Na’vi from destruction, coming to become the one to
lead the attack despite being one of the ones whose presence has lead to this outcome in the first place.
We have seen this plot many times before, and films continue being produced with it as the focus. These films also tend to do very well in the box office as Avatar shown itself, reigning as the top grossing movie of all times for a time after it's release.Why do we keep flocking to theaters to see a regurgitated plot decade after decade?
Media is a huge part of the lives of people in western societies, and it is through the media and the saturation of this very plot that we can come to the belief that these tribes of non-whites can't possibly defend themselves and have to be saved by the "greater" strength of the whites. David Brooks hammers the point home in his article The Messiah Complex: “It
rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and
technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests
on the assumption that non whites need the White Messiah to lead their
crusades.”
The White Man's Burden
The White Man's Burden was a poem written in 1899 by Rudyard Kipling, and was an attempt to convince the US that it is the burden of the whites of the world to take control of the non-white countries of the world.
Sounds familiar right? Jake Sully does exactly this after he switches sides in Avatar, rising up as the one who leads them against the humans in the final battle. The poem calls for the conversion of the "half-devil, half-child" people into a colony, in this case the Na'vi. While Sully's actions stop the complete colonization and theft of the resources from the Na'vi, he is still a white male taking command of a tribe of "lesser" beings to bring them up to the point where they can stand themselves.
Hana Shams Riazuddin goes so far as to state in her article Why Avatar is a truly Dangerous Film that the that the viewers in the theater do not even see these "half-devil, half-children" as humanized until the the romance between Sully and Neytiri, that we only see beings that display love as we know it as human.
The White Man's Burden is the concept that other races are below that of the white men and have to be "carried up the hill" to the same point as them by force if necessary, and that white men should be happy to do this. We see the scientists in Avatar teaching the Na'vi to speak English, offering medicine to them and trying to "bring them up" in other ways.
The film resonates with the ideas put forth by Hana Shams Riazuddin in the article Why Avatar is a truly Dangerous film:
Riazuddin states that the Na’vi in Avatar are only truly seen as people
by the viewer after certain events that only happen thanks to the
interaction of the humans. That the romance between Neytiri and Sully is
a tool that fully humanizes the Na’vi, who in the design of the film
can only be human within the restraints of colonialism (Riazuddin.)
Overall
the Na’vi in the film are presented as both helpless before the humans
with Sully, and not even as people without the injection of Sully to
allow the audience to truly see them as humans.
Historical Resonance
What the humans are trying to do to Pandora is clearly meant to be a representation of what many European countries did when they began to colonize other landmasses. They came in and occupied the territory, taking it from the natives and began harvesting materials and using the people for their own gain.
Africa was devastated by these actions, many parts of it still trapped in the economic sinkhole created by colonialism. The ghosts of colonialism do not step there however, as even after breaking away from being a colony South Africa spent decades under the thumb of Apartheid, something that District 9 is very deeply connected to.
Neill Blomkamp's District 9 we see a type of colonialism known as Settler Colonialism: A type of colonialism where a foreign group moves into the space previously inhabited by its natural inhabitants, who are normally forced out in favor of these foreign settlers. We also see a heavy focus on Apartheid as the film puts forward a situation that is very close to that of the years spent in Apartheid.
Apartheid
Apartheid has come to be the word to refer to the system of institutionalized racism that had existed in South Africa for over 4 decades, from 1948 to 1991. The natives of South Africa were discriminated against in their own home country in favor of the previous colonists.
We see this repeated in District 9 with the treatment of the Prawn, the strange crustacean like alien race that has found a new home in Johannesburg for almost 3 decades. They are segregated away from normal humans into trash covered and disgusting hovels, feeding on cat food and unable to find jobs in a world that despises them and places them under the humans and into abstract poverty.
The portrayal of Apartheid in District 9 is not perfect, as Jonah Weiner points out in her article What Does District 9 Have To Say About Apartheid? Weiner mentions how the Aliens are presented as "intergalactic schlubs" who are incapable of organizing and many of them with the exception of Christopher Johnson are too dumb to ever have a hope of being treated fairly by the humans.
This portrayal is troubling as the actual people that were constantly abused thanks to Apartheid continuously fought against it, Nelson Mandela having gone to prison multiple times over the protests he participated in.
District 6
The
Prawn being confined to a separate area away from normal people is a
clear reference to the segregation caused by apartheid, Distract 9
itself is a reference to a place that had at one point been found in
Cape Town known as District 6. “While it was known primarily as a so-called Colored community, it was also home to a large Jewish population, and it is not a romantic exaggeration to say that Muslims, Christians, blacks, and whites all lived together in relative harmony.”
(Johnson).
Eventually this mixed community was torn apart piece by piece
by the laws put up during Apartheid until it was made a whites only
community in 1966 and all the others forced out.
Settler Colonialism
The valuable lands were
taken from all but the whites, the others being forced out. We can see
this in the re positioning of the Prawns from District 9 and to a new
location, under the excuse that it is due to the rampant overpopulation. The removal of a native population so that new settlers may move in is what is known as Settler Colonialism.
While the Prawn are not native to
Johannesburg, they are still being forcibly removed from a place that
had been their home for 28 years, at the behest of the government and
people of Johannesburg. This removes the unsightly prawn from view of
the people in the city while also having the added benefit of freeing up
the space that District 9 exists in, a striking parallel to District 6.
What do the films share?
Both of these films show two very different portrayals of colonialism, either a modern attempt to colonize as shown in Avatar, or the echos of Apartheid finding a new target in the Prawns of District 9. This does not mean they share nothing, as they both put forward ideas of a post-colonial world and even look at Assimilation the same way.
Assimilation
Assimilation has been a key part of a post-colonial and globalized world, as people move from country to country. We saw this happening in 2006's God Grew Tired of Us with the Lost Boys of Sudan as they came to the US, suddenly finding themselves in a world very different from the life they had lived back in Sudan. They had to change to fit in with the culture of the US, while still trying to hold on to the concepts and ideas they had been taught growing up in Sudan.
Avatar and District 9 both take assimilation and turn it on it's head, instead of having to change to conform to the power of the majority, the main characters find themselves changed into that of the minority, Reverse Assimilation.
Jake Sully in the end willingly changes full into his avatar body, becoming a Na'vi yet the viewer still knows who he is under the body and continuing the humanization of the Na'vi to the viewer. Jake Sully sides with the Na'vi because he doesn't believe what the other humans is doing is right, giving him a moral reason for it.
On the other side of the coin we have Wikus, whose transformation is painful and drawn out instead of the seemingly painless and quick transformation of Sully. Wikus despises what is happening to him, and it is his own stake in trying to find a cure that drives him, not a sense of virtue or that he believes the Prawn deserve his help.
Why is colonialism such a popular concept for film?
Both of these films did very well at the box office, and both are heavily influenced by colonialism. Why do people continue watching these films? I feel it's because it is something familiar for us to latch on to.
Avatar and District 9 are both very action heavy films with enough violence to keep your every day movie goer happy, while bringing enough questions to the table to keep others intrigued. There is nothing more familiar to The West then the social impacts we have had on the world, and I feel like it is this history being shown in different forms on the big screen that keep people coming back for more.
Can we ever expect Hollywood to stop milking the atrocities of the past or post-colonial ideas to make money? Films like District 9, Avatar, Dances With Wolves, and The Last Samurai are made constantly and almost always do very well, until people begin to really pay attention to what they watch and the subtle ideas being portrayed, I don't feel like we will see these films stop being made.
Works Cited
Brooks, David. “The Messiah Complex.” NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html?em. Accessed 20 March 2017.
Riazuddin, Hana Shams. “Why Avatar is a Truly Dangerous Film.” Ceasefire Magazine, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/why-avatar-is-a-truly-dangerous-film/ . Accessed 20 March 2017.
Zellhuber-McMillan, Ellena. “A Beginner’s Guide to...Post-Colonial Cinema.” One Room With A View, https://oneroomwithaview.com/2015/05/27/beginners-guide-post-colonial-cinema/. Accessed 20 March 2017.
Johnson, Scott. “The Real District 9: Cape Town’s District 6.” Newsweek, http://www.newsweek.com/real-district-9-cape-towns-district-six-78939. Accessed 20 March 2017.
Dominguez-Chio, Amanda. “District 9: A Post-Colonial Analysis.” The Artifice, https://the-artifice.com/district-9-post-colonial-analysis/. Accessed 20 March 2017.
Johnson, Mary. “Timeline for the highest-grossing films in history: The past 100 years.
” six Degrees of Film, https://sixdegreesoffilm.com/2013/08/05/336/ Accessed 1 May 2017
Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899.” Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1929).
Weiner, Jonah. “What Does District 9 Have To Say About Apartheid?
“ Browbeat, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2009/08/18/what_does_district_9_have_to_say_about_apartheid.html. Accessed 1 May 2017
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