Yay, James Cameron! Thanks so much for
Avatar! Not only did I love it, but I'm hard-pressed to find ANYTHING to complain about in the gender portrayal department.
But, of course, I will, because I'm almost impossible to please. I was a little bothered by the fact that, on Pandora, the man was always the political leader and the woman the spiritual leader. I guess it did fit in some ways as the Na'vi people worshipped a goddess. Their logic might dictate that a female could more easily commune with "Eywa." Also, I really do appreciate so much the fact that women and men always led together and that leadership seemed to pass on to a child regardless of gender. But man as dominant, rational, political and woman as emotional, intuitive, spiritual is a little too on the stereotypical side for me.
Also, once again, the protagonist of a big-time action movie was a man. As I always say, that's not a problem on a movie-by-movie basis. OF COURSE it's okay to make a male your lead character. The problem is, as a group, there are very, very rarely action or sci-fi films that cast a woman in the biggest role. Sure, there are plenty that have strong female characters in them, but the women aren't the main characters - the characters whose names you'd say first if someone asked you what the movie was about. Avatar, of course, would have been an entirely different movie if it had featured Jane Sully, ex-marine and avatar who finds a smart forest boy to help her appreciate the beauty of the planet she's come to exploit. And I will say that James Cameron was doing so much that was different in this film that an unexpected gender twist might have made the movie too much for a mainstream audience to handle. But I did want to raise the point. I'm waiting for a great action/sci-fi flick that focuses on a female first.
Now, on to the many, many things I loved about the film.
- Wow. I was so pleased with gender ratios. Except for in the army, I think I saw as many females as males on screen and with speaking parts. There were also really great named female characters. Grace (played by Sigourney Weaver), the head scientist, and Trudy (played by Michelle Rodriguez), the rogue fighter, were particularly terrific roles.
- I was really annoyed when Neytiri jumped on the back of Jake's whatever-it-was (dragon? banshee? dinosaur?). I felt like, "Okay, here we go with the lady on the back of the motorcycle." But then (thank you, thank you, thank you again James Cameron!), she got her own untamable beast! The very animal that just about cost Jake his life at the beginning of the film. Nice.
- In general, I just loved Neytiri's toughness. How great of a moment was it when the villain had stabbed that cat-like animal she was fighting on, she was stuck underneath it with no hope of survival, and the first thing she did was hiss at him? Yes! And well-done, Zoe Soldana.
- I liked the contrast between the sexist soldiers from Earth (who more than once referred to a group of men as "ladies") and the nearly perfect gender equity of the Na'vi. Women were warriors and hunters alongside men. Both sexes could tame banshees and fight off a pack of Pandora wolves. Also, in one of the two societies they went to to gather more soldiers, a female was the one acting as leader and rallying the troops. I feel that in a lot of action flicks, the love interest, if she's tough, is seen as a gender exception - an especially cool female. In this case, all the Na'vi women were portrayed as strong.
- The natural world was equitable. Animals, if I heard correctly, were sometimes called "her" and sometimes called "him." That's a small detail that means a lot to me. It would have been so easy to just default to the masculine, especially when these pronouns were only used in a couple of scenes. Also, as mentioned above, the deity the Na'vi worshipped was a female. That's a nice counterpoint to the male God we hear about 99% of the time both in film and real life.
- I went to
learnnavi.org, the website where you can learn the Na'vi language online, and the language looks very solid, gender-wise. For example, unlike Spanish, where a group that includes both males and females is referred to with the masculine pronoun, Na'vi, like English, has a gender neutral option. It's the difference, basically, between something like "you guys" and "you all."
- And finally, the overall message of the film was very positive with regard to gender. When Jake chose his avatar over his human body, he chose a lot of positive things: the use of his legs over a wheelchair, harmony with nature over a "dying planet," etc. However, he was also choosing a society with gender parity over one that glamorized the worst traditionally masculine traits: domination by brute force and at any cost and the unbridled pursuit of money (symbolized respectively by the male characters of the colonel and corporate tycoon, played by Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi). Please note that I do not necessarily agree with making both of the villains male. Just as I believe men and women can make equally important productive contributions, I know that females and males are similarly capable of hate and destruction.
I could go on and on, but this post is already too long. I just really appreciated the effort to make women such equal players in this film that, realistically, will probably be seen by more men than women. Also, I think that the gender portrayal choices made this film much more interesting and groundbreaking than it would have been if it had followed action/sci-fi traditions more closely.
To end, there's one gender question about the film I don't have an answer to. We seem as Americans to love to Pocahontas/Sacagawea story - a rough-and-tumble guy discovers a new world with the help of a smart native woman. Is this cultural narrative good or bad for females? The "good" argument would say that these storylines represent men admitting they might have something to learn from a more capable female. The "bad" argument would say that this kind of plot is all about conquest. Any thoughts?
