What happens when you watch "Avatar: The Way of Water" with your Shipibo-Konibo friends?
- Lisa Ausic
- Jul 14, 2023
- 5 min read
Pucallpa, January 2023
Given the increased visibility of cases and debates surrounding cultural appropriation and cancel culture in recent years, as many others, I, too, was surprised that Avatar: The Way of Water had not been swept (and drowned) by a wave of criticism before it could flood the cinema screens.[1]
Already James Cameron’s first Avatar movie, released in 2009, was met with controversy and critique: aptly referred to as “Space Pocahontas”[2], it reiterated countless colonial tropes, punched together stereotypes of a variety of Native peoples through a White male lens and then coated them in blue alien skin. Given that there already exists a plethora of excellent educational analyses made by Native American scholars and Sci-Fi fans, I will not go further into the by now well-known critiques raised against the first movie (nevertheless I’d like to highlight this episode of Métis In Space for an in-depth discussion). Neither will I dive into the ways in which Avatar: The Way of Water has appropriated Maori practices and still managed to cast only two (!) Maori actors for their Polynesian-"styled" Metkayina clan (and instead hired Kate Winslet to portray Ronal, the clan's prestigious medicine woman).
Instead, I would like to spend a few words reflecting on my experiences of watching Avatar: The Way of Water with my Indigenous Shipibo-Konibo friends as a White European in the Amazonian city of Pucallpa, Peru. Many of my Shipibo-Konibo friends had already been anticipating the Avatar sequel for its visual beauty, entertainment factor and even a dash of hope to see parts of Shipibo-Konibo and Amazonian lifeworlds at large represented on screen. Some others were rather wary of racist stereotypes, cultural appropriation and the fact that Shipibo-Konibo film makers have to scramble for funding to tell their own stories.
For me, who had watched the first Avatar movie years ago, its content and my reflections on questions around representations were pretty much the same ones I had about The Way of Water. Nevertheless, for me as a White European, it definitely was a different experience to watch an Avatar movie sandwiched between three close Shipibo-Konibo friends (compared to watching it alone or with a group of non-Indigenous pals). For example, when I rewatched the first Avatar movie alone in my bed with Amazonian January rain hammering on my tin roof to write this blog, there were both moments in which the movie's obvious colonial gaze made made me cringe and moments in which I had to remind myself to analytically step back and not be overly distracted by the fictional planet’s beauty, getting carried away by the movie experience. I had to remind myself to move back into “observation” rather than “experience” mode.
This, precisely, highlighted for me the difference of watching the second movie with my Shipibo-Konibo friends: having lived and still living many of the movie’s stories alluding to imperial oppression in their everyday lives, for them, there was no clear line nor even the possibility to choose between more intellectually “observing” and more visually and viscerally “experiencing” the movie. That which is their (and my) analysis of a mix of depictions of colonial tropes, racist slurs and environmental devastation, cannot be divided from them “experiencing” the movie – it IS the very experience, on and off screen, and it is thoroughly different from mine given the fact that, when watching it by myself, I can just get lost in the visuals from time to time.
This difference I was continuously reminded of while watching Avatar together with my friends: The proximity of our bodies in a dark cinema, the screen shining light on our faces in pivotal moments, exchanging annoyed glances at stereotypical presentations, snickers on jokes, “ahs and ohs” admiring the visuals, sensing tight muscles and jaws any time the word “savage” fell and villages were burnt as well as sharing some near-heart attacks and clasping each other’s arms in moments of on-screen tension kept succumbing to watching the movie with momentary White numbness at bay. It removed a barrier between my division of intellectual “observation” and visual “experience” of the movie - while further highlighting that for those whose movie experience is shaped precisely by a blurring or removal of such (White/non-Indigenous) boundaries, critically interrogating racist representations does not eclipse, hinder nor complicate both enjoying the beauty of some of the imagery as well as being painfully reminded of persistent everyday struggles like threats to territory and life. Nevertheless, of course, it goes without saying that it still begs a reflection on the ethics of paying money for an Avatar movie ticket, adding yet more dollars into Cameron’s wallet while Shipibo-Konibo film makers, like one of my friends present that night, struggle to make ends meet.
Besides this though, my friends’ overall movie receptions could not have been more varied: one friend felt herself recognized in some of the on-screen representations such as the in the presence of arrows, life along/with water and the use of breath employed by the Metkayina healer to revive Kiri; another friend was simply in love with the film’s visuals and with it being an emotional rollercoaster centering on the theme of family while her husband, himself involved in Indigenous film making, rated the film soberly a “más o menos”, “more or less”, attributing his assessment to the movie's problems of appropriation and its fetishization of a stereotypical notion of Indigeneity (yet he still wanted to go back to watch the movie a second time to take notes for his own work). Moreover, the scenes that drew some of their most vocal live reactions were those that evoked a perceived similarity to life along the Ucayali river: for example, Avatar's skimwings, the flying fish ridden by the Na'vi in The Way of Water, immediately drew joking comparisons and exclamations, being called a "paiche volador", a flying pirarucu or arapaima, one of the biggest freshwater fish in the world.
Finally, what this collective cinema experience highlighted for me as a White European was that too many movie goers across Europe, North America and Australia will once more succumb to the privilege of White numbness watching this film, getting lost in the “experience” of it, without or with too little “observation”. And even those who do observe and critically interrogate Avatar’s storylines and politics of representation will be spared the viscerality of real life contemporary pain that the movie can evoke and reflect for others. When they go home, the movie is over and the Na’vi remain a blue-faced allegory of a distorted past. And while they remain in love with Pandora’s beauty, touched by the spiritualization of its ecology and some even going as far as learning the fictional Na’vi language and ways of life, actual demands from real Indigenous activists to protect their lifeworlds from logging, mining and any unnecessary interference remain nothing but another news headline to scroll past as they instead click on the latest updates on the upcoming release of Avatar 3 in 2024.
[1] for a notable boycott campaign, click here: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/07/why-indigenous-groups-are-boycotting-avatar-the-way-of-water.html
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