'Avatar': Why do conservatives hate the most popular movie in years?

It's no secret that "Avatar" has been stunningly successful on nearly every front. The James Cameron-directed sci-fi epic is already the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time, having earned more than $1 billion around the globe in less than three weeks of theatrical release. The film also has garnered effusive praise from critics, who've been planting its flag on a variety of critics Top 10 lists (it has earned an impressive 83 score on Rotten Tomatoes). The 3-D trip to Pandora is also viewed as a veritable shoo-in for a best picture Oscar nomination when the academy announces its nominees on Feb. 2.

But amid this avalanche of praise and popularity, guess who hates the movie? America's prickly cadre of political conservatives. 

For years, pundits and bloggers on the right have ceaselessly attacked liberal Hollywood for being out of touch with rank and file moviegoers, complaining that executives and filmmakers continue to make films that have precious little resonance with Middle America. They have reacted with scorn to such high-profile liberal political advocacy films as "Syriana," "Milk," "W.," "Religulous," "Lions for Lambs," "Brokeback Mountain," "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," saying that the movies' poor performance at the box office was a clear sign of how thoroughly uninterested real people were in the pet causes of showbiz progressives.

Of course, "Avatar" totally turns this theory on its head. As a host of critics have noted, the film offers a blatantly pro-environmental message; it portrays U.S. military contractors in a decidedly negative light; and it clearly evokes the can't-we-all-get along vibe of the 1960s counterculture. These are all messages guaranteed to alienate everyday moviegoers, so say the right-wing pundits -- and yet the film has been wholeheartedly embraced by audiences everywhere, from Mississippi to Manhattan. 

To say that the film has evoked a storm of ire on the right would be an understatement. Big Hollywood's John Nolte, one of my favorite outspoken right-wing film essayists, blasted the film, calling it "a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC cliches that not a single plot turn, large or small, surprises.... Think of 'Avatar' as 'Death Wish' for leftists, a simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you freakin' hate the bad guys (America) you're able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all."

John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard's film critic, called the film "blitheringly stupid; indeed, it's among the dumbest movies I've ever seen." He goes on to say: "You're going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie's politics -- about how it's a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq.... The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism -- kind of. The thing is, one would be giving Jim Cameron too much credit to take 'Avatar' -- with its ... hatred of the military and American institutions and the notion that to be human is just way uncool -- at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard issue counterculture cliches in Hollywood have become by now."

Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, took Cameron to task on another favorite conservative front, as yet another Hollywood filmmaker who refuses to acknowledge the power of religion. Douthat calls "Avatar" the "Gospel according to James. But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, 'Avatar' is Cameron's long apologia for pantheism -- a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world." Douthat contends that societies close to nature, like the Na'vi in "Avatar," aren't shining Edens at all -- "they're places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short."

There are tons of other grumpy conservative broadsides against the film, but I'll spare you the details, except to say that Cameron's grand cinematic fantasy, with its mixture of social comment, mysticism and transcendent, fanboy-style video game animation, seems to have hit a very raw nerve with political conservatives, who view everything -- foreign affairs, global warming, the White House Christmas tree -- through the prism of partisan sloganeering.

But why is it doing so well with everyday moviegoers if it's so full of supposedly buzz-killing liberal messages?

"It has the politics of the left, but it also has extraordinary spectacle," says Govindini Murty, co-founder of the pioneering conservative blog Libertas and executive producer of the new conservative film "Kalifornistan." "Jim Cameron didn't come out nowhere. He came on the heels of all the left-wing filmmakers who went before him, who knew that someone with their point of view would have the resources to finally make a breakthrough political film. But even though 'Avatar' has an incredibly disturbing anti-human, anti-military, anti-Western world view, it has incredible spectacle and technology and great filmmaking to capture people's attention. The politics are going right over people's heads. Its audience isn't reading the New York Times or the National Review."

I suspect that's a good explanation. But if I were trying to get to the bottom of conservative complaints with "Avatar," I'd offer three more key reasons why the film has set the right's hair on fire:

1) Glorifying  soft-headed environmentalism:

If you hadn't noticed, the conservative movement has become the leading focal point for skepticism about global warming. The Wall Street Journal's ardently right-wing editorial pages have been chock-full of stories ridiculing everything including government sponsorship of alternative energy, nutty Prius enthusiasts and scientists who allegedly suppressed climate change data that called into question their claims about global warming (a flap the WSJ dubbed "Climategate").

Ever since Al Gore took center stage with his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," conservatives have been falling over each other in their attempts to mock liberal planet savers, taking special pleasure in slamming Hollywood environmentalists who fly private jets or live in huge houses. (As soon as Climategate erupted, two Hollywood conservatives surfaced, asking the academy to take back Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" Oscar, even though, inconveniently, the Oscar had actually gone to the film's director, not Gore.)

So Cameron's giddy embrace of a primitive people who live in harmony with their land -- and his scathing portrayal of a soulless corporation willing to do anything, including kill innocent natives, to steal and exploit their planet's valuable natural resources -- is the kind of anti-technology, pro-environment dramaturgy that sets off fire alarms. If "Avatar" had been a western that showed sympathy for the Indians (many have in fact compared its storyline to Kevin Costner's "Dances with Wolves"), conservatives would probably have been up in arms too.

As it is, they have been content to hoot at Cameron's portrayal of the Na'vi's one-ness with nature, with Podhoretz writing: "Like the Keebler elves, the Blue People all live in a big tree together and they go to church at another big tree, under which we learn lives Mother Earth, only since it isn't earth, she isn't called Mother Earth, but the Great Mother or something like that."

2) Godless Hollywood triumphs again:

Conservatives have complained for years that Hollywood ignores, laughs at or disrespects religion. And to be fair, they are not so wrong. It's almost as rare to see a film with a sympathetic portrayal of an openly religious character as it is to see a film with a leading role for an African American actress. I think it's a stretch to call Hollywood godless, but it would certainly be fair to call it an extremely secular world.

Conservatives are always quick to point out that when someone actually made an openly religious film -- and of course we're talking about Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" --  it made hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, they usually fail to mention that when Hollywood made 2005's "The Nativity Story," a sweet, very respectful religious drama, it earned $37 million in the U.S., just about what it cost to make. Ross Douthat is probably right. Moviegoers are far more comfortable with a fuzzy, inspirational form of pantheism than they are with an openly biblical message.

3) Hollywood's long history of anti-military sloganeering:

There is no doubt that "Avatar" portrays its military contractor characters as barbarous mercenaries, willing -- even eager -- to wipe out innocent natives in their pursuit of Pandora's precious resources. It almost feels as if Cameron is drawing parallels, not only to the Iraq war, but to Vietnam, where the military found itself in the nihilistic position of destroying villages just to save them. Even the New Yorker's David Denby, hardly a die-hard conservative, found himself in awe of the film's "anti-imperialist spectacle." But while Hollywood often makes antiwar movies, "Avatar" is something different -- a peaceful warrior film, celebrating the newly aroused consciousness of a Marine turned defender of a higher faith.

What's fascinating is that the American people, who have almost always shown strong support for our foreign wars, would happily embrace a film that portrays its military characters in such an unflattering light. My guess is that audiences have seen past the obvious because the film is set in a faraway, interplanetary future, not in present-day America. When Russian political dissidents wanted to criticize their oppressive regimes, they would often write stories or make films that were set in the past, inoculating themselves by using a 15th century czar as a stand-in for the tyrant of the day. Cameron has done the same thing, but by moving forward into the future, creating a safe distance for his veiled (and not-so-thinly veiled) social messages.

"Avatar" has, of course, far more on its mind than its politics. It's a triumph of visual imagination and the world's first great 3-D movie. But it is fascinating to see how today's ideology-obsessed conservatives have managed to walk away from such a crowd-pleasing triumph and only see the film's political subtext, not the groundbreaking artistry that's staring them right in the face.

Photo: Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) in "Avatar." Credit: 20th Century Fox

Comments

[CJ]

Conservative critics are what they are expected to be -- stubborn and irrational. I love how one critic said it was one of the dumbest movies he'd ever seen. Arguably, most current movies are dumb because they are fictional and are shaped around a writer's personal assertion. I would compare these conservative critics to the people who think Harry Potter is unsuitable for children because it promotes witchcraft created by the devil. Avatar portrays a good message about the wrongs of imperialism and a real threat of irreversible changes we pose to the environment that conservatives ultimately ignore, due to political and corporate corruption, and will probably soon discover the effects, along with the rest of the world, the hard way.

[Han van der Horst]

I went to see Avatar to avoid the light snow that is considered e blizzard in Holland and I saw some sort of Amazonian rain forest look alike with the Na'iv in the role of noble savages.

The noble savages are beaten all the way. They fly their winged monsters, they greet the earth, but they are beaten all the way untill they accept the leadership of a shining white former US marine. He uses an avatar body mimicking that of the Na'ive, but that does not change his essence: semper fidelis. He keeps up the ideals of the marine corps against a former collegue who was bought by the fiendish mining company that wants to destroy the ecosystem of the planet. This corrupt and cruel man is a true prince of darness and he gets killed in an epic battle against our hero, good marine and good Samaritan at the same time and - last but not least - the fiancee of the chief's daughter.

Now, this is not what I would call a revolutionary message. It is not easy to satisfy conservatives in the USA. If I were a conservative, I'd be happy to see that even on Pandora only WASP leadership brings victory.

[boccialettig]

In watching Avatar, I kept thinking about America's original sin: extermination of native Americans. That was painful to watch. I don't think Avatar portrayed the military in a bad light. Rather, it protrayed private military in thrall to corporate interests in a bad light. Blackwater, anyone?

The film rocks.

[Jim Bob]

Its wierd how leftists who eagerly voted for Obama and support his escalation of the war in Afghanistan see the war against the Na'vi in "Avatar" as a "conservative" phenomena. After all, Viet Nam is the classic imperialist war and it was LIBERALS who took the US into the war in VietNam. Similarly, today it is Obama and the liberals now who are escalating the war in Afghanistan and are desirous of creating a more regional conflict that also involve Pakistan in what they call the "Afpak" theatre.

The success of Avatar has more to do with the 3D portrayal of hard-bodied 9-foot-tall blue-skinned babes in fur bikinis then with any kind of political screed.

[emy]

I have seen the movie. It is so "american" to debate about movies and their political aspects...
My opinion as a foreigner is that, indeed the movie is typically intended for masses, therefore lacking a good scenario: no surprises, characters are stereotypes, good vs evil war (typically american, but in a reverse way this time!)...
HOWEVER, if you focus on the artistic dimension of the movie, it is definitely worth watching!

[JohnH]

Please show we where it is stated in the movie that the military contractors or buisnesses assets anyone in the movie for that matter are Americans? Why does a segment of the right assume it is Americans? True Jake sully states he is from the "jarhead" clan and is recruited to the Avatar program since his brother died but where else is it stated that anyone else is American? Why can't people see avatar for what it is, a exciting interspace adventure in 3d. I think all his hoopla is ridiculous.

[Bill]

This blithering anti conservative diatribe by the obviously liberal reviewer is so contradictory that it is hard to take it seriously.. I am a conservative and loved the visual aspects of the movie as did the conservative Podhoretz whom the critic savages.. That still doesnt mean you cant fault the stupidity of the plot and the absurdity of the dialogue in which, for example the mineral the bad Americas are looking for is called "unobtanium" (jeez) . What conservatives blame Cameron for is that its always Americans that are put in a bad light.. soldiers being blown away in many ways...I winced when I saw that final battle scene. However, the stunning visuals make up for the story.... And in no way does it mean that the other really cruddy movies criticized by the conservatives didnt deserve their condemnation.. Films luke Redaction, religiosity, in the valley of Elah were so blatantly stupid and disgusting no one saw then anyhow .. There was nothing to redeem them.. What Cameron did was simply overcome the absurdity of the plot with his stunning vision..

[Elian Gonzalez]

One theory that this movie has definitely overturned: that people (including nerds and geeks) care about "plot development" and "character." Rubbish. They're seeing this movie for the special effects (pointed out in the article), period. So the next time some sci-fi buff tells you otherwise, you can safely tell him he's lying.

[Jon K.]

It is a fairly liberal film and argues its perspective through creative brilliance. I, personally, am not a liberal, but I do snicker at anti-intellectual "dumbness" of the modern conservative movement and their helplessness before the cultural impact which 'Avatar' will have upon young people.

Like 'Star Wars' this film will impact a generation and Sarah Palin and her hordes of idiot zombies are helpless before it.

[mrbill]

I am very conservative. I am also in the movie business, doing special effects, specifically. I loved he experience of this film, but in the same way I love eating ice cream; I know it's fattening and full of cholesterol. It is, on a literal level, infantile. The key art shot of Jake Scully outside the tank with his Avatar inside the tank is the perfect diagram of what is going on emotionally, and that is, a desire to return to the womb. Pandora. And that, in a nutshell, is also the basic drive behind leftist politics.

Curiously, in the NaVi tribes, the men are all warriors. When Jake Scully's boss isn't around, whom do they fight? The obvious answer is never addressed, and that reveals the distance between this womb fantasy and a more mature handling of the material.