With the success of James Cameron’s Avatar, audiences are once again being assaulted by Hollywood’s assumption of self-hate and false politically correct “truths” about who America is today and what we were in our past. Of course we shouldn’t be surprised, a look at James Cameron’s past films with military characters like Aliens and The Abyss show a similar disdain for the military. His scientists are always good and noble, but his military types, whether official or the contractor type as in Avatar remain uneducated, redneck killers. After all this is a film that lying propagandist, so-called “filmmaker” Michael Moore has declared, “a brilliant film for our times.”
I much prefer the balance of say the great 1951 black and white classic The Thing, where James Arness’s murderous, but very smart alien runs amok in an isolated Arctic research station. That is until captain Ken Toby and his wisecracking Army Air Corps crew and few common sense scientists manage to fry said killer alien’s ass with a makeshift electric chair.
The Thing‘s military guys get all the really good lines, too. In level headed response to the naive head scientist’s crazy insistence that “…our lives do not matter. Knowledge, that’s the only reason to live, it knows far more then we do. We can learn from it. Just think we’ve split the atom.” Toby’s co-pilot responds wryly, “Yeah, and that sure made the world happy didn’t it.” But what do I know? I love westerns and military films; only the rare common sense science fiction film like The Thing or a grand adventure like Star Wars captures my fancy.
Fortunately I also know a good amount of military and western history, too. Since Avatar really is a politically correct sci-fi fantasy version of our own Indian Wars. More then one critic has accurately compared the plot to Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, while even a National Public Radio reviewer dared suggest that the script was actually a bunch of scripts thrown into a blender. Though no one mentioned whether the blender was put on chop or grate, since the story line is so crude it certainly wasn’t blended in any sort of smooth fashion. Like Plains Indians Cameron’s Na’vi break and ride horses, six-legged ones on their home planet of Pandora and domesticate dragon-like flying creatures bringing to mind Plains Indians who used to lay in wait for eagles to turn their feathers into war trophy head gear.
Both Avatar and Dances With Wolves share the most evil, villainous and genocidal military killers since Little Big Man in 1970. It wasn’t true then and of course it isn’t true in Afghanistan or Iraq today. All modern civilized countries armies have had rare murderous aberrations in their history like My Lai or Sand Creek, but these have always been the exception not the rule. The Sand Creek massacre in 1864 featuring scum of the earth militia recruited out of the dregs of Denver’s saloons wiping out a good part of a Cheyenne village promised official government protection. Still, Sand Creek was also a ill-fated response to the continuing line up of mutilated settler’s bodies, women and children as well that the Cheyenne were leaving on the Colorado and Kansas plains.
To the uninformed, and let’s face it we haven’t taught fact-based history in this country for several generations, Avatar‘s chief of security is just a evil George Armstrong Custer clone from Little Big Man and his “soldiers” copies of that same film’s cowardly and murderous cavalry troopers. Top professional western historians like Robert Utley, Paul Hutton and most recently James Donavan in his suburb 2007 book A Terrible Glory have repatriated Custer’s reputation based on facts.
From time in memorial in the heat and confusion of battle non-combatants have often been killed. Yet at the battle of the Washita in 1868 against the same Cheyenne from Sand Creek (numerous young hot headed warriors had continued unabated murderous raids on the Kansas frontier, partially because of the atrocities at Sand Creek) but Custer went out of his way to stop any killing of women and children and took over fifty prisoners, including old warriors. It was Custer’s Osage scouts who killed most of the non-combatants, just another day at the “office” against their tribal enemies. Yes, he did wipe out the Cheyenne’s 1,000 horse herd because they were war materials, the same as destroying buffalo meat in the village or a gasoline dump or truck park in Iraq today. An unhorsed Cheyenne warrior wasn’t much of a warrior at all. As a cavalryman who loved and depended on horses, Custer didn’t like it much either, but that’s war.
Actually I really like Costner’s Dances With Wolves even if I disagree with the politically correct stances that it takes. It’s a beautifully made film, captures the warrior spirit quite well and shows that each tribe like the Lakota Sioux and the Pawnee were distinct tribal groups unto their own. Though through strength of numbers, white man’s guns and the decimation of tribes like the Crow, Pawnee and Arikaree by small pox it was actually the Sioux who were the “imperialistic conquerors” chasing the weaker Crows, Kiowa and Cheyenne out of the Black Hills in the Dakotas around 1800. So much for Sioux claims that, “this land has been ours for as long as the sky has been blue and the grass has been green.”
By the way, the Sioux escaped the ravages of small pox because United States contract medical teams vaccinated them back in the 1820s! You can look it up, the “evil” old US of A was worried that the disease might wipe out the western tribes and sent out those medical expeditions, except the Pawnees, Crows and a few others were at odds with white folks back then and kept their distance. It wound up being good for the Sioux and bad for other tribes, since the Lakota eventually grew into the most powerful tribe on the northern Plains. That’s why the Pawnee, Crows and Arikaree eventually became scouts for the U.S. Army. One year after Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn, once the army had run the Sioux to the ground many Lakota warriors signed on with the U.S. Cavalry to fight their age old enemies Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce. Once a warrior it was best to do your damnedest to stay a warrior, if only in spirit and demeanor.
Avatar‘s twelve foot tall, blue-skinned Na’vi and the film’s themes of socialistic and egalitarian hunters at one with nature are right out of all of those numerous “Noble Redskin” movies, but not factual history. Yet even some American Indians – that’s right Indian, since that is what almost all American Indian people refer to themselves as and Native American is a 1970s title that some comfortable, white, liberal college professor with a guilty conscience made up somewhere along the line – generally Indians recognize that their ancestors were warriors, generally pretty damn fierce ones at that and not a bunch of “happy hippies” peacefully fornicating in the hills. Even today most American Indians remain some of the most patriotic people in the United States and send an incredibly large percentage of their young people to serve in the U. S. Military, the same military that James Cameron insults so egregiously in Avatar.
Today, one successful film on a particular historically themed subject becomes the benchmark for knowledge on that subject. High school history teachers and even college professors often pick one film to show a class or give extra credit for watching out of class. Want to know about the Civil War, show them Glory, D-Day and World War II then show them Saving Private Ryan, the Kennedy Assassination show them Oliver Stone’s JFK. History is so out of fashion today that most students won’t watch a film on history out of the classroom. Films may indeed mainly be entertainment, but they can have tremendous influence for the better or the worse.
I grew up during a time when there were a number of films and even dramatic television shows on a particular historical subject over a matter of a few years. For some of us the fact that the movies and TV episodes didn’t even agree on say Custer and the Little Bighorn or what happened at the Alamo sent us to the library. On those library shelves we quickly learned that the books didn’t even agree and some of them appeared to be written and researched far better then others. It did something for our critical thinking eventually we even got curious about those pesky little numbers called footnotes and primary sources.
The danger of a vapid politically correct fantasy like Avatar is that for most of the audience there is no alternative opinion to the “America as Evil Fascist Empire” train of thought that it passes off as entertainment. That is particularly disturbing when director James Cameron freely admits that the evil corporate lackeys and military contractors who serve as his films antagonists are his comment on American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
[Ed. Note: This is part one of a two-part series which concludes tomorrow.]
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