'Avatar' and Hollywood's Traitor Obsession

Avatar’s “hero” is a Marine who decides alien poontang trumps your entire species. He condemns his planet to slow destruction rather than allow them to continue to over-zealously mine some ore.

If you watch as many movies and TV shows as I do you’ll notice something rather annoying besides all the lame cliches that keep getting trotted out. And that’s the latest cliche to show up over and over again as the big “reveal” of the climax.

The bad guy turns out to be a traitor of some kind.

Either he’s the hero’s close relative, friend, buddy, co-worker…or, if the film deals with the military or national security in some way, the villain turns out to be a “patriot” who is trying to save America from itself by destroying it.

You have to ask yourself, what kind of Freudian slip is this? Writers usually know what they are trying to say. I know that may be hard to believe if you saw Terminator: Salvation or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but yes, writers usually are trying to make some kind of thematic statement.

The idea of a traitor can be powerful in dramatic terms. Someone you trust and rely on turns out to be your real enemy. That can be a very painful thing to discover, but it’s become such a common device in film it is almost a given. Which means what? Hollywood is lazy, or they feel we can’t trust anyone anymore?

Well hey, they invested a lot of faith and trust in our current president and look how that worked out. Except this has been going on for at least a decade now.

Let’s take two recent examples of the traitor. The first one is a big spoiler so don’t read the rest of the next paragraph after SPOILER: if you don’t want the movie “ruined” for you.

Smoking Aces 2: Assassins Ball features Tom Berenger as a handicapped lifer CIA desk jockey who is targeted by a whole slew of crazed assassins to want to kill him for some reason, at a certain time and place. The FBI wants to protect him when this hit is going down so they can discover why these killers are after Berenger. He seems to be a loyal worker for the US, a patriot (look out!) who has served his country for 30 years. SPOILER: And of course, he set up his own execution to lure a bunch of rogue assassins into a trap where they’d be killed, because he wanted to cover up the fact he used them to do terrorist acts around the world for the US government. Yes, the US government. Including the Spanish train bombing a few years back. And he doesn’t care if all these FBI agents protecting him get killed in the process. See, anyone called in a patriot in movies these days is a psycho. And, as we saw in last season’s 24 or Die Hard: Live Free or Die, patriots have no problem killing off Americans in the name of saving “America from itself”.

In Avatar we have the progressive’s favorite kind of traitor. The kind who sells out his own people. Avatar’s “hero” is a Marine who decides alien poontang trumps your entire species. He condemns his planet to slow destruction rather than allow them to continue to over-zealously mine some ore. His own troops, who he was supposed to represent, get slaughtered and the rest of his people get shipped off and humiliated so he can get rid of his puny white body and become a big blue stud. Sounds like the worst case of white guilt/penis envy ever imagined.

Talk about Freudian, Mr. Cameron.

Of course, the argument the story makes is sophomoric at best, it’s a Edgar Rice Burrough’s pastiche with some Hayao Miyazaki and Roger Dean thrown in. At no point do the “bad guys” have any sense to try negotiation with the dominate species. It’s a puerile parable of western civilization raping the new world. But what a lot of people seem to miss is the fact that the hero sells out his entire planet which needs this rock to live. And there is no attempt to work out a solution. As bad as the earth people are in the film, condemning your whole species because you like going native is a sad commentary on where some people’s heads at. And it reveals a dark undercurrent in the psychology of left leaning film makers.

Hollywood needs to take a break from his hack plot device. It has already lost its mojo. Let it rest for a few decades so it can regain its punch. And Hollywood, don’t think the success of Avatar had anything to do with its lame political message. All that money you wasted on Iraq bombs should have taught you that lesson by now.