Avatar: Anti-White or Anti-American?

As Joe Webb’s review makes clear, Avatar is an anti-White movie. Today’s LA Times article by Patrick Goldstein (“Avatar: Why do conservatives hate the most popular movie in years?”) shows that the movie has been panned by conservatives. But of course no mainstream conservative could actually label the movie “anti-White.” That’s simply not an aproved part of the lexicon because mainstream conservatives must be completely blind to race. Conflicts must be phrased in terms of American citizenship or conservative values, but not as Whites versus non-Whites, even when (as in Avatar and in the real world)  racial conflict is staring them in the face. Instead, it’s “anti-American.”

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.”

As the article makes clear, conservative viewers have flocked to the movie because of the spectacle, not the politics. Goldstein points out that Avatar reflects long held Hollywood values, emphasizing opposition to religion and the military as well as pro-environmentalism. But of course he does not mention Hollywood’s anti-White values as documented by Edmund Connelly: Reel bad WASPs; Reel bad whites — values that reflect the strong Jewish influence in Hollywood.

Cameron is not Jewish. I don’t  know where his leftist attitudes come from, but there’s no question that they sell well at the box office. He may well have figured that non-Whites would love to see bad White guys defeated by non-Whites. (James Cameron’s movie has already grossed over $1 billion, 2/3 of it from foreign countries.) And of course Whites don’t mind seeing themselves defeated as long as they have fun doing it. After all, most Whites are used to seeing themselves as the bad guy (see links to Connnelly above) and have internalized that attitude. It’s money in the bank.