I missed this when it first came out, but Zizek had a piece about Avatar in the New Statesman last month, linking Arhundati Roy’s recent writings about Maoist guerillas in India to the professed anti-Imperialism of Cameron’s flick.

Rumor has it that Zizek hasn’t actually seen the film yet. But, then, neither have I. I kept hearing that I needed to see it in the theater, in 3D, so I could properly get the experience, and have decided instead to wait until it comes out on DVD, buy the shittiest bootleg I can find outside of Chubby’s, and watch it on a black-and-white television. I want to remain unpolluted by the special effects and enjoy the full force of Cameron’s narrative skill.

Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the “military-industrial complex” of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.

At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded.

Arundhati Roy, in Outlook India magazine, writes that the Maoist guerrilla army

“is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called independence, have not had access to education, health care or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadres who have lived and worked and fought by their sides for decades. If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land . . . They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated . . . their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.”

The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the “single largest internal security threat”; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism”, replacing stories about “Islamist terrorism”. No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against “Maoist strongholds” in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the “people’s justice” of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself — the film substituting for reality.

The rest.

Žižek rails against charity. It’s enough to make me almost wish I were a Marxist. The money line: “The worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves.”

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, whom I’ve been neglecting of late for frontier biographies and true crime cop shoot-’em-ups, has a review of The Hurt Locker on the London Review of Books blog. I wasn’t a fan of the The Hurt Locker, and it looks from Zizek’s review that he shared my irritation. (Thanks to the Endless Thread.)

The Hurt Locker brought back to Hollywood the trend which also accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war, Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon. Lebanondraws on Maoz’s memories of being a young soldier; most of the action claustrophobically takes place inside a tank. The movie follows four inexperienced soldiers dispatched to ‘mop up’ enemies in a Lebanese town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli air force. Interviewed at the 2009 Venice festival, Yoav Donat, one of the actors, said: ‘This is not a movie that makes you think: “I’ve just been to a movie.” This is a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been to war.’ Maoz has said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through: ‘The mistake I made is to call the film Lebanon because the Lebanon war is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be political would have flattened the film.’ This is ideology at its purest: the focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict.

The Hurt Locker’s depictions of the daily horror and traumatic impact of serving in a war zone seems to put it miles apart from such sentimental celebrations of the US army’s humanitarian role as John Wayne’s infamous Green Berets. However, we should bear in mind that the terse-realistic presentation of the absurdities of war in The Hurt Lockerobfuscates and thus makes acceptable the fact that its heroes are doing exactly the same job as the heroes of The Green Berets. In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.

The rest.

There’s another trope that pops up with some frequency to do the same work, only instead of focusing on the trauma experienced by individual soldiers, it peddles a kind of mawkish brotherhood-between-soldiers as the greater moral good in war. There was a period there of about fifteen years when nearly every Vietnam movie ended with an overdub that ran something like, “In the end, we didn’t fight and die for our country, or for any grand ideal, but for the man next to us.” My favorite example was We Were Soldiers and Young Once. Or, looking away from Vietnam, The Four Feathers, which was one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen in its attempts to wriggle out from under the weight of historical reality.)

It’s an obvious dodge, of course. As in The Hurt Locker, it’s a way for the film writer and director to pretend to be making some kind of statement about something significant while ensuring nothing is ever said that could alienate a single potential movie-goer. (And, seriously, I probably would have liked The Hurt Locker better as a straight pro-Iraq War movie, because at least then it might’ve avoided its goofy clichés and cardboard characters.)

It’s also a pretty sketchy sentiment on the moral side, if you think about. After all, if the only thing that matters in war is the brotherhood created amongst soldiers, than there’s no culpability for individual soldiers in advancing the war’s aims. To think it through it to its logical conclusion, those Nazis on the Easter Front suffered horrendous hardships, and each probably bonded tremendously with his brother soldiers, but it seems like any movie about them would be just a bit remiss in not pointing out what their aims were.