Avatar & "Otherness"

In Starn's article, I thought it was interesting that "some people had been so mesmerized by Pandora--'a wonderland peopled by noble beings'--that they indicate they'd rather DIE than return to Earth's gritty reality." (197) He noted that this conveys a longing for Otherness, which was also touched upon in Grace L. Dillon's Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, in Leslie Marmo Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, featuring a post-apocalyptic setting in which white people will pay the Indigenous descendents anything to heal themselves, "longing" for the Otherness, which Western society had for so long rejected. This concept of Otherness is an interesting one, because with it, Indigenous peoples find it difficult to escape from stereotypical anthropological viewpoints, but without it, the self-determination of Indigenous peoples is threatened because they are thrown into the melting pot, assuming the identity of "just another ethnic group that we all share this great country with." There is still the question of people of mixed background,who have a unique position to distort the boundary between otherness and what is familiar.


Regarding Avatar, I do disagree partially with the analysis of Neytiri, wondering what Starn's alternative proposal for her character would be. There's nothing wrong with women leads being sexy and owning it, but it seems that they always get thrown into either one of two categories, the Other "primitive exotic" or the conservative Westernized "Disney princess." Perhaps because the movie's plot is such familiar ground, Neytiri is unable to escape from either of those two Western tropes. I thought Avatar does make some leaps over previous movies of the same vein, because Jake does physically leave his own body and everything that is familiar to become his Avatar self fully. Perhaps where the movie could have lent some freshness to the tale is if Jake, instead of playing the "White Messiah," as Starn critiques, stepped back to let Neytiri lead the people, to learn from her and the rest of his adopted world. Either way, this movie was written for a certain kind of audience who is used to an action-oriented male lead, and I think throughout the decades it's interesting to see how these types of movies shift in their ways to convey messages. Was Avatar's success as a blockbuster, designed to reach the biggest mainstream audience possible, what hindered it from lending a Fourth World perspective to the world of Pandora?