The Bechdel Cast - Avatar (2009) with Ali Nahdee

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

This week, Jamie, Caitlin, and special guest Ali Nahdee all *see* each other while discussing James Cameron's Avatar (2009). (This episode contains spoilers) Here is more information about the four Indigenous women in Winnipeg who have been murdered, and whose remains the police are refusing to search for: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/9/daughters-of-murdered-indigenous-woman-push-canada-for-action Cambria Harris, daughter of Morgan Harris, one of the murdered women, speaking at Parliament Hill in Ottawa:  https://www.tiktok.com/@aptnnews/video/7174583697558031622?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7174583697558031622 And a more recent development about First Nations leaders taking matters into their own hands: https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/first-nations-leaders-form-committee-to-do-feasibility-study-of-winnipeg-landfill-search-1.6195100 Here is a link to our guest Ali Nahdee's online store, Debra's Darlings Boutique: https://debrasdarlings.com/ Here is our linktree, where you can find all the ticket links for our upcoming West Coast tour! https://linktr.ee/bechdelcast  For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast Follow @alinahdee on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante, and @jamieloftusHELPSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, the President of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrue Crime Plus

only on Apple Podcasts. Hey, everyone. Jake Storielli here from John Boy Media. I want to tell you about my podcast, Wake and Jake. I've been a sports nut my whole life, and there's nothing I love more than talking about it. If you're a sports fan, Wake and Jake is the place for you. Covering all the hot topics from the sports world. A lot of baseball, a lot of postseason coverage, mock drafts, awards, guest interviews, all of it.

New episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Come watch along on the Wake and Jake YouTube channel or listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, listeners. Before we get into this episode, we wanted to say something to raise awareness about a particular current event. Our guest, Ali Nadi, speaks about this at the end of the episode, police are refusing to search for the remains of four Indigenous women who have been murdered by a serial killer. The women are Morgan Harris, Rebecca Contois, Mercedes Myron, and a fourth unidentified woman. This speaks to the pervasive problem in Canada and elsewhere in the world of Indigenous women going missing, being murdered, and officials doing little to nothing about it. So we wanted to raise

awareness about this. We've included more information in the show notes, and we encourage you to learn more about this and other issues that affect indigenous people and communities. All right, on to the episode. On the Bechdelcast, the questions asked if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effing vast. Start changing it with the Bechdel cast. Jamie. Yes. I see you. Caitlin. I see you. Do you want to mate for life with me? Yeah, where's your tail at? Here it is. Your brain tail. And then we kiss, kiss, kiss under the tree. Oh, iconic moment in cinema, for better or worse.

People remember it. They really do. Hello and welcome to the Bechdel cast. Oh my goodness. Here's one that has been a long time request, a long time coming, and an episode we thought we may never release because we were not convinced that the sequels are actually going to come out. And yet here we are. And here we are. The Avatar episode.

How are you feeling, Caitlin? I'm nervous. I feel underprepared, even though I did a lot of reading. There's truly so much to go through. And there's also like 15 years worth of production, criticism, waves of different takes on this. It's just been, it's been a real journey. It really has. And I'm excited to get into it.

We have, I think, I think we should just get started. I'm like, I'm ready. I'm ready. Yeah. Ready. We can breeze. Let's just breeze past. Look, the show, we analyze movies through an intersectional feminist lens.

I'm just like, Avatar! But, you know, figure it out. Let's tell them. Let's tell them. Let's tell them. Okay. I like how you're like, fuck this show. We're going to be here for three hours.

Buckle in. So we analyze movies through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechdel test simply as just a baseline jumping off point to initiate a much larger conversation. Uh, what is the Bechdel test though, Jamie? Well, I can tell you what it is. It is a media metric originally created by queer cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test. She made it for her incredible comic, Dykes to Watch Out For, originally as a joke, but it is

now kind of become a common media metric that we use on this show and also in the world. A lot of different versions of the test, but the one we use is this. To pass the Bechdel test, there must be two characters with names of a marginalized gender talking to each other about something other than a man for more than two lines of dialogue. Some things do it. A lot of things don't. And that's just kind of what it is. How did I do? So well.

We're off to a great start. Whew. And now is the time to get our guest into the mix. Oh, I'm so pumped. Returning guest. You know her from our episodes on Aquaman and Frozen 2. She's an Anishinaabe writer, founder of the Ali Nadi test, formerly known as the Ayla test. It's Ali Nadi.

Welcome back. I'm back with my braided tails. Hell yeah. I got one for each of you. We're going to embrace eternity. Welcome to the three timers club, Ali Naughty. I told them, I was like, I call dibs on Avatar. Nobody else is allowed to do this.

I have so much to say. And yes, I did. You saw my to do this i have so much to say and yes i did you saw my google doc i had so much to say i've seen 42 page google doc i'm so fun we talked about this uh i think two years ago like the first time you were on the show yeah frozen 2 yeah and the moment is here avatar 2 is coming out it's happening i thought it would never happen and it probably shouldn't happen but we'll see i i hope it's good j thought it would never happen and it probably shouldn't happen but we'll see i i hope it's good james cameron's pretty good with sequels so we'll see we'll see that's true titanic 2 is a classic i know the best ever when he came back

when she woke up yeah she woke up yeah Allie, what is your history relationship with Avatar? Oh, so this is a history. Okay, so it came out like 2009. I want to say I was probably around like 18, 19 ish. And it came out at an interesting time. This is obviously way before the Ali Nadi test, the AILA test was ever a discussion the way that it is now. And the film itself was cathartic in a lot of ways for me I can't believe that there's a movie like this as far as the natives win, which I didn't see coming. Everybody else saw it coming. I'm like, no, we never win. This is going to be Titanic-level sadness because everybody's going to die and it's pain. And that didn't happen.

I did not expect the girl to live. Neytiri did not expect that I didn't expect um her to like because and and I'll talk about this later but like in a lot of movies when the native female character falls in love with the white male character and he ultimately ends up betraying her she usually like takes his side like no no i love him and we can work together and i was hoping that that wouldn't happen i was afraid it was gonna happen it did not happen i'm like oh what is this movie right so then i get online and so many people like hated it, just did not like it. They're like, it's Pocahontas in space. It's dances with wolves in space.

It's white guilt. It's liberalism. It's, you know, just all of this stuff. And I knew something in it was kind of rooted in anti-native racism. I just didn't have the words for it and obviously like as the years have gone by i found the language to like kind of point out what exactly like these criticisms which aren't wrong but also are very steep aggressive yeah yes so then i almost kind of like the avatar out of spite in a way just because i'm like screw you guys i like this movie and but i'll be honest after re-watching it and especially re-watching

it now i didn't like it as much and i'm like okay i know everything that's kind of i know everything that's wrong with it but i still liked it in spite of it. But I'm like, you know, after Rhymes for Young Ghouls and Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls and Wendell and Wild and all of these indigenous films usually made by indigenous people. that if native creators were given the same amount of power and opportunity as James Cameron, they could do it just as good, if not better, than Avatar. It'd probably be something you'd never see before. Totally. Right. Yeah, that's what I think.

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. It's like always, where does the money go and who gets the opportunities? Yes, exactly that. So that's my very complicated history with Avatar. I love it. Jamie, what about you? What's yours? It's a disaster kind of. It's all over the place. Like, I feel like you've been witness to it in large part, Caitlin. Like I saw this movie in high school um along with

i think the rest of the world it seems like i saw this movie in 3d i remember like i just wasn't i mean i guess like people don't maybe because this show's been on for so long like i was originally your co-host caitlin because i just like didn't know a lot about movies and didn't have like a huge passion for them growing up. So I saw it because it was like compulsory, it felt like. And I was like, I liked it. Sure, that was fun. And then as time went on, and Allie, you were alluding to this,

there was like just always this shifting discussion around what this movie meant culturally, what it meant about you if you liked it versus you didn't. Like, I feel like it's just flip-flopped a million times. I think there was a huge chunk of time where they were like, Avatar, like has been forgotten, like lost to time.

And you know, like why everyone saw this movie, but no one can remember a thing that happens in it, which like, I was like, I don't remember. And then I think sometime around the lockdown I took on a a Shrekian appreciation of Avatar where it did seem like a lot of people uh with with like time on their hands like got back into Avatar kind of like spitefully

and ironically where they're like well I remember what happened in avatar and blah and i was i was kind of like i was kind of doing that for a while because i was you know locked down mental illness i don't really know like i can't really speak to it i know it was happening i know i bought a lot of books in 2020 because there was um i think actually uh the video that like got me back into wanting to understand more about the movie because I rewatched the movie. I still like, I don't know, I feel like my opinion on the actual, the movie itself has changed for a lot of the reasons you're describing, Ali. Like I think that a lot of the, there's a lot of, of course, like extremely valid criticism of this movie that we need to talk about. And then there's also a lot of the there's a lot of of course like extremely valid criticism of this movie that we need to talk about and then there's also a lot of like overly simplistic uh comparisons that you're

describing that um i think are interesting to to discuss like but it's it's it's very it's a very movie movie i don't know it's like a blockbuster where it just kind of washes over you it's a movie that feels like a movie would you say say that? The movie feels like a, like a movie is what I would say. A movie with blue cats. And tentacle tails. It's a blue, it's,

oh God, I just. The dude fucks a cat. The end. The dude fucks a cat. The furries win. James Cameron, like I does hurry's win james cameron like i it's really i'm always gonna give james cameron a chance to impress me and he's such a weird man like i just don't like the things that

he really commits himself to are baffling to me and i'm excited to talk about it um but yeah i kind of came all the way around because i saw a YouTube video by a creator named Sideways. I love Sideways. Yes. Right. So I think maybe we talked about it. I know the one you're talking about. Yeah.

It's this incredible video that they made about how the Avatar score was composed and then kind of uncomposed of like all of this work and resources that James Cameron and the production put into like creating a unique, very specific Navi culture. And then they basically used none of it and they got like overwhelmed. And then they're like, um, let's do a pretty standard James Horner score. And that'll basically be it. So I got more interested in the production side of the movie because there was a lot more thought and intention that went into it than I would have guessed based on what the movie is like. So ultimately, I would say the movie feels like a movie. And I still, I mean, I am kind of excited to see the second one. Can't lie. Like, you know, Sigourney Weaver playing a teenager.

I'm intrigued. I don't know. I don't know. Weaver playing a teenager I'm intrigued I don't know I don't know but there's a lot of problems I don't know yeah my relationship with Avatar is fraught but you know so is mine all right well what's your relationship with Avatar so I saw this in theaters I think twice I was in my early 20s at the time and i loved it i was like this movie rules i don't know you loved it whoa reveal asterix at the time sure i was like damn this movie's awesome it's so good james cameron he's done it again and then like some weeks pass and people are like yeah i mean i guess i liked it but was it that good i'm not sure and i was like well i don't know was it and then more weeks pass and people are like maybe that movie actually kind of sucks and like the same thing that you were talking about ali is

about weird yeah and you jamie like and then i was like seeing all these things on the social media of the time which was was Facebook, people being like, it's just, it's Ferngully. You know, James Cameron ripped off Ferngully. He ripped off Disney's Pocahontas. It's blah, blah, blah. And then I also remember a very specific criticism that so many people were like, the thing's called unobtainium. That's so ridiculous. And it's like, first of all, it's, I think, intentionally on the nose secondly have you seen some what some of the elements on the periodic table are called there's an element called einsteinium like they have some ridiculous names like also it's like everything about this movie is extremely on the nose like right it's not trying to be subtle so like it's not really james cameron's thing

people being like unobtainium that's so like that i don't think it's not really james cameron's thing people being like unobtainium that's so like that i don't think it's a valid criticism but then i was like oh yeah i guess it is kind of like pulling from stuff and maybe it isn't as good as i thought and i was like young enough that i was like too easily influenced by other people's opinions still so i was like yeah never mind this movie's it's not good and then a decade passes over a decade passes i don't watch the movie again until three days ago and then i watch it again i'm like no i was right the first time this movie rules but with the caveat that they are right with the caveat that there are a lot of issues with it, which we are about to discuss.

But from a just like kind of strictly narrative standpoint, I'm like, James Cameron, he did it again. He can tell a damn cinematic story. He kind of always does it. There's a fun James Cameron thing that I noticed on this one was because there's just like a lot of good killing the bad guys moments towards the end of this movie, but the closest thing to the propeller moment in Titanic is when the guy gets crushed between the two steel boxes.

You're like, ooh, why did... He's a sicko. You just hear it. Ah! That's what you get, colonizer. Get wrecked. A lot of good colonizer kills it was pretty exciting so many that's why so many white people did not like it let me tell you oh my god because this movie i mean i only lived in one small country in europe you know so i can't say that this applies outside of the U.S. everywhere

but the movie made so much money for a reason and I'm pretty sure it's because the bad guys in Avatar are so American coded like you don't see American flags or anything like that but there's no British people and there's no all the white people have american accents except for sam worthington who's really i love he's tried budget of 235 million can't make an australian guy sound american tell you there was one part where he's like your life comes down to one moment and you're like poor sam they should have just made them australian because they still have a history of colonialism right anyway but yeah and i think that's why because the americans lose in this one like i feel like uh the rest of the world kind of has a very at least my experience

in finland they have a very disney princess cowboys and Indians understanding of Native history and Native people, as far as Native American, I should say. Even if it's not as blatantly racist over there, there's still elements of it where it's like, oh, but, you know, we're sympathetic, kind of, you know, we're way more sympathetic and we'll play the Indian in our games more than the cowboy you know that sort of thing so to have a movie like this where the cowboys lose to the indians i can absolutely see and they send the americans packing i mean of course the rest of the world loved this movie and of course of course the white americans hated it it made made $2.9 billion. Billion. Billion dollars.

Billion. I always forget and get mad. Again, it's like there's, people have accused James Cameron of ripping off a million different stories in this, but there's also just like so much of James Cameron ripping himself off too. Where like that moment at the end, it reminded me so much of like when mr ismay survives

and you get one shot on like this motherfucker lived and they do the same thing with like the bad guy that's not the colonel uh what's his name giovanni rubisi yeah yes yeah i don't know the uh the character's name i know the parker parker when the colonel gets into the like large robot thing that's what ripley does at the end of aliens like yeah like James Cameron's using his own playbook to do oh that scene is so I'm like it's so weird because I'm like I like it's a good movie there I forgot I hadn't seen in a couple years and I think you know whatever your brain kind of trains you to expect the worst in every movie, especially when you do this show for six years. Especially when you're the hosts of the Bechtel cast, yes.

But I always feel myself clench up where I'm like, ugh, he's not going to let Neytiri kill the colonel, is he? He's going to let Jake Sully kill the colonel. He lets Neytiri kill the colonel, and it's so exciting. And the whole theater cheered. And it was awesome. The catharsis. Good job, movie. We're going to have so much fun.

Let's take a quick break. And then we'll come back to recap the movie. So we'll be right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia.

I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, taking it to the next level. The one, the only Katherine Hahn is joining us on Lost Culture East. That's right. The queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's

as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture. I feel some Sandra Bernhardt in you. Oh my God, I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to.

No, I know. I'm so behind. Katherine Hanken's thing. I'm really good at karaoke. What's your song? Yeah, what's your song? Oh, I love a ballad. I felt Bjork's music and I just was like, who is this person?

I gotta hawk this slalom, Luge. Not hawk this slalom. I absolutely love it. It was somehow Shakespearean when you said it. It was somehow gorgeous. Yee, my slok, you hollum. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packers star Kabir Bajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. KGB explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning. In a story about faith and football,

the search for meaning away from the gridiron and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked. Voila! You got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. All right. Here's the recap. I had to gloss over some details, and I even leave out certain characters just because

there's so much, and the movie is almost three hours long. So bear with me, but here we go. Better not cut out my friend Dr. dr max aka the guy from drag me to hell wait who is his name dr max it's oh dr max patel oh yes um the leap row who's also in inception playing a very similar character kind of this is he was on kind of an unprecedented run in 2009 and 10 yeah and then i think james cameron kidnapped him and um he is stuck in pandora forever forever at least he's living off the royalties for the rest of his life it's true truly he's chilling okay so we meet jake sully played by Sam Worthington, and we get his backstory.

He is a Marine who became disabled during battle. He's now paralyzed from the waist down. And he has been approached with an opportunity to go to a faraway planet called Pandora and do something. We don't quite know what yet. Because his twin died died which i feel like is very glossed over that he's actively mourning his brother his brother died like four minutes ago yeah i know and then they just cremated him like right in front of him i'm like no and he's just like oh damn dude and he's like we need you for science and he's like he's okay we need you to fuck these cats he's like all right sleep it off uh science in the morning and also no one cares that he just lost his twin brother like sigourney weaver is like um okay

what are you doing here you loser i need your brother sorry oh yeah okay so then jake arrives on pandora and he learns about the planet, its dangerous wildlife, and its indigenous population called the Navi, who are tall, blue-skinned humanoids. Yeah, they're cat-like. They got cat features. With cat features. Jake meets Norm and the two of them are going to be avatar drivers so basically scientists have spliced human and navi dna to create these avatars that jake and norm and other people will remotely operate by hooking the people up to these avatars via a like neural link which is why they wanted jake

for this because he has the the same DNA as his brother. They originally built this avatar for his brother, but it'll still work with Jake. And that always messes me up because it's like, they do nothing with that. It's like, if it's his brother's DNA, I mean, this whole movie is about accessing memory and accessing like history. How come they never did anything like that where he enters his uh brother's avatar and elements from like his blood memory or something like that is still there so he can like feel his thoughts or something they never do anything with that

that's such a good point i've never thought about that right because it's like that would fit into the theme of the movie the theme so well and right. And Jake Sully is so like underdeveloped, but it's not like you don't know anything about him. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. And Neytiri in the deleted scenes has a sister who died. And these guys never bond over that. Like you both lost your siblings like recently.

And that's not something you guys would talk about during your forced fucking romance and you would also think that like i don't know that like jake might i don't know like jake doesn't feel culpable enough for any of this the entire movie when it is like so his fault a lot of the like most of the time but it was like also on of that, his brother would be so disappointed in him for, like, it sounds like his brother was a very, like, well-liked ethical scientist who would be probably devastated to learn that his brother, like, McFucked his entire, like. Yeah, fucked it up, Jake. Jake still, like, fucks up. The worst. On such an unprecedented scale truly white boys be like they be doing that um okay so then we meet the head of the avatar project

grace augustine played by sigourney weaver she like we mentioned is not thrilled with jake being there because he's not a trained scientist but jake being there was parker selfridge's idea that's giovanni rabisi and then we learn why people have come to pandora it's to collect parentheses steel an extremely valuable element slash mineral called unobtainium and parker's whole thing is that he'll stop at nothing to obtain this unobtainium um yeah james cameron does the classic thing of like capitalism is one guy and the military industrial complex is also another guy it's not subtle storytelling but uh you know but it's also right like it's also correct. Like it's also correct, which is the worst part. So obviously the Na'vi don't want them to do this.

So right now the humans are trying to find a quote unquote diplomatic way to colonize the Na'vi and steal their resources. So then Jake gets Neuralinked to his Na'vi avatar for the first time. He gets acclimated to his new body. And the movie telegraphs to us that it's exciting for him because in his human body, he's paralyzed from the waist down. But in his Na'vi body, he can walk and run. And he really takes to his new body very quickly this is uh interesting because uh there is absolutely some ableism yeah for sure in this movie we'll talk about that yeah yeah there's a really wonderful line though because obviously people with disabilities are not i hate to say not a monolith but that's the

only thing that came to mind you know there's many different types uh and it's different for each person so there was a quote when i was doing my research where a woman who was able-bodied and then couldn't use her legs anymore and is in a wheelchair said that the scene where he goes from his wheelchair into the avatar where he's walking and playing basketball and running. It's really touching. She's like, I had a spinal cord injury in a car accident when I was five years old. So it gave me chills. I'm in a wheelchair for 20 years. I can't even remember what it was like. And he's just stretching his legs out. And it must have felt just so all like the ultimate stretch and then other people were like uh no this is actually quite awful yeah yeah there's a whole conversation to be had around that and i saw

similarly like mixed responses um right ultimately the actor should have been a disabled actor definitely exactly a disabled actor a good actor you know there's a lot of arguably not a white actor maybe like a lot of choices could have been made differently I think yeah we'll get into the conversation around disability a little later but I I was interested that there was such a kind of diversity of opinion because what was hitting for me and it's like I'm able-bodied like I don't have a voice in this conversation, really. But I, you know, there are constant insults thrown Jake Sully's way. They are generally from characters we are not supposed to like.

So it's like, I don't know, it's an interesting one. It's complicated. And from characters that we do like because even grace at some time that's true yeah she's saying some ableist slurs at him yeah i was like okay grace relax what's wrong with you yikes smoking a cigarette in the lab oh yeah she's like where's my goddamn cigarette what's wrong with this picture that was iconic that was great you don't need a cigarette you need some pot you need but her ableism was uh disappointing and consistent too it like became like a term of endearment it seemed like yeah really gross um yeah so back in his jake body he meets Trudy. That's Michelle Rodriguez.

She's a pilot who will bring the avatars into the wilderness so they can do their science and colonizing. Jake also reports to Colonel Quaritch. His whole thing is science people are losers. Military people are losers military people are awesome and i want you to spy on the navi and find out their weaknesses so i can kill them more easily i love this bad guy i know i shouldn't but i love this bad guy uh he is such a ham he's so campy he seems campy and cartoonish but also i feel like there are people like this oh for sure so i'm just like in any other movie he would be the hero james cameron just made him the bad guy this time but changed

nothing like this would be arnold in the goddamn jungle looking for the predator this could be any action hero in the 80s it's the exact same absolutely character he's just bad this time and it's steven lang and he's just so fucking perfect and goofy it's very good casting steven lang really seems like he's having the time of his life being the worst man ever and i mean the same with giovanni rabisi's character where you're like he's just fucking despicable and it's so like played up and then when they're in the same room you're like oh it just fucking despicable and it's so like played up and then when they're in the same room you're like oh it's the most evil room in the world and you're right there are people that are those people that are just like this Giovanna Ribisi is interesting

though I feel like his character would have been this one-dimensional you know sort of comic book character like Stephen Lang but he um I think the actor gives it a nuance where he's like conflicted, where it's like, because you even see it in the movie sometimes where he's like. He'll give like a heavy sigh. Yeah, we're going to kill these people. And while they're not people, they're cats in a tree, whatever. They can go to another tree. But we're going to kill babies kill babies you know so it's like

you kind of like see the mental gymnastics he's doing or like the you know the things that he has to do to justify his choices which does make it worse like because he still goes through with it yeah yeah uh not to brag or anything but i saw g Giovanni Ribisi getting ice cream in my neighborhood one time. Wow. All I did was see Taylor Lautner screaming at a moon juice. It's not fair. I met Scott McNeil at Yomacon, and he told me I was beautiful. Hell yeah.

Okay, you win. I do. That was Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z and all of my 90s heroes hell yeah uh okay so jake norm and grace in their avatars go into the forest they encounter some big scary animals one chases jake and he gets separated from the others and lost in the forest. Then he encounters a Navi woman, Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana, who saves him from the animals who were swarming him. But she's really pissed. She's like, those animals didn't need to die. But because you were careless and flopping around like a baby, I had to kill them.

And he's like, oopsie. Well, how about you teach me to be better at this? And she's like, no, you suck. But then the seeds of the sacred tree float down and surround him as if to say, he's special. He's the chosen one. I know. There's so many chosen one shots. And then I kind of always forget that it culminates

in like and also jake sully can kind of talk to god and she listens to him i was like what god answers to jake sully what are you talking about alanis morissette would never also uh zoe saldana just like 1000 just embodies this character like she's the best she's the best actress in the movie i love like just the physical performance the way she moves the way she uh the way she hisses like a cat yes she's so good. They said that she was a former ballet dancer. So she was able to do like all the stunt work and stuff like flawlessly. Yeah. Because she was in that movie that we covered and it was called Center Stage. Yes.

Was that it? Yeah. That was like her big debut. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot that she was, yeah, she was dance trained. Man. Zoe Saldana also on a hot streak because she's also in the star trek movie this year and guardians of the galaxy and yeah like

she's queen of sci-fi she's in a lot of space movies yeah she's she's also in the britney spears classic crossroads crossroads uh-huh yes oh yeah i did not know that true story i feel like i feel like zoe saldana would prefer it that way it's not a very good movie written by shonda rhimes though yep okay so naitiri takes jake to home tree where the navi live uh we meet her father etukhan yes i knew it was him as soon as I saw him. Like, he just has a very distinct looking face. Even before I even knew he was in the movie. It's like, as soon as it was like, okay, native coded characters, they need a chief.

There he is. This beautiful man. Yep. Yep. So he's the clan leader. And we also meet Neytiri's mother mother moat played by cch pounder she's their like spiritual leader the saheek she's incredible she is the best looking one i love her design her design is awesome first of all that was so moat is uh the only character in the film

that passes the alienati test oh because she never falls in love with a white man no and she doesn't die and she doesn't die all that other good shit but uh yeah so she uh usually in stories like this there is never a chief's wife like there's usually the chief's daughter the the Indian princess type, but you never see like the spouse of the chief, which is interesting because a lot of native societies, not all, but many are matrilineal. So the bloodline usually follows the mother. So you never really see a character quite like this anyways. But then she just, her design is beautiful i just love how every aspect of this character you look at her and it tells a story i 100 buy that she's the

chief's wife that she's the spiritual leader um the fact that she's bilingual suggests that she probably tried to be diplomatic and then realized there's no salvaging this. So, you know, it's just such a really interesting. I wish we saw more of her and less of Jake. Less of Jake on the whole. I hope that the second movie really runs with the whole concept of less Jake. If the trailers tell us anything, though, I feel like he's in the movie a lot. CCH Pounder, I didn't, because I'm like, I don't know anything about linguistics.

I'm just a baby. I'm 17 years old. You're Jake Sully flopping around in the forest. No, I'm not that bad. But in that sideways video that sort of unpacks how, you know, this movie invested in building an entire language kind of elvish style. And like hired a dialect coach to teach each actor how to speak Navi and speak it correctly. I guess CCH Pounder is like the MVP of speaking Navi in a way that was like very authentic and convincing. And there's like a whole sequence of like how she, I don't know. It's really cool. Oh, cool.

Anyways, shout out CCH Pounder. Hell yeah. Shout out. Okay. So most of the Navi are hostile toward Jake, understandably. They see him as an outsider. Okay. So most of the Na'vi are hostile toward Jake, understandably. They see him as an outsider. But Mowat says that Jake Sully should learn their ways because she's like, she interprets the will of Ewa, which is their deity. So Mowat's like, okay, you can learn our ways.

And Neytiri, you're going to be the one one to teach him which she's not thrilled about back in human world everyone is thrilled that jake has gotten so close to the navi uh grace for like science and anthropological reasons and parker because under the navi home tree is one of the largest Obtanium deposits on the whole planet. And so he's giving Jake three months to convince the Navi to move so that they can come and steal the Unobtanium. Otherwise, bulldozers will go in and destroy the place. So back in Avatar body,

Jake begins to learn the culture and customs of the navi also they call themselves omatakaya so i'll like probably use those words interchangeably from now on although they refer to themselves they never refer to themselves as the navi is that correct uh i think it's part of their language yeah because there's a scene where she's yelling and I did hear Navi. I wonder if it's like their word for like people. Maybe. Or something. Because I think Ometekaya is the name of like their clan.

Their clan. Right. Okay. Because I think other, yeah, other like regional clans are referenced later on when they're building the army against. Against Mr. Military. Yes. Against Stephen Lang. later on when they're building their army against against mr military yes against steven lang yeah oh i love when steven lang dies it's so exciting okay so because they refer to themselves as omatakaya i'll from this point on use that um to refer to them. So Jake learns how to ride this horse-like creature and Neytiri explains that he needs to form a bond

called Sahelu with the creature, which is the like, so all the Omatakaya people have this long braid and at the end of the braid are these, how would you just- Tentacles.acles yeah tentacles more or less noodles like nerve endings it's very um you're just like james cameron it's so horny what are you thinking about in that big old house hentai that's what he was thinking about. Cat girls and tentacles. I'm just saying.

The man made Alita. He really. It's so funny. I'm like, I wouldn't even say that's him knowing his audience. I think that's him broadening his audience. Oh, no. So it's like, well, fuck the horse with your tentacle braid. Yeah.

And that's how you create this meaningful bond with animals and trees and um basically any living thing on pandora there's also this flying animal the ikran but he's not ready to form a sahelu with one of those yet because this is like advanced stuff advanced tentacle sex really advanced he's not ready for advanced hentai and hentai 201 is horses yeah yeah but he is learning the language he's learning how to hunt he's learning how to see things from an omatakaya perspective he learns about the deity ewa and eventually Nateri deems him ready to try to form this bond with an Ikran which he successfully does also side note there is an alpha version of the Ikran but it's very very rare for anyone to bond and fly with one so just put a little pin in that it's like the guy fieri ikran it's got flames on the side it's the cool it's the cool one he's very big you can tell because he's got flames yeah yeah

oh hello oh speaking of cat-like creatures ali's cat just showed up heard the call this is piku oh piku she's like i too would like to learn about the cats the fellow dragon fucking cats okay so jake and nateri they fly together and also they flirt together nobody asked for this and yet i'm kind of rooting for them there i said it you were that was i was honestly brave to say because no one else did i feel like at every turn you're just like niteria can do so much better so much surely among these faceless navi that we know that it's such a large population like surely surely someone's here that um isn't jake sully but i feel like you know in in the in the real world

we often end up with the jake sullies of the world no one's perfect tell me about it you never think it's gonna be you the worst part is is that the guy she's hooked up with the one who's gonna be the next clan leader his name's sute those two they're like betrothed i guess they they become a mated pair eventually but you don't really see them interact much at all like they really don't have much of a relationship right no which is unfortunate because the actor is super hot and yet they give my man this fucking atrocious hairline and these tiny ears and these itty bitty small nipples i want to like you but shit i mean laz alonso is gorgeous oh hot they did him so dirty they did him pretty dirty i don't know i

mean there's like i think the element of jake Dateri's love story that worked for me, although I was like a little unclear on what the Navi mating practices were. Cause it was like, yeah, they referenced that you would be betrothed. You didn't have a say in who you married, but then it like, I guess they just didn't really go into it. I'm sure it's in one of my many Navi guidebooks that I have back in Los Angeles. But I am not there right now. So I couldn't consult my small avatar library that I manically purchased secondhand. Please don't judge me. Okay.

But I think the element of the Jake and Natari love story that worked for me was like her choosing. Like that was cool that's what I liked too yeah and even Jake Sully was like and she must choose me like because he's Australian she's like she already has kiss kiss and then he goes you all right yeah that's the part I like let's have tentacle six then but yeah jake is a romantic partner is um no thanks pass uh okay so back in human world jake is having an identity crisis because he has gotten so immersed in the omatakaya way of life that he feels that that's his real life and him as a human feels like a dream basically they say he's stopped showering you're like jake yeah get it together man seriously he is then officially

made a member of the omatakaya so he is now one of them can i just say this takes place over three months i know this motherfucker becomes the best navi the best indian ever in three months i don't want to hear anybody complain about ray from star wars ever again ever again yeah where was that energy for jake sully yeah i found that hard to believe both that he could master a language in three months and like just like master all of the culture and customs. And that the Omatakaya people would so readily accept him in such a short amount of time. I was like, nothing adds up here. No. Disconnected natives.

Like, obviously not all natives are the same, but so many disconnectedatives who are displaced because of colonization, residential schools, foster care, or just growing off the reservation. Like there is such an anxiety when it comes to reconnecting to your own people that the fact that this dude who has nothing to do with any of these people and has no history with any of these people can just walk right in and be like oh yeah i'm ometakaya mate oh there's so many gross moments like especially once he becomes immersed in like ometakaya culture like where he repeatedly is like i need to speak and it's like jake you don't like you just got here my man like you really shouldn't that i would say is my biggest beef with this movie yeah jake has really taken up quite a bit of space for being the new guy for being a guest for being a new like a new random white guy that is actively ruining everyone's life like yeah yeah fucking jake sully but he's one of them now and um he gets to choose a mate and he chooses nateri and she's like i choose you

back and then they kiss and have tentacle sex under a tree it's kind of hot it's confusing you're just like you do does it seem so sexy? James Cameron knows how to make a sex scene that will, even if you don't like it, it's going to stick with you. You're going to be thinking about it. I remember when I thought that scene was so weird when I saw it for the first time. A couple years later, I started playing Mass Effect, and the love of my life is this cricket-looking dinosaur fucking alien man with a very nice voice. So it's not weird anymore. Yeah, his picture's in there if you want to check through the Google Doc. Like, Gareth McCarrion. I do want to check.

Wait, what page? Page 22. It's at the very top. Gareth McCarrion is the love of my life. Oh, you're the best. Oh, my God. Okay, he's kind of hot. I get it.

I love him. I love him. I get it. He adores you. He's kind of got a Mr. Darcy vibe to him. Oh, he does. You're like, ugh, he's complicated, but I can get through to him. His codename is Archangel.

Oh, my goodness. Okay, so Jake and Neytiri are smooching and they fall asleep together. And the next morning, a huge bulldozer comes crashing into the tree where they're at. And Neytiri and Jake have to run away. Colonel Quaritch and Parker, the two big bads of the movie, realize that Jake is trying to sabotage their mission and they are pissed. And they're about to go back in guns blazing. And Jake is like, stop, let me talk to them and see if I can negotiate something here. A detail that I didn't really think about that I appreciated on this run was that Grace knew the whole time. Like she was able to figure out very, I feel like a lesser script would have been like, and she had no idea because women can't brain.

But I like that she figures out because that is like logical. Like he is a Marine first. So and he's around the two most evil people ever all the time and so she's like oh i need to get him out of here because like i need the information he can get me and of course he's going to go with these guys because that is like his kind of his training pedigree or whatever like yeah he hates science and he's not he's he's refused to mourn his brother so he's kind of a loose cannon yeah he forgot all about his brother like yeah never hear about him ever again what

was his name even do we ever tommy we do learn his name but tommy sully horrible horrible pouring went out for tommy sully tonight geez that's awful just why not sullivan why not anyway shout out to your character sully though from santa university i i it's look he's coming back this year because it's year of the sully thank you so much all right so so the bad guys are about to go back in guns blazing and jake's like let me talk to them so he goes back in but naitiri is like what you knew this would happen i trusted you and you betrayed us favorite scene in the movie yeah favorite scene i talked about this in frozen 2 but i'll say it again uh this was the point in the movie where i was like okay this can only go one of two ways if it

goes one way i hate this movie and it is the worst thing ever made if it goes the other way i love this movie it's the best thing that's ever been made i feel differently now the stakes are very high but literally like i said earlier too it's all like in movies like this and stories like this especially with a character like this it's you know oh well we can reach something peaceful because i love him and he loves me and love saves love can solve racism and it doesn't so what it is is you knew this was happening and we're gonna lose our home people are going to die and we trusted you you shouldn't even be here and we fucking trusted you and zoe saldana's emotional just rage in that scene was so good and i'm like good you fucking kill his ass yeah and she leaves him for dead because she leaves him for dead i

love that she leaves him for dead perfect because they tie jake and grace up to a tree knowing that the bulldozer is like on its way and like missiles are coming so leaves him for dead the military shows up to fire at home tree but then moa is like you know what jake if you are one of us help us so she sets him free conflicted feelings about the home tree is destroyed it's absolutely devastating i'm crying and nateri's father is killed among others in this attack someone brought up how despite how anti-military and anti-imperialist avatar tries to be they did kill the only native actor in the movie correct and i'm like you're not wrong that's true well that scene was sad though i love west duty and zoe's performance again just yeah so sad because

jake sully's once again trying to insert himself into one of the most personal moments one can have and it's i i i think one of the things that has i don't i mean i don't remember how i felt about anything when i was 17 probably incorrectly it's safe to assume but i i do think that the the movie obviously there's a shitload of stuff going on it's like we're approaching the climax of the movie but i wish that they took more time to dwell on that loss because we lose this amazing character it is this really really moving well-performed moment and then we kind of don't revisit it and it's i mean obviously everyone's in crisis but it's like it would have been nice to see you know like her mother's reaction to see the community's reaction

but we get way more air time to like we have to save grace which is like sure grace is a great character but why are we focusing on a white lady we've known for like a couple you know, months versus like our leader. Yeah. Like your parent, like your parent. Oh my God. I could not like having lost a parent, I promise I won't cry anymore, but having lost a parent, like there's no forgiving someone if they get your dad killed. You know what I mean? Like how I get it. Like I get it as we'll like like, find out later with the Turok and everything and the story. And but even so, I mean, two things can exist at once, man. And you killed my dad. You know, I'm not.

Yeah. Fuck this. Fuck you. Yeah. Because I didn't mention this yet, I don't think, jake sally has been feeding information about like the tree the home tree to colonel quaritch so he's like gathering this intel that he's now able to use against the omatakaya people in this attack so he's evil so then jake finds nateri in the rubble as she's mourning the death of her father she wants nothing to do with

him she's like get away never come back then the the military bad guys pull the plug on jake and grace and so they wake up in their human bodies they put them plus norm in a holding cell but trudy remember her she's in the movie she she would say a quip about every 40 minutes and you're like oh yeah um she breaks them out of prison and they get in trudy's ship and escape this military base and they head to the tree of souls which is the omatakaya's most sacred place where they have relocated and jake needs to prove his worth to be able to rejoin them so he forges a bond with the alpha ikran the the the one that has like spinners on the wheels i just kept thinking it was like the coolest car ever he's got a spoiler on the back yeah um so jake shows up with the turok at the tree of souls i would say he

pulls up he pulls up yeah yeah he kind of tokyo drifts into the place i mean if we have michelle rodriguez in the movie and everything exactly um and everyone reveres him now and nateri is like maybe you're okay again instant forgiveness yeah and then during the escape earlier grace was shot so the omatakaya tried to save her by transferring her consciousness permanently to her avatar her omatakaya body but she's too weak and she dies but she dies at peace yes it's a really good scene yeah it's very touching for sure it's nice and i also like again i just like i feel like a lot of movies would have not had the courage to kill her off especially like a big but i feel like no one can die in um franchise movies now because not now but james cameron is not shy about killing people off. Oh, yeah.

We're about to see a lot of colonizers get squished. Jake gives the biggest, dumbest speech, but I... Oh, my God. It's cringe, but I dig it. Yeah. It's cringe, but I dig it. And the reason I dig it is because this is where the Pocahontas and space trope just goes to die.

Because again, you know, especially with a character like this, a story like this, it's always our love can save the day and peace and understanding. And this is no, we are beyond that. Now we have to fight.

Now they need to fucking leave and that never happens in movies like this where it's like peace is not an option we are hell and gone from diplomacy you have to fucking go and you never see this in like movies about indigenous people let alone movies about indigenous people by non-indigenous people like especially rich white dudes in the film industry so yeah because it's them trying to rewrite history to be like no we it was so peaceful when we came here and colonized people and murdered them yeah one of my one of my grandmas was a princess it was a knobby she plugged her tail into my dad did she though did she though yeah that that's a very james cameron-y moment and it's also like i don't know like i always struggle with like i i totally agree

with you ali and i think it's like it is a really unusual subversion in a movie of this scale to to do and then it's also like why jake sully exactly like of all people when he's like this is our land it's like it's our our land not yours say yeah your say this is your land jake you just got here this is your land it would have been cool if he said this is your land i don't know so yeah so jake is rallying the omatakaya to launch an attack against the humans or the sky people, as he calls them, as if he's not one of them. But Colonel Quaritch and the humans are planning a preemptive counterattack with their more advanced weaponry and their aircrafts and missiles and all of that. So Jake goes and prays to awa for help the awa scene with it's just jake sully is like so embarrassing all the time

so he goes to awa to pray essentially and i did think it was kind of funny how that scene ends where nateri comes in and she's like yeah that's like not how this works and jake's like oh man well i guess it was worth a try and then she's like okay let's go to bed that's like the scene but then it ends up working like but then yeah god is listening to jake sully i think not i think not alanis morissette's in the tree like, all right, okay, just this once. Let's hear this Australian guy out. So the next morning, the humans come to the mountains with, you know, their heavy firepower. But the Omatakaya have the hometown advantage.

And they have Jake as Turok Makto. Because he's on the big pterodactyl with flames on the side. He drives the convertible, yeah. So he's in charge. Fine. And there's a long battle. And eventually it seems like all hope is lost for Jake and Natiri and the Omatakaya. And Trudy, who shows up to help.

And Norm, who's fighting with them it's so funny when norm has a gun it's silly it's like why are we letting norm have a gun he's not contributing come on i'm gonna harm you norm's an indoor kid like what's he doing here? Yeah. So Quaritch is headed toward the Tree of Souls to destroy it. But then the big animals from earlier in the movie come charging in and they drive out the bad guys. Seems as though Ewa has answered Jake's prayer. And so the Omatakaya get the upper hand. And there's a final showdown between Quaritch andake and nateri and they defeat quaritch and nateri gets like the killing blow so awesome two killing blows i also forgot on the re-release that she gets she gets him twice like just to be sure

oh yeah it's so satisfying i love it when the James Horner, that da-da-da-da plays as she pulls up. It's good. The movie feels like a movie when I'm watching that. It's so good. And then the Omatakaya send the humans home. And the movie ends with Jake's consciousness being transferred to his avatar to make him permanently one of the Omatakaya. The end. So let's take another quick break and we will come back to discuss. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist

who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.

And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. This is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right?

Well, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Katherine Hahn is joining us on Lost Culture East. That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture. I feel some Sandra Bernhardt

in you. Oh my God, I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know, I'm so behind. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know. I'm so behind. Katherine Hahn can sing.

Oh, I'm really good at karaoke. What's your song? Yeah, what's your song? Oh, I love a ballad. I felt Bjork's music. I just was like, who is this person? I got to hawk this slalom, Rudy. Not hawk the slalom.

I absolutely love it. It was somehow Shakespearean when you said it. It was somehow gorgeous. Yee, my slok, you hollum. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packers star Kabir Bajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation.

KGB explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning. In a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron and the consequences for everyone involved you mix homesteading with guns in church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked voila you got straight away i felt like i was living in north korea but worse if that's possible listen Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

Okay. Wow. Allie, where would you like to start? Oh, my God. Do you have a preference? Where do we begin? There is so much. There is so much to say.

Okay. How about we begin with any questions you might have for me? I guess. Well, so we already, we touched on a lot of the criticisms that I think we're going to have against this movie already during the recap. But yeah, I mean, for me, the big thing is you've got this like white guy who like appropriates the body of an indigenous person comes in he's flopping around and they're like no no no you're the chosen one though and it doesn't make sense but he's the chosen one he doesn't have imposter syndrome for one single second. No.

Which I guess is very white guy of him. He has a very inflated ego about the whole thing. Yeah. But yeah, it is like a white savior top to bottom. 100%. So my question is, in a movie with a similar premise, where white capitalist colonizers come in and are trying to colonize and steal the land and steal the resources of indigenous people. What is a version of this story or what changes would you make or do you think could be made to eliminate the issues that we see in avatar okay so i've thought about this a lot because a lot of the issues stem back to jake like massively for all

the reasons that we suggested i feel like even if if nothing else were to change about the film and it would have been the exact same movie and the exact same stakes and everything, as problematic as it was, if someone like Adam Beach or Anthony Mackie or a character of color, specifically a disabled and preferably an indigenous actor playing Jake instead, I feel like it would have had more gravity. As much as I like Sigourney Weaver's character, she is so sympathetic to the Na'vi that I was like, okay, but scientists, unfortunately, are not that sympathetic to indigenous people.

They're the ones that are stealing their remains and putting them in the smithsonian against people's wishes and stuff you know or conducting the research to prove that you know sami people aren't human enough or not as advanced enough as like swedish or finnish people you know so if you were going to have that character like the scientist character if she were indigenous if she were played by tantu cardinal or even irene bedard all roads go back to pocahontas or even uh like if you wanted someone sassy but smart and you know still has that ferocity even jenn Jennifer Podemski would have been perfect at that part I think she would have been great yeah she would have been great she's

hilarious and she's badass because I think that that would have been an interesting subversion because um her school in the movie that was another thing and yes connor beard was talking about this on tiktok he was talking about how avatar has many problems he's from the lumbee tribe and he said specifically that the school being used as a positive in the film is kind of tone deaf if not really offensive because residential schools were so bad to native children and they aren't in this movie and i feel like that was probably just to bridge the communication error you know what i mean like or the conflict sure you know it's like we need we need to be able to talk to these people they need need to be able to blah, blah, blah. But, like, what if it was Tantu Cardinal and she was teaching them Anishinaabemowin instead of English or along with English? So it's like, you know, we can communicate a little more privately and not in a language that would, like, front you off in front of the real bad guys or something you know because then that would be subversion that would also be kind of decolonizing that sort of right uh premise

of the school for sure if you were going to have that because if they want to come in and like actually engage in some kind of diplomacy why is it oh we have to teach you english so that you can communicate with me versus and to be fair grace like does know navi and like the other scientists seem to as well and i wonder if that was just almost a choice to be like well we don't want to have too much of the movie in a language other than english because that holly mr hollywood thinks that that tends to put off American movie going audiences. So like we have to, as much as possible, have the Navi or have the Omotakaya speak English. So I wonder if like that's just how they justify. But then, but like to have it be like they set up a school to teach indigenous children English.

Like you said, Ali, the historical parallels to that are atrocious and it doesn't seem like the filmmakers considered the implications of making that choice. That was like something that popped for me this time where it's like the, there's no like, even, even with Grace, cause I feel like Grace is, and the science and,

you know, Norm, Dr. Max, et cetera, are all presented pretty uncritically as good guys yeah but on this rewatch specifically like with bechdel goggles on you're like this actually like the movie should be far more kind of interrogating what it is they're doing because it's like

grace is also appropriating an indigenous body. Like she's doing that consistently. And the ethics of that are not questioned by any of the characters in the movie. It's like because she's not giving information to the colonel, it's made to seem like, well, so what she's doing you know the equivalent of a residential school on pandora there's no reciprocity where it's like the navi don't have an opportunity to to you know it all takes place on pandora because that is where the human's interests lie is like mining these natural resources and grace is absolutely complicit in that like she knows that to the point where she is able to, you know, predict that Jake is going to leak information to the colonel and she gets him out of there, which puts a bandaid on the problem. But she's still aware of exactly what's happening. And she's, you know, she has like some quips and she's she, you know, doesn't seem to agree with it. But she she's participating

she's a willing participant and that is not really interrogated at all yeah that's right i agree and my friend erinak uh who's wonderful uh they have a really wonderful uh youtube channel we were talking about this because i was sharing my notes and I was trying not to share my deeper notes, just more like, oh, look, this funny thing I said, you know, while I'm doing research. But they said, they're like, I think this film is so forgettable because it almost does something worthy of note. And then went, well, how can we make a white guy the hero in the weirdest way possible? And I'm like, yeah, that's the biggest failing of this film is that jake is in it just because it feels like nateri should be the hero absolute 100 like if you're gonna have the school and stuff like that in it i mean like why couldn't it begin with nateri

being a student in the school and then seeing her sister be murdered, like they say happens in the deleted scenes and stuff, and then becoming disillusioned and disenfranchised with this idea of diplomacy, you know, because there is no diplomatic way to forcibly relocate people. That's genocide. Right. Exactly. way to forcibly relocate people that's genocide right like that's exactly i love i mean i love what you're talking about in terms of casting native actors um on the human side of the conflict because that doesn't happen and i feel like that problem scales up to what you were discussing at the beginning of the episode which is like that would be an incredible, like I think a far more impactful way to tell this story. And also probably not a story that James Cameron has any business writing.

And so it's again, it's like a resources thing of like, you know, who is getting the opportunities? James Cameron's using his own playbook to try to tell this story, but he's limited in what he can do i don't know yeah it's very outsider's perspective and the way that dances with wolves was yeah um but but to dances with wolves credit the native characters in that movie are fleshed out way more than the navi are and avatar it's like when i watched dancesances with Wolves when I was very young I really liked the movie because there was kind of a catharsis of I don't like Kevin Costner and I don't really look like Kevin Costner but to see someone who kind of looks like me being accepted in a group of people who look like my dad you know was kind of like really special and especially with the

stands with the fist character but even then it's like graham green's character who is a holy man in that movie he's hilarious he's wonderful he's dignified he's open to communication but he's also like you know why is this guy rolling around on the ground with like that thing on his shirt and then the other native character whose name i forgot but he's very much like this dude's fucking crazy let's leave you know and i'm not afraid of you you know like the time spent in the village with those characters are more sympathetic and interesting you really don't get that in avatar no matter how sympathetic or understanding they're trying to be because like does nateri have brothers and sisters does she have friends does she have

aunties like you just nothing no so little to the point where like her parents are important characters but i only mentioned each of them like twice in the recap and i so like they're just they're not that they're pretty secondary honestly to the story and it's really only nateri uh who we get any real insight into. And despite Zoe Saldana's incredible performance, we still don't get that much about her backstory, about her life. We know a little bit about what is in store for her future. She's going to take over the role as like spiritual leader for her mother. But like, we don't know that much and then yeah speaking of speaking of indigenous

actors uh playing characters so the actors who play the omatakaya characters um of the ones who get speaking roles they're mostly black actors except with one exception of Wes Studi, who plays Neytiri's father, Etukhan. He is an actor of the Cherokee Nation. But it seems to me, and correct me if I'm misinterpreting this, but it feels like a lot of the imagery and iconography they're pulling from, as far as just like cultural things, historical things, about the Omotekayaya seem to be pulled from indigenous people of northern america so it feels weird to not cast more native americans in those roles and if they're playing a character that's not even human right you know like if it's

going to be indigenous coded then there's so many indigenous people that you could reach out to. You could cast Sami actors, you could cast Maori actors or Hawaii. It could be the whole spectrum of indigenous people. Right. But it would be nice to see them as humans, too. On top of that, it's like how often like people of color in general, but, you know, specifically indigenous Americans are and indigenous people in general are like othered in. I mean, this is like a pretty aggressive othering of I don't know. Yeah, we're curious. In science fiction. Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Especially since colonizers use language and rhetoric against indigenous people to justify killing them and stealing from them and one of the ways they do that is to reduce them or liken them to animals and so to make the omatakaya have animal features tentacle porn cats misses the mark just a bit the other thing okay so even back then the thing that makes me just cringe the most it's like you you've got cat people i know they're native coded why are they liliing i mean i know there's an actual word for it i just forgot what it is but it's here i'm gonna move away from my mic you know what i mean like why why are they doing that they're cats yeah right like they're cats they should be saying meow meow meow even the even that thing that they do that you know what i mean like the heck like it's yeah i i saw a lot of

criticisms around the battle cries that seemed kind of like randomly and offensively selected for the america and yeah i haven't seen an effective argument against it like it just seems like that was a straight up offensive uh lazy shitty choice it just made me i was like oh you know first time i saw it too every time i see it i'm like oh why are you doing that it's so strange there's a whole montage where it's like just that over and over and over and over yeah and then the context of that scene is that jake sully is randomly the general now. Like, that was... He just shows up on his large pterodactyl and he's like, I'm the captain now.

We're left to think that, like, there is some collaboration going on between Jake and Sute, but it seems like at the end of the day, Jake is in charge because Jake, like, walkie-talkies to Neytiri at the peak of the action and says that's an order i was like dude you don't you're not stop you're not in charge you just got here you can't make an order

and i mean speaking of cat-like features of the omatakaya people there's i think a whole conversation around their character design i mean there's like a lot of things to unpack as far as like lack of body diversity costume design skin color just like everything that encompasses the character design of the Navi or the Omatakaya so yeah friend of the show I just want to quickly shout friend of the show, Janice meeting has pointed this out for years, the lack of body diversity in avatar characters, and is also because she's the funniest person ever, like, turned it into a bit, where she's like, I'm gonna get cast as a Navi, and the game going to change. But like she was the first person I heard talking about that

because there are, I think, so many like problematic elements to the way the Navi are designed that that sort of gets overlooked a lot of the time. Well, not only that, elders play such an important role in indigenous communities. So the fact that we don't really see like an elderly navi character you know other than nateri's parents or you know like not everyone in a society like this is a warrior you know so what do they look like when they're not in like peak shape all the time and what about the warriors who um you know get hurt or get injured or are disabled or something what if there's a bad hunt and the dinosaur thing bite your arm off i mean are you

right we don't see any of that and it would have been interesting to see jake like interact with some of those veterans you know actually right so many like overlaps between jake and navi culture that just goes completely unexplored by this um by this movie right yeah and then yeah as far as like just the the body type every single navi person has the same exact body type so they all have frog butts they have frog butts there is not a booty to be found well i think that that like i kind of wonder i've watched a lot of behind the scenes featurettes on this movie in the past and i like i know that it's kind of tricky because in some ways i want to say that they're almost animated characters i know that it's motion capture so it's like it's either animation tropes

we've talked about before where it's like very rigid two body types available which i think does kind of carry through this movie or it's a casting issue and they only cast two body types so either way it's you know a fucking wash and you know like it just i don't know it doesn't just like reinforce um rigid stereotypes we see all the time it also like lessens the richness of of pandora because you're just like completely alley like what what are other people up to like it can't they they appear to be thriving you would think there are other things and elements of of this culture that just are like not referenced or explored at all and don't cats always have like that you know belly fat that like flops and when they run it's iconic for real though and they famously have eight

nipples and so why don't the omatakaya have eight nipples they just have tentacles nipples on the nipple scales um and then as far as and this is something i think we've touched on in different episodes in the past but there's a pretty um a precedent has been set somewhere along the line that in sci-fi and fantasy, especially because these are the genres where you would usually have like non-human, human-like characters. So in this case, the Navi, the Omotakaya have blue skin. And this is something we see a lot where, you know, like humanoid characters who are coded as indigenous, they're coded as people of color in general, they will have blue skin, green skin, purple skin, some skin color that does not exist on humans. And just like kind of further others these characters who are coded as people of color and i noticed

that this is something that happens a lot in sci-fi where even if they cast like an actress of color they usually cast her as an alien like even star trek which is pretty diverse anyways and i'm referring to like the jj abramams movies because I am not a Trekkie. How dare you? Also starring Zoe Saldana. But this time she gets to actually have her actual skin color. Her natural skin color. But Sofia Botella, I think is how you say her name.

And the third movie is an alien with white skin. But she looks awesome and she's great. But, you know, like, it's not her also. But Zoe Saldana in, like, Guardians of the Galaxy has green skin. And I love costume and makeup designs and stuff like that, especially when you're making monsters. Like, Doug Jones is a fucking G and i mean the best i love hell boy and everything but it is a a trope i've noticed like a lot yeah like even in star wars it's like you get lupita nyong'o and you make her that ugly little alien oh my god what are you doing i will never get over that i just like you did what with that

casting decision you did nothing nothing with that casting decision the most beautiful talented person and you did what there oh i was yeah i don't even give a shit about star wars particularly but i was enraged by that i would also be curious to hear what what listeners think on that issue. Because I don't know, I've seen that point made about Zoe Saldana's career quite a bit of like her two biggest or, you know, I guess, best remembered roles. Although there are those crossheads people out there. Or those crossroads. Crossroads. Crossheads? Hello? cross heads hello um okay two sips of miller light and i'm i'm cooked um but yeah i i like i think that that is like absolutely no accident and i wish that sci-fi were at a place where like you know sci-fi can be like a really amazing place to explore like more diverse worlds if you have diverse voices

that are also behind the camera which is not really happening in avatar and shows and i think the uh you always run the the risk of racial stereotyping anytime you code non-human species as an existing group of actual people i think frozen 2 and even avatar the last airbender do this better where it's like yes they're coded as inuit or they're coded as sami but they're not you know they're water tribe they're nathaldra you know so but they're people you know they're like actual human characters even if the tribe or the races is not you know right i hope i said that correctly no i know what you mean yeah and this wouldn't be as much of a concern if in these genres you had white actors also playing like you know blue-skinned aliens like it wouldn't

be and then and that there was no specific like racial coding attached to any any of the characters it's just like this is just a person like a person with purple skin right Doug Jones Doug Jones? Folks, he's a sexy fish. Sexy fish. Sexy, sexy fish. But because the trend tends to be that only BIPOC actors are cast in these roles where their skin is some color of the rainbow and their character is coded as an othered race. It's also because it's generally by like white writers and directors that are making that decision like that is a huge element of i don't know like it does like the way james cameron is doing it seems like a tropey overwrought like lazy kind of pretty offensive like storytelling trope like it's not he's not doing anything new here yeah it would have more gravity if it was by a writer who was indigenous or otherwise marginalized yeah i think and then

as far as the costume design goes um i'm curious about your thoughts on this ali but the the navi across the gender spectrum of the navi they're all like pretty scantily clad as far as their costume goes. Yes, the two body types are scantily clad. Yeah, you can see all of their blue skin, basically. And there is definitely another media trend where Indigenous women, we see this time and time again are hyper hyper sexualized in media i i don't know exactly if that's what's happening here i'm just so i'm just yeah curious to your thoughts so um this is kind of okay so if you talk to one indigenous person you've only talked to one indigenous person so this is just me

personally um sure connor beard on tiktok who's from the lumbee tribe i think i mentioned him earlier he's doing a series of tiktok videos about avatar and racism in it and tropes in it that are anti-indigenous and i can co-sign on most of them i think he makes really good points but he released and i say this respectfully um he released a recent tick tock talking about how avatar fetishizes and sexualizes native women and i get it but i don't agree entirely because um i personally have a rule where if male and female characters are wearing the same costume the costume itself isn't inherently sexualized um like black widow and captain america are basically wearing the same unitard it's just black widow is filmed differently right you know so so it's not really the costume that's the problem um like someone i forgot who it was i think it was a pop culture detective

was talking about how cora in tron legacy is sexualized and i did not agree with that either i'm like she's wearing the same thing everybody else is wearing and she's never really objectified by the camera so because there's a difference between like a character just being really sexy on screen and the filmmakers and the filmmaking actively sexualizing that character I watched that same TikTok from Connor Beard and he points out that in the screenplay for Avatar, so this makes me kind of think

that James Cameron is actively sexualizing, especially Neytiri. Oh no, I hate reading James Cameron's writing. It's so stressful. Do you remember that thing from Titanic where she falls under his welcome weight I will never stop thinking about the phrase welcome weight written by a 50

year old man I just can't even okay what did you say what did you say at least it translates well to screen. But he's like, I don't even think it's like an unpopular opinion to say that James Cameron is like a pretty bad writer. He's just got he's got a lot of chops where he's got a lot of chops. And then he also writes the movie. And then he writes what we're about to hear. Welcome wait. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

So this is for Neytiri's character introduction, which in a screenplay generally has a little bit more detail about like the character visually, like what the character looks like. So quote, Jake passes under a tree limb invisible to him draped on the limb. Like a leopard is a striking Navi girl. She watches, only her eyes moving.

She is lithe as a cat, with a long neck, muscular shoulders, and nubile breasts. And she is devastatingly beautiful. For a girl with a tail. Oh my god. Jim? So do they ever mention the size of Jake's dick as he's going into his avatar body? Because if he's not, then that's definitely

Then that's telling. Exactly. Yeah, where's the reciprocity? Jim's going to horny jail again. There's one more sentence that is upsetting. Oh, fine. In human age, she would be 18.

No. So she is young, young, young. Jake Sully is, what, in his 30s? Mid to late 30s, probably. He could be a strong CW 31, you know? Dad, so... That is creepy. It is creepy. But I think that that is a really good rule of

thumb that you're describing ally of like if there is because it's also like you know like james cameron writes creepy we've discussed it on the show before and it seems particularly pointed in this in this example because he's you know like writing about an indigenous woman who's 18 like yeah oh man there was like a lot of i'm glad that there's like a diversity of opinion on this because i do think that like the movie does not objectify nateri the way that that couple sentence run would imply that it would based on how creepy he's being i didn't feel that creepiness in the camera or in the film language i think that that is like in spite of the fact that he's like a creepy writer he is not a creepy filmmaker which is you know an oversimplification i'm sure he's

had his creepy moments but and he's made like r-rated movies too so if he really wanted to be creepy he could have really been creepy in his other films but but then on the other hand it's i i mean i know that we sort of have spent a lot of this episode unraveling like the way that like comparing avatar to disney's pocahontas is a vast oversimplification but because it's like the the navi characters are like somewhat animated or like i don't know how to describe motion capture really but she looks more like a cat than a person so it's not it doesn't i feel like pocahontas like disney's pocahontas even shell or chel from um the road to eldorado i think that's way more offensive than nytiri. For sure. Because I would say that that is hypersexualized and objectified more than Neytiri. Because I also don't think that nudity is inherently sexual either.

And really the only time Neytiri is ever like sexy on screen is when she's having sex. Which, you know. Fair. There's a time to do it. Same. Same. Hopefully. is when she's having sex which you know fair there's that track same the same hopefully kind of the the best time to be sexy is during sex wow yeah kind of weird if you're not and even during the weird tentacle sex thing i mean it's more romantic than sexy um i guess

so much wrong it's hard to yes but like um a worse example of this would be in Terrence Malick's film, The New World, where Koryanka Kilcher, who is 14 years old, is way more sexualized with her two grown male counter, counter stars, co-stars, co-stars. That's the word. Not counter stars co-stars co-stars that's the word not counter stars yes so 14 year old Corianca Kilcher with that's Christian Bale and Colin Farrell inexcusable playing Pocahontas I still have not been able to bring myself to watch that one because everything I hear about it is just disgusting she's beautiful and she's wonderful but oh my god baby girl i'm sorry i'm so sorry ugly ass bitch like terrence malick would even do that to you evil evil fucking evil yes one last thing i'm and then then i promise i'll stop dragging connor but um there was one more uh line that he says in that tiktok where so it's a line where uh

nateri tells him you know you're omatakaya now and you can make your bow from home tree and you can choose a woman and he you know jake's like i already chose but this woman must choose me and connor beard makes the argument that jake is the one being progressive and nateri is the one being primitive and i think that this is where context matters because the navi with all their problems are very egalitarian and i don't think the women are just like oh you only exist to be chosen by these dudes you know because then why would there be women warriors right and I think it's also because Neytiri's engaged so he's like hey do you want to come with me or you know I know who I've chosen but do you choose me and I don't know it's like I didn't think that was uh yeah I don't know

I hear you on that like I mean and and I think that like the the best I mean you said it yourself like the fact that she is engaged is not really harped on by the movie which I appreciated because that's like a really annoying trope to like get in the mire of but it's like it makes sense that it would be sort of like tacitly brought up in that conversation because yeah be weird if jake didn't try to tacitly acknowledge like that it's sort of him the way that jack dawson is like do you love him yes it's just a simple question do you love the guy or not and And Rose is like, this is not a suitable conversation. But Jack was being very rude. Jack was being a little devil in that conversation because he was being aggro and not to hand it to Jake Sully. I don't do it and I hate to do it. But but, you know, Jake doesn't get aggro about it.

It's like a it's a conversation. It's not like cornering you in the gym of the Titanic. I'm just merely pointing out that James Cameron keeps writing more or less the same scene over and over again. He loves this one movie that he writes. the character design of the omatakaya is i wasn't sure if james cameron was referencing any specific indigenous culture or cultures or nations with the omatakaya or is he just sort of like treating indigenous people as a monolith and like just kind of making several aesthetic references and kind of lumping them all together and like i don't know i what's your thought on that a bit of column a and column b like it feels very outsider's perspective because it is um uh when i first saw the movie um it felt like i don't know if you've ever seen Apocalypto, but it kind of reminded me of that where it was, I assumed, since they're in a rainforest and the what I have found was a lot of inspiration is from Maori people from New Zealand yeah and even in the trailers for the way of water I

noticed that a lot of the facial tattoos on some of the new Na'vi characters looked very much like the same ones from Polynesian cultures yeah from what from what I've heard of and read a little bit about the second movie, it seems like Cameron takes that direction a little more decisively in the second movie. How effective it is or how respectful it is, I don't know. But I was going through old featurettes trying to see if there was, because there's so much written about certain elements of production, that was not something i was able to really find and i know that there is this tendency um we were talking about this with olivia woodward a while ago um about just like this tendency to take so many like unique indigenous cultures and just like lump them all into one vague you know kind of

tropey interpretation which I don't know if that's really what I mean I just kind of struggled to find information on what he was doing right well when I first saw the movie 2009 in the theater there were several scenes five like major events in the film that I think mirror actual historical events in a broader Native American history. So obviously invading Pandora is any, it could be Columbus, it could be the British, it could be the French, it could be Leif Erikson, you know, like any invasion, colonialism, you know, that's happening. Obviously, there are elements that are probably inspired by Pocahontas and Jamestown and the Powhatan Nation interacting with the settlers, especially since John Smith, when he was kidnapped, was accepted into the tribe as kind of like an honorary member to build diplomacy. The image of Pocahontas resting her head on him and saving him is kind of more of like an initiation, kind of like she's his godmother to compare it to anything

don't quote me on that 100 since i'm not from those tribes but that's my understanding of it any big massacre scene but you know home tree getting destroyed felt like it could have been wounded knee it could have been sand knee it could have been sand creek it could have been any attack any massacre really and then you have the trail of tears afterwards were forcibly relocating indigenous people um any death march any long walks you know i i was and again it was like it was just hard to find any like hard confirmation. But I kind of assumed that that was what Cameron was trying to reference, even in the way that Giovanni Ribisi's character was talking about it. Like, oh, it's not a big deal. It's like a relocation. It's not like I was like, OK, this is kind of clearly mapped on.

Yeah. Peacefully negotiate their relocation. It's like there's no peaceful negotiation to forcibly relocating. But the last one which surprised me and I'm happy that it ended like this was I feel like the final battle in Avatar like the big climatic awesome battle felt like it was a big allegory

to the Battle of Little Bighorn or the Battle of Greasy Grass where the Lakota sioux and the cheyenne uh won a battle against uh general custer and the u.s army and um they did that because custer thought that he was going to ambush them and murder all of them and no there's 5 000 of us and you're dying today and the person who shot him off of his horse was a woman by the way buffalo calf road woman so nateri nateri style i'm just saying oh that rocks so that pleases me i didn't really that's that. Yep. She's the one who shot him off of his horse and probably delivered the killing blow.

And afterwards, the other women took like little needles or whatever and poked out his eardrums. And that's where the phrase, that's where the phrase, see what happens where you don't listen comes from. Whoa. So it sounds to me like James Cameron is pulling, not only from like a design point of view of the, of the Alma Takaya, but also from just like narrative events in the movie Avatar. He's pulling from a lot of different nations. So, I mean,

allegory in storytelling is like you know that tends to happen where like you're you might be kind of referencing something it's an allegorical probably be weirder if you didn't pull from actual history like it's not inherently negative that he did that right it's just the mess it's just that and it's the outsider's perspective that I think is really. damage also so I can see how kind of blending it together because it all kind of blows together makes sense I feel like it probably could have been done a little more ethically right and the way to do that would be to hire native writers to write about the allegory um what else another thing I would change is that a fangirl jean i hope i'm pronouncing her name right i think it's pronounced jean but i think it's also pronounced jean j-e-a-n-n-e fangirl jean

oh my please don't kill me fangirl jean anyway she uh was talking about how she kind of likes and dislikes avatar in the same way as i do but she's like jake should not have been allowed to stay period if he was going to and i feel like that would have lended itself to the story a little bit better and the sincerity of the character where they're like listen we appreciate help, but you put us in this situation. So at the end of all things, you can't sit with us anymore. Yeah. Right. If it would have, at the very least, it should have.

And he should be okay with that. If he's as good as he thinks he is, then that would have been like, that's fair. Okay. You don't get to stay with us. Yeah. I fucked up. I'll see myself out yeah yeah yeah though i will say your brother's funeral jake yeah jeez i will say um this is my hot take is that let's

hear it i think not that his story is good not that his redemption arc is good but all things considered jake's redemption arc is more satisfying or better than a redemption arc for like kylo ren for example because at the end of the day even though kylo ren or even darth vader turn from the dark side and do the right thing at the last moment they die right after and they don't undo all the damage that they did they may have stopped or prevented more damage which good but they never face the people that they hurt they never like face any repercussions or consequences for the harm that they've caused. So Jake, even though it's not great, he still has to prove himself

if he's going to show his face again. And when he does the right thing, eventually it's like his friends die, people get hurt. He can never go back to his planet again. He can never, you know, so there's a whole lot at stake that you know a lot of sacrifices that was made for him to do the right thing he does have to

do a lot to actually have a redemption but then he like centers himself so consistently throughout it that he's always like i'm the boss now and he's like or like yeah that is i mean which is maybe like realistic super macho white male behavior but like yeah the fact that he's like okay i like i totally agree it's good that he recognizes that he can't just like something has to be done to try to mitigate this tragedy that is in a huge part his fault but his solution is like i have to be the leader of i have to and then he's rewarded by being like okay you're deaf you're one of us again and you're permanently one of us and we're gonna do this like spiritual ceremony to make you

he should at least be back on a trial basis at very least yeah like for real it's like you're answering for crimes against ometakaya right here's another question i have for you ali um throughout the movie there's a lot of emphasis on the Omotakaya's connection to the earth and this like spiritual connection to the wildlife, the flora and the fauna, and obviously pulling from, you know, indigenous culture and the connection that indigenous people have with the earth. But the movie introduces this like kind of sci-fi fantasy element to that with like the tentacle tangling. The neural network. Yeah.

And I'm just curious about your thoughts about that and what implications you think that has good or bad or neutral. Okay. This is why natives need to make stuff yeah give natives the same budget and we will make something better than avatar i promise i promise um because i mean to james cameron's credit uh he's been an environmentalist activist since like high school so there are good intentions there he um said in an interview very recently i think it was like james cameron breaks down his most iconic roles or something like that watch that yeah yeah he um was talking about like as he was making avatar he's like indigenous people were reaching out and saying you know

a lot of the stuff that's happening in your movie is happening in real life in our community so there were things like um and even sophia yanok who's a sami activist um when she gave her ted talk about mining companies in lapland in sami territories and the damage that had done she said that Avatar felt like that like she definitely resonated with the damage that's done to these ecosystems and these sacred territories and everything and how Avatar has a happy ending but in real life we're still fighting in lapland and the same can be said in like brazil and standing rock wesuoten and all these other places and when you think of uh like just the spiritual aspect in pandora i mean it's a movie, so they kind of have to ham it up. But I mean, people are not like usually in indigenous cultures or the way that we believe in these things. People are not

at the top of the pyramid and then everything is beneath us. Indigenous people tend to be stewards of the land who believe that we are actually part of an ecosystem and as much as we need the land the land also needs us to take care of it and the land is very much as alive and as sentient as people and as animals so i see what he was trying to do uh he's just kind of okay he's just kind of out of his element because he's not part of the the community right right you know there's like a something lost in translation I guess there's a disconnect because it's so very outsider's perspective right and it's a good idea I mean I do like the idea of you know like you can plug your tail into the willow tree and hear your ancestors singing and stuff like that's beautiful

but not when they're aliens right right it's almost to me it reads as like um an outsider's perspective looking at indigenous spirituality and being like it's so mystical it's so magical it's almost science fiction and then like so as to be alien and then just like leaning into that and then putting it in a movie yeah yeah and in a way that kind of dehumanizes indigenous people that you're trying to be sympathetic towards anyways in the uh deleted scenes there's a really awesome deleted scene where jake before he becomes one of the people undergoes a um a vision quest i guess i don't know if you've seen that I have not seen that scene no yeah it's an incomplete

deleted scene they must have ran out of money because the CG isn't there but it's where he like it's when he tells Quaritch or Stephen Lang you know I have one more thing I have to do and then I'll be one of them and blah blah blah and then it cuts to

Neytiri putting the war paint on do and then i'll be one of them and blah blah blah and then it cuts to nateri putting the war paint on him right and then he goes into like this chamber and moat is like lighting the incense and the herbs and stuff and like this beetle or whatever like he eats a worm and then this beetle like stings him on the back of his neck or whatever and he has a vision quest and when he survives it they're like oh well you're alive so let's all hug and touch each other but there's a scene where he's talking to grace before he does that because she's like dude you cannot do this because actual navi have died doing this and we have no idea what an avatar is going to do but it's jake and he has plaid armor so he'll be fine yeah but uh he's the chosen one he can't die yeah he's god he should he should have died in the first second when he goes in as an avatar when those like rhinoceros

like animals are like plowing him over like yeah he should have been done for i found i found it so frustrating how uh like anytime nateri was about to bail on him which was constantly because he sucks like there's a sign from the the from pandora from awa that jake's a really cool guy you're like oh my oh my God. Is he though? In what way? But anyway, so the thing is, he tells Grace what he's doing. Then he goes, they don't even have a word for lie. They had to learn it from us. I'm like, dude, what?

Shut up, Jake. In my opinion, it dehumanizes indigenous people when you say something even if it's meant to be flattering like they don't have a word for lie you know they don't even lie that's the other side of the coin for there's no word for thank you in dothraki you know what i mean it's like it's another form of just degrading they cannot possibly comprehend the concept of X, Y, Z. Or that like an indigenous character would not be capable of lying. Like the full spectrum of being, you know, human. Yeah. Yeah.

God. Ridiculous. I found it interesting. I looked into James Cameron's first round of interviews for this movie and then his current interview. It does seem like, I mean, I'm just like, guess uh I'm just interested in how Avatar 2 works out for him but in the first one I was curious of like how explicitly he was how explicit he was in saying like where his influences were coming from because this was something he started working on in the 90s like during the production of Titanic he was it is very 90ss environmentalist Captain Planet-y. Right. Where you're like, I see the intent, but the follow through is meh.

But he said, like, I was surprised at how open he was at, like, being influenced by movies like Dances with Wolves, movies like Lawrence of Arabia. In terms of a movie I like, he references Princess Mononoke several times as another inspiration. But he does kind of explicitly say like, yeah, these, you know, very white savior, sympathetic colonizer stories are like ones I was pulling from when I was making this. And so there's that. I just wanted to share. And you can tell. And you can tell when you watch Avatar. And Princess Mononoke does it so much better.

Like, just does it so much better. And it also features an indigenous main character. Because Ashitaka is Amishi. Love it. My indigenous king. But, okay. So, elephant in the room let's talk about the comparisons made between this movie and pocahontas sure yeah because that's usually how everybody uh dismisses the film it's pocahontas

in space oh and james cameron also says that he mapped early plots about Neytiri onto, well, he says the Pocahontas story, but I'm like, well, what do you even mean when you say that? It sounds like he's referring specifically to the Disney version of it, because the real version of that story. Grow up. You're 50 years old. Yeah. Anyways. So to begin, I mean, obviously the reason I haven't stepped up to do a Pocahontas in space I always say I'm

like Pocahontas is an actual person who suffered and terrible things happened to her so she deserves more respect than that and these stories are not the same you know like full stock it's like you know the same way that people make fun of Elizabeth Warren and call her Pocahontas and it's like you know the same way that people make fun of elizabeth warren and caller pocahontas and it's like you know you can criticize both this film and elizabeth warren for numerous valid reasons but you can do it without being racist and you can do it without using an abused child yeah as a punch line but the other other thing is that the story of Pocahontas, how it actually not even the story of Pocahontas, but

the romanticized account of Pocahontas that people are very familiar with that was used in this movie and the Disney movie and everything is much older and it says, there's this article and it's called the Pocahontas Perplex and it says there's this article and it's called the uh the pocahontas perplex

and it says that it was um originally there was this old scottish ballad it was called like lord bateman and the turkish king's daughter and it was this really well-known ballad in europe at the time where an english adventurer goes to a foreign land and meets like the Sultan's daughter or an African King's daughter or something. And she's beautiful. And when he's in a dungeon and he's about to die, she saves him and then they fall in love. He goes back to his homeland and she goes after him and shows up on his wedding day and they love each other even though she's darker and people who read john smith's accounts of his stories in the new world were like oh my god it's that story john smith and pocahontas is

like lord bateman and the tur the Turkish king's daughter it'd be like you know oh my god it's like Jack and Rose from Titanic you know like it was that level so that's what started the whole thing so there are elements where you know like you can compare the two but it's not the Pocahontas story specifically because that is a very different story right yeah when people were you know criticizing avatar for ripping off or seemed to be ripping off so much from disney's pocahontas and i remember like fern gully being a thing too that everyone was like it's ripping off a fern gully and dances with wolves and yeah as i was watching the movie this time i was like remembering that criticism but i was thinking well no one was talking about how this movie is just pulling

from a lot of historical events like like in history yeah yeah history like right but that was never part of the mainstream conversation about this movie. And yes, as we've discussed, James Cameron did not handle certain things in this movie well, but people were so hung up on similarities to existing movies. But it's like a lot of what happens in Avatar, there's a very clear historical precedent of colonizers stealing land and committing genocide against indigenous people for capitalist gain and for power and that not being part of the conversation about this movie i feel like speaks to what you were saying earlier like at the very beginning of the episode ali as far as like people finding reasons to not like this movie and that it felt very steeped in like anti-indigenous racism. And the colonizers

are very clearly presented as the bad guys in this movie. Which is not true of Disney's Pocahontas other than it's like, I think again, it's like colonization, the one guy

and all the other guys are great. And one of them's Christian Bale. And you're just like, well, what the fuck? And the guys in that movie are great. And one of them is Christian Bale. And you're just like, well, what the fuck? And the guys in that movie are terrible. And they're never held accountable for all of singing about killing Indians and stuff like that. So it's like, oh, well, this guy is worse than you because this is your John Smith's friends.

Right. So if you were nice, you know, it's a mess and avatar doesn't do that right right i yeah i i it didn't register for me certainly at the time but i i i think that the the original backlash i mean like whatever it's problematic on so many levels and i know that word is overused but first of all it's like well it doesn't bode well for James Cameron if he's being criticized for ripping off a famously historically abysmal children's movie that's not great to begin

with but I also yeah it like speaks ill of the general audiences at the time and of film criticism or at least you know prominent film critics at the time which we've talked, or at least, you know, prominent film critics at the time, which we've talked about a million times, always skew white guys. And the implication there is like, well, we've already had a movie that talks about colonialism, we don't need more,

where you're just like, no, like, not to say that Avatar deals with it anywhere approaching perfectly, but for the conclusion to be, like, imperialism and colonialism and racism against indigenous populations is, like, well, we have that movie. We don't need another one. It's like, well, you know, go fuck yourself. No. Yeah. sure it hasn't gone away but back then when i was like spite liking it you know the white reviewers like on youtube and on different um platforms were criticizing the film and the biggest thing that kept going if they didn't just outright dismiss it as dancers with wolves in space or pope hannes in space they would say things like white guilt and you know like oh well what am i supposed to do you know and it's like

hollywood's making these movies where i'm supposed to feel bad for being a white guy and all of these white guys in this movie are the bad guys and i'm like if that's your takeaway from it and not the anti-indigenous like racism in the film even if, you know, not nearly as bad as it has been in the past, but it's still problematic. Like, you have a bigger problem with not being the good guy this time, when, you know, there's so many other problems with the film that you could be talking about that, you know, indigenous people have even talked about like i like the movie but lots of indigenous people don't for like many valid reasons and it's like none of those reasons that i've heard indigenous people complain about have ever been said by any of like those reviewers from the past at all because they just weren't even thinking about it it's like their ego was just so fragile white fragility is it's it's there the hell of a drug this movie was vaguely critical of me and i hate it on fire you're just like still at the end of the day it's like i mean

this movie was made by a fabulously wealthy white guy like and the other thing um because i used to think back then i used to think okay maybe the bad guys are a little too on the nose maybe they're too cartoony maybe they're you know not subtle enough until standing rock happened and that really i'm like re-watching this in a post standing era, post missing and murdered indigenous women era. I'm like, this is exactly how these people think, you know, like this is how they talk. So let's see, there's a couple quotes from the movie that really stood out to me. The first one's Giovanni Rubisi's character when he's talking to jake about relocating them and he says look killing the indigenous looks bad but there's one thing that shareholders hate more

than bad press and that's a bad quarterly statement yes that is like yes that's not a cartoon villain that's how it works that's em Enbridge. You know what I mean? That is Oka. You know, the Oka crisis for people who don't live in the United States. That is every mining facility in Sami land, you know, in Lapland. And that's how they think. That's how it is. For sure. There's a quote from, I think it's in jake's voiceover so it shouldn't

be him who says this it should probably be nateri who says this but the quote is something like you know make them the enemy and you can justify killing them yeah which is what has happened all throughout history when genocides have happened is like again rhetoric and mental gymnastics are used to justify killing entire populations of people and you see that happening in the movie where like the omatakaya people are referred to are like references being roaches and you know blue monkeys and like yeah anti-indigenous slurs are used several times their intelligence is insulted like it's just all these things to dehumanize them and make them the enemy to justify killing them and i found the line well a line from the movie it says it's grace telling him these are people and giovanni rabisi's character says no

they're fly fly bitten savages that live in a tree all right look around i don't know about you but i see a lot of trees they can move so i said you know this is genocide in action you know granted they're not human but you strip them of their humanity and it becomes easier to kill them. And then in colonial terms, like this is something I don't think a lot of people understand. When you talk about colonialism and, you know, white imperialists coming to America, for example, and America is huge. Like the continent of North America is gigantic gigantic the united states is massive that is a lot of land that was stolen you know you know so anyways it says you know like let's not even break it down let's break it down to like it's not even an entire continent let's say it's your house

and someone comes to your house and they're like oh well why don't we just share your house you know like we want to live here we're here i brought my whole family let's just live in your house i mean what do you tell them do you say oh yeah here's a room set up for you or do you tell them get the fuck out of my house who the fuck are you go away yeah it's like no we're not sharing our home with you you have to fucking get out of my house even in the event where okay okay we'll leave home tree and we'll go someplace else they're not going to stop at home tree they're gonna obliterate the whole place because they immediately switch and and threaten to kill like or threaten to bulldoze the next yeah yeah yeah and it's like that's the other thing.

I mean, like, again, Turtle Island is massive. The United States is massive. That is a lot of trees that a lot of natives moved to. And look what happened. You know. Exactly. And it's, it's so heavy. Yeah.

It was almost good, except it's fucking Jake. Right. Take Jake out of the story. It could be a good. I think that there was also a time where I felt like that storytelling was too unsubtle, which is like also kind of ridiculous when you show up at a James Cameron movie. You're like, well, I don't know what I expected. But but I think that, yeah, like that those elements have like aged very, very well and in the movie's favor and it's also like the politics i mean i would not on every front but in terms of anti-military industrial

complex and i had to go back and like look up like there were specific terms and events connected to the iraq war that james cameron was referencing through this that I, I just did not remember, um, is unobtainium oil. No, not to blow your fucking mind, but, uh,

but I, I thought that like, I mean the politics of this movie and what it is against is pretty clear. And like the, I think the, the metaphor and the characters that they use to make those politics clear is very very muddled and a bajillion mistakes are made some of which we've discussed some of which we still have to discuss but i mean it's like the politics of this movie it's it's a

you know massively successful anti-war anti-imperialist movie anti-capitalist yeah anti-corporation yeah and ironically the movie made three billion dollars three billion dollars and that's why people remember it it's because it was so good at capitalism not because it was like the best movie ever um right you know sad thing is it could have been it just needed like, it had been so much better. Cause even James Cameron, like in the YouTube video, I was talking about like his most iconic films or whatever. He said,

he was all like, after I did avatar, I was hoping to like do some more environmentalist activism and like Brazil and all these other places. He's like, but I decided to make the avatar sequels instead and i'm like well or instead of ocean conservation and i'm like dude you could have been doing actual good stuff but he did say he's like you know film is powerful and you can

reach a lot of people for sure i. I completely agree. But also film productions, especially huge budget ones like this and the environmental impact they have. Well, I would be curious to know if James Cameron has made any strides in that direction. I'm always like interested in that kind of side of filmmaking because there's, there are like far less harmful ways to do it and i wonder if like you know given the politics of his movies and seems like his personal politics

whether that's something that has been addressed even remotely i hope so but it's like you just never fucking know with a production like that right the biggest concern i have with the sequel is that how many of the characters in the film in the sequel are actors of color and of them, how many are indigenous? And that's like my biggest concern. It's like if it's more white people and blue face pretending to be Indians, I'm like, have we learned anything? It's been 14 years or something. It's been 84 years. It's felt like 84 years since 2009, to be honest. Truly. Can we talk about the ableism a bit more?

We touched on a lot of the things already, but I just want to make sure it has its moment. We give it some more time. So Jake Sully uses a wheelchair. He seems to be paralyzed from the waist down from an injury he sustained in battle as a marine as we mentioned that character is not played by a disabled actor which is a problem we come upon time and time again in movies um sam worthington is able-bodied. I read a lot of responses from disabled people about the representation we get on screen in this movie. And like we mentioned already, it seems to be

pretty mixed across the board where some people saw themselves in Jake Slly they they felt represented by his character and you know him being a disabled character others criticized him as one of many movie characters who is trying to quote unquote fix his disability right where he's like it being incentivized by the kernel of like i will like it's implied like i will make you whole again. And that's something that is said to be appealing to Jake Sully at first. That and there are interpretations, and I can see how you might interpret it this way, where one of the main reasons he chooses to stay in his avatar body is that his avatar body is able-bodied and of course this you know perpetuates this idea that disabled people are you know quote-unquote incomplete or that they have something wrong with them disabled characters in movies trying to again quote-unquote fix their disability is

is something that you see a lot I think especially in movie villains um yes friend of the show Kristen Lopez wrote about this in the hollywood reporter when toy story 4 came out so it talks a lot about toy story 4 but it references a lot of other movie characters where this is the case so there's you know that criticism but then other people were like well but no that's not why he chooses to stay in his Avatar body. There are other reasons. So there's just like... It does seem like it's like an original... Like that first sequence when he's in the Avatar body does seem like that is a big...

But it doesn't seem like that remains the incentive. I don't know. Or like not that it's even an incentive. Right. Because then he falls in love with a woman and then he falls in love with the culture and right he becomes an indigenous person you know how when you can be a white person and then you become an indigenous person you know when that always happens yeah so the point is there's a lot of nuances to this discussion and i'd be i'm as always we're just curious to hear from our listeners who can speak from a place of experience.

Yeah, I mean, because I've also read kind of a wide diversity of opinion there where, you know, we have a protagonist who, he sucks, but he is, our main, our protagonist is a disabled person. And you don't see that in movies really ever. Very infrequently, yeah. But on top of that, you have many of the common trope-y issues with disabled characters, beginning with the fact that Sam Worthington is not a disabled actor, and it kind of goes on from there. I would be really curious to hear listener perspective on on that because I think the movie like the movie doesn't really touch on it that much after the first act and which I think is for the you know could could be seen as for the best where James Cameron doesn't appear to have

very much insight into that topic but again like who's telling the story who is advising and um how does that bear out and who's the character for exactly exactly yes jake not like the other colonizers sully it seems like that choice was made in the story because when you're writing a screenplay i don't know if you know this but i do have a master's degree in screenwriting from boston university i would never bring it up on my own but you make choices about your characters especially your protagonist to motivate and justify other things that will happen in the movie so it feels to me like we need to get him from the start of the movie where he's a human white guy to the end of the movie, he's going to be a member of the Omotakaya people. What qualities or what things can we attribute to this character to justify that making sense by the end of the movie for him to want to permanently be an

Omotakaya person. And I feel like the only reason that he is a disabled character in the movie is to be like, well, that, well, that'll be one of the things that justifies him making this choice. Yeah, I was about to say that because one of the things now speaking also as an able bodied person was that watching the film for the first time. I think another reason why I like Stephen Lang's character, even though he's the bad guy, was, you know, he tells him, I look out for my own. If you do this, I promise you, you'll get your legs back, you know. And he says, quote unquote, your real legs. Right.

And it's like, you know, for me, you know, who's not disabled or doesn't have a disability, I'm like, fuck, yeah. You know, these things are aliens and your planet's dying so get your legs and do it and save the planet and go home hell yes you know and i feel like a lot of people probably felt the same way until you meet the navi and you realize that this is bullshit and he's colonizer and stuff so at first on paper it makes sense however if that was the case if it was do this for me get your legs back the downside should have been if you don't do this you remain disabled but there's no like lose lose he's like okay so i still have my body at the end you know so well that's that's that's implying that like your punishment is that you stay disabled as if being disabled is a punishment is a punishment

so there's all these like yucky implications and also it's like we've received no indication that like Jake Sully is unhappy as like as a disabled man. Like that's not something that we ever hear him speak on in any, like, it's just people are making that assumption about him, which is a very common ableist thing to do, but it's like the story doesn't challenge it really. Like, well,

of course this is true. Right. At the beginning of the movie, he does make a comment where he's like, uh, they can fix it if you have the money because american health care in the future is still dog shit so he is disabled because he's broke but still it's like that should have been a bigger driving point if that was going to be the thing that motivates him

to do the thing right i mean yeah it's like okay i guess there's commentary on like the horrible state of america of like american health care slash like veteran benefits sure which is like yes still abysmal but yeah the the way that was handled and then again and i'm speculating here but i think the choice was made to make him disabled to like narratively justify like him wanting to remain in this avatar body by the end of the movie that's just like not the representation people and i you know i'm also speaking as an able-bodied person here but it's my understanding that people with disabilities want to see themselves represented on screen i mean obviously far more than they already are and in a way that just normalizes their experience rather than being some like justification

for something else some other narrative choice that's gonna happen yeah and that's not what's happening in this movie no it's being like weaponized as a plot point like it's just and like a lazy plot point at that yeah which is just like a mess i guess i'm i can't say that the movie is necessarily above that behavior. Obviously, we've been talking for two hours. But yeah, I would be curious to know. Because I also don't want to ignore disabled writers who did enjoy how Jake Sully was characterized. Of course. I have one last just quick thing that i want to touch on

really quickly hearkening back to the romance between jake and nateri um yeah i want to talk about nateri in general because we've been like in general praising her like and you know in different places but yeah yeah and so the thing i liked about the romance and it's really just that like he's like i have chosen a woman but she needs to choose me. And she's like, yeah, I did already. You goof. So I liked that, like, she's given and like, that just shows how low the bar is for a female character being given agency in her own romantic life is something that I'm like, oh my goodness, that happened? I feel like we've really been handing it to James Cameron for doing that in a way that's like, yeah, that should just be kind of standard. But, you know, in Titanic, it's a period piece. You're like, oh, wow, women didn't have choices back then.

How subversive. But then it's like, why are the Navi monogamous? Okay, I had the same thought because she's like, and now we had sex one time and now we're mated for life. And, and again, I, I don't, I'm not an expert on this, but it's my understanding that like hetero monogamy is a very European Christian thing. And I'm not knocking monogamy or anything, but things like heteronormativity and the quote-unquote gender binary and long-term monogamous pair bonding, these are all constructs

that, again, from my understanding, a lot of communities around the world, including many indigenous ones, don't participate in because it's never been a part of their culture or cultural evolution. I am literally reading this book called Reclaiming Two Spirits and I'm like just a couple of chapters in but they're already talking about like how all over the United States in general like there are so much there's so much evidence of lgbtq relationships and polygamous relationships not even just like one man with multiple wives which does happen but like a man with multiple husbands and so to see it like done like this in a movie that is about connection and about like you know this network

of people and stuff like that why would she just be limited to one person that she would be in love with yeah why would this like why would they mate for life right when that's such a construct of like like such a euro christian centric construct it's because he's a white guy because james cameron is a white guy right it's like it does feel like a james cameron thing where he's like he is i don't even know like i was like who even knows how conscious like how hard he even thought about this because it's just like that's what happens when you have like he's giving like he's giving the navi elements of the oppressor in a way that is like what what who yeah and for what and for what and then gives us a little peanut of like well

but nateria got to choose her partner uh that you have to marry after having sex with one time and we're like yes girl power it's amazing yeah so i take it all back i'm not rooting for their relationship she just should have snagged the white guy and then that should have been jake like wait what oh i just fucked a cat with my braid tentacle thing the one moment with jake and natiri that i did like was when she finds him in human form and she's holding him and then they say I see you and you're like oh he sucks in all forms

but she accepts him in all forms wow so nice it is a good scene it was good but no Neytiri in general I love her I think that they could have done more to characterize her. We don't know very much.

She gets reduced to the relationship at certain moments. Not all the time, because like you were saying earlier, Allie, she is, I think, realistically and tactically and emotionally most connected to her family and to Pandora and when jake fucks with her family and fucks with pandora he's cut out of her life that totally makes sense but there are sequences of the movie where they're on good turn like when things are going well all we know about nateri is in relation to jake when things aren't going well she gets these character moments but they're also in reaction to Jake.

More often than not. Is there a scene in this movie where two Navi characters talk to each other and Jake or Grace are not there? Navi Bechtel test. Navi Bechtel test. It's when Neytiri and her dad are talking to each other when he's dying.

He tells her to protect the people but then jake shows up but then jake shows up but then he still bulldozes into the scene hey let me touch your shoulder to comfort you and she's like get the fuck away from me you asshole jake loves to insert himself you're like dude i do appreciate that umteria's never framed as a damsel. She saves Jake several times. She saves herself several times. She's a competent warrior. Kills the bad guy. She

kills the Colonel. That is good. She should have been the hero and she should have been Turok Makto. Yes. Instead of Jake. She should have been taruk mctow yes instead of jake she should have been that if anything was going to like be the big motivator to unite the clans it should have been like we lost home tree this is what's at stake i'm getting that fucking dragon i think that would

have been more like that would have put her people in a better like more comfortable place too of like yeah that why would it why would it be drag this movie should have been more like the movie prey where it's told from her point of view where she is like the ultimate warrior where she fights the aliens who came from the sky and fucking kills their ass i guess it's just one of them in prey but still but still but still yeah that would have been great that would have been better i know fuck jake if jake was gonna do anything he should have like sabotaged the base from the inside yeah while nateri was getting shit done because that would have subverted everything i think like if that would have been like okay our hero fucked up and he ain't shit so now he's in jail and if he wants

to contribute he can do something with his own people inside of jail instead of the base and then he should have gone back to earth and it's like sorry for you that it the earth is basically like mad max fury road but whose fault was that and it's not our problem yeah that's because humans fucked it up um is there anything anyone else wants to talk about i feel like we've only scratched the surface but i just wanted to breeze through really quickly a few other um women in the movie uh we've talked about grace i i you know like she's it's a sigourney weaver character so at the end of the day i'm like nice but i do think like it's worth kind of repeating that her character you know it's like on the surface

level it's good that you know our highest most respected scientist is a woman who seems to have a lot of control influence respect woman instead on the other hand she is ethically compromised and no one ever wants to bring that up and complicit in genocide i do like her relationship with jake though because you rarely see that mentor uh student relationships between men and women where the woman is the teacher and the man is like her subordinate and there's like a genuine respect and camaraderie that's i wish he would have had that with nateri also yes instead of whatever the fuck because snag the white guy and then go get married fuck it or don't get married just fucking fuck monogamy and marriage just have just fuck but yeah i that's a that's a good point

and also that like i feel like when there is a woman in the mentor role the like male mentee constantly brings it up of like i can't believe i'm learning from i feel like i'm learning from my mom like but it's just like a an inherently respectful and like i feel like I'm learning from my mom. But it's just like an inherently respectful. And I feel like these are elements of the James Cameron playbook that he's generally really good with. Same goes for, it's a pretty diverse team, the science team. And you also have, again, she's like, whatever. The Michelle Rodriguez character is so underwritten and so underdeveloped that it's like, we're just going to have her say fast and furious lines in this movie. But a very highly motivated character who has a whole arc about realizing that the military industrial complex is bad, actually.

But she is like she is, you know, without that character, a lot of, you know, Jake's return to Pandora would not have been possible. So the whole third act wouldn't have happened. Yeah. Trudy, like, is a very important character for someone with very little screen time. I wish that they didn't blow her up. Yeah. Yeah. Trudy is what Giovanni Ribisi's character isn't because Giovanni Ribisi knows that something's wrong and he continues to do it and Trudy knows that it's wrong and she's like fuck this I didn't sign up for this

which we kind of did but you did you technically did but maybe you didn't know exactly what you're signing up for because we can script people very very young and it's fucked up uh but I did I did generally like that character. Again, very broad James Cameron-y writing, but very easily could have been cast as a man and was not, which I think is, again, I feel like we're handing it to James Cameron for nothing, but most male auteur directors don't do that.

He did make Titanic, though, so we've got to really hand it to him for a lot of stuff um shout out norm kind of just for no reason but i'm just like sure he was in bones he's a sweetie he's a sweetie also complicit in genocide uh so there you go yeah norm originally in the deleted scenes was supposed to be the jake sully character as far as like oh well we've got a scientist who's not threatening and maybe he's going to be the one to connect with the navi and then jake just steals his job and that's why he's pissed off and there's another deleted scene where sute it's after jake hunts and is a successful hunter or whatever and then they party and they're eating and drinking and stuff like that and sute is drinking and he and jake get into like a drinking competition

he sits there he's kind of drunk he's like i never thought a sky person would be brave he's like you guys fight far away and like those machines and stuff like that you fight at a distance i never thought one of them could be brave and they had like a bonding moment and makes that fucking scene where he's like you made it with her like that much worse because it's like dude i thought we were bros and then you just fucking and then they actually have a proper fight scene in the deleted scenes and that one should have been good and that should have been in the re-release and it's not and i'm salty about it because he would have won he would have won oh yeah oh yeah they keep disrespecting my man that entire fucking movie

well yeah well have we reached the end? I think we have. We have. What a journey. And yet I feel like there's still so much. I know. Oh, boy. What a journey. Does this movie pass the Bechdel test?

Does it? Oh, my gosh. I forgot to pay attention. I can't really. There was a few that I flagged that I was like, maybe. There was a few close passes because like Grace does speak to Natiri's mother but it's always

I don't think that it does and now I have scholarly journal BechtelTest.com up and the closest I can get to someone effectively making an argument because they're always talking about Jake and the best argument I've been able to find was like,

well, Grace talks to Awa at the end. And I was like, well, okay. But that conversation doesn't even happen on screen. Yeah. And she's literally telling Jake about it. So Jake ruins this whole movie. He also prevents it from passing the Bechdel test. Congratulations, Jake Sully, you asshole. Damn it. And A. Terry doesn't passing the bechdel test congratulations jake sully you

asshole damn it and a terry doesn't pass the ali nadi test so god damn it damn it god damn it son of a bitch jake um well what about our nipple scale though a scale of zero to five nipples where we rate the movie based on looking at it through an intersectional feminist lens um i would say oh okay here we go james cameron he had good intentions i think with this movie he tried he tried he wanted to tell a story about anti-capitalism anti-colonialism anti-military industrial complex and those messages are clear however when you dig a little deeper and you look at a lot of the implications of what's happening on screen you realize that it's a white savior story about a white guy who fails upward into somehow being a part of this community which if this was a movie made by indigenous people i don't think that would have ever happened like that would have never been written that way that would have is not how that story would have panned

out it would have just been told from you know nateri's point of view jake would have just been told from, you know, Neytiri's point of view. Jake would have been eliminated from the story in general. It would just be a story told from the Omotakaya people's perspective. And that would be the movie. So intentions good, though they might have been. A lot of marks were missed as far as indigenous representation, as far as disability representation. And to some extent, I think the representation of women as well, because you could kind of easily make the argument that Notary is presented as a plot trophy for Jake Sully doing the right thing. A prize to be won. She has more agency than that, though.

She does? Yeah. a prize to be won she has more agency than that though she does she does still yeah but but again if this movie uh in our rewrite that we're gonna do um nateri would be which first of all it'll be on ice frozen 2 avatar the way of ice we'll we'll find a way to work minions into the story and shrek will make an appearance obviously minions would have worked for the colonel minions would have worked for the colonel for sure um anyway we're gonna do a rewrite but no the the story should be nate teary story like she should be the protagonist jake sully didn't even need to be there. So with all of that in mind, I'll give the movie two, two and a half. That's kind of where I'm at.

Nipples. I'll land on two and a half because at the end of the day, I still had a damn good time watching this movie. The movie felt like a movie. The movie feels like a movie. So I'll give one to nateri i'll give one to moat her mother and i'll give my half nipple to pandora mother awa um i guess i'll meet you there i kind of want to dog it to two i don't really know why i don't have a good reason go with your gut but i'm going with aw on this one if that's what your braid tentacles are telling you go with it i guess i i just saw this really funny tweet while you're

um it's uh james cameron standing at the avatar 2 premiere it's just him standing in front of the words tar and it's like even james cam Cameron had to see what all the fuss is about and went to see tar. Okay. That's very good. Moving right along. I think that, again, yes, I think that James Cameron expresses certain themes very effectively here in a way that you never see even really attempted in blockbuster movies. He's always been good with this. He's made entire movies that are explicitly critical of the LAPD.

He is generally good. I think he could have been better in this movie, honestly, about putting women in prominent and motivated and interesting action roles. I don't think this is the movie where he does it best, but he does it to some extent. He's doing the things that he does well, well. And then when he's out of his depth, it's very obvious. Yeah. Yeah. But but I think that like it's I don't know, my experience of this movie has been so kind of colored by the changing ways that we've talked about it in the

13 years it's existed. It feels like it's been around for fucking ever and i think that you know there's a lot to love about this movie that we've been encouraged not to love because of how just media in general seems to view indigenous stories and centering indigenous characters in any way shape or form and that's not to say that this movie does it particularly well right so i don't know i guess i'll go two and a half because that was mostly complimentary uh that said it doesn't pass the factual test and or the ali nadi test you know and only one character passes the ali nadi test right but not the not the main woman that you'd expect not a teary and um you don't get really any you know it's too much

jake sully you don't get any interior look into what the what the omedakaya are thinking when jake sully isn't there which is i think a huge missed opportunity and that's like supposedly if james camera wants to make a movie that effectively addresses, you know, indigenous issues and concerns and culture, then why is Jake Sully always there? Is my question. Two and a half nipples. I'm giving one to Neytiri. I'm giving one to Neytiri's mommy. Why do I have the Wikipedia page for tar up?

Oh, it's because of the... Okay. Giving one to... I'm not giving one to tar. I'm giving one to Nateri, one to Mowat. And I will give the last half to... Ewa. Perfect.

Beautiful. Okay. So if you were to ask me back back when it first came out i probably would have gave it four four nipples all four of them but uh now you know after enough time and especially after talking and communicating with other indigenous people especially indigenous creatives. And now that I've seen better, I know that we could do better. And there's absolutely no reason why indigenous people shouldn't be allowed to tell stories of this scale. Yes.

You know? So I feel like I'm going to give it three. I'll just commit and give it three. Hell yeah. Because I did. And I did enjoy it. hell yeah for you because i did and i did enjoy it the stuff that i enjoyed i still very much enjoy i think it's beautiful and i think like the special effects and everything and the fact that the water wasn't real like blew my mind the fact that it remotely holds up is so wild i know it looks it looks so good and uh but the aliens now as someone who

smashes aliens in mass effect uh for three games i wish that the aliens were to that caliber of hot or at least because the characters in mass effect have uh a lot more to offer as far as like their own stories their own histories, their own opinions on things and all that stuff. It's a Bioware game, so you're allowed to go deep. You couldn't go deep in this one. And there were too many human characters,

not enough Na'vi characters. Jake should have had a couple Na'vi friends outside of Neytiri and outside of his bromance with sute just to like kind of build on why he switches sides so fast and feels this connection to these people instead of just like well i'm here i'm here and blessed by god so love me. Oh, God. But, yeah, so I'll still give it the three stars. Three stars.

Three nipples. Three pasties. Nice. One's going to go to Neytiri. One is going to go to Moat for passing the alienati test. And then the last one's going to go to Sute because he should at least have one regular-sized nipples because his are so small. On top of everything else wrong with it help the guy out i have to give my man some dignity because he got almost done in

this movie yeah it's true he did have a great death scene but that's not saying much yeah well ali thank you as always for being here. It's been an absolute delight. A three-timer. We love to see it. There is one last thing I want to shout out while I'm here, though, because this is very important. So this has taken place in Winnipeg right now in Canada. And since we're talking about Indigenous people, let's actually talk about the real ones that exist today. But there is a situation happening right now where the daughters of Morgan Harris, who is an Indigenous woman in Canada who was murdered by a serial killer, along with four other Indigenous women. They believe that their bodies are in the uh the prairie green landfill the rcmp so the canadian police told them that they believe that that's where the serial killer dumped their bodies

and they're refusing to investigate because they said that it isn't feasible so they're essentially telling these girls that they have to make peace with their mother staying in a dumpster and not getting a burial. And these girls are fighting to push back and search the landfill. So I really wanted to just raise awareness to that and get the word out there because I heard about it two days ago and it's just not making as much waves as it should be. Do you know if there's any kind of go fund me or anything to support uh i will definitely look it up and send it your way if i do but we'll post it in the show notes if we'll at least link to a story for context as well that's yes fucking unconscionable i was seeing what you were posting about it and yeah also did not hear about it before you said something yep so if we could do anything good i mean like avatar is great

but people are going to go see avatar too and not enough people are talking about this so i'm definitely yes spread the word thank you for that absolutely is there anything you'd like to plug as far as your own work? Well, I am kind of limiting my Twitter access, but I'm Allie Naughty on Twitter. I'm Allie Naughty on Instagram and TikTok. I'm back on Tumblr because I don't like Twitter. Especially now. Especially now. But I've been more active on the Allie Naughty account which is still the ala test because that's how a lot of people know it so i keep it there and my sisters and i opened

up a boutique called never starlings in honor of our mother that's so cool check it out buy some stuff very cool yeah wait that's huge for me okay i can't wait yeah i'll send that to you too oh my gosh please uh and come back anytime please yeah wonderful oh and uh you can uh follow us on instagram and twitter at bechtelcast. And speaking of Twitter, there's a pretty good tweet that we found. Oh, okay. It feels like an end of a Daily Zeitgeist episode. Like, tweets you like.

But this was one that really just... It's from the LA Times review of Avatar Way of Water, which is a quite good review. It's getting quite good early reviews, folks. We haven't seen it yet but the critics are soft raving about the way of water but this is from justin chang uh the film critic over at the la times um he references how avatar 2 is about

jake sully being a loving father in the second movie and then he says and i quote you could say he's a felice navi dad oh it's so good oh twitter's still horrible but there are there are moments there are moments and that was my moment. Love it. That really meant a lot to us. You can also follow us on Instagram where I did not receive that information but it is, you know, it's another platform where we're at.

We are also going on tour, Reminder West Coast. Yes. You can find that in the link in our bios and the link in this description as well. We're going to be in la san francisco portland and seattle at the end of january into the beginning of february more info about that at the link and you can join our patreon aka matreon what the hell is that caitlin oh my gosh it's a

place where you can get two bonus episodes of the Bechtelcast. Usually just Jamie and I goofing, goofing, goofing, but we're also having awesome discourse. And you get access to the back catalog of well over 100 bonus episodes. So if you've run out of main feed episodes, scoot on over to patreon.com slash Bechtelcast. And it's December, so we're doing our cursed holiday movie roundup we

have already released our Netflix original Lindsay Lohan falling for Christmas a movie where a little girl's Christmas witch is for Lindsay Lohan to fall off of a mountain correct and we'll also be doing while you were sleeping and I also I was getting excited today because january is the pinocchio wars episode and so we just we have a hell of a time over there join the community join join the the movement that is the matreon um and finally it's the holidays so if you're looking for gifts last minute gifts you can go to our store over at tpublic.com slash the bechtel cast we actually have some new designs new designs just came out pretty fun feminist icon paddington shrekian which came up in this episode yeah it's canon to the show it is and um also just one that

i kind of wanted to make for myself that we have referenced on the show, which is the Flobber Mambo by Danny Elfman. Yeah. So that plus classic designs, including our holiday baby Grinch designs. Of course. So head over there, get some gifts, and live your damn life. Exactly. And hey, Jamie, Allie, I see you. I see you too.

Bye. Bye. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nickname Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore.

The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrue Crime Plus, only on Apple Podcasts. Hey everyone, Jake Storielli here from John Boy Media. I want to tell you about my podcast, Wake and Jake. I've been a sports nut my whole life and there's nothing I love more than talking about it. If you're a sports fan, Wake and Jake is the place for you. Covering all the hot topics from the sports world. A lot of baseball, a lot of post-season coverage, mock drafts, awards, guest interviews, all of it.

New episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Come watch along on the Wake and Jake YouTube channel or listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.