Avatar Movie Analysis: Clichés and the Role of Female Characters

For the ethnography assignment, I went to a screening of Avatar in Sackville on the Mount Allison campus when I went to visit my friend by a car two weekends ago for his 21st birthday. The screening was free but held in one of the seminar rooms on the Mount Allison campus as part of one of the clubs my friend is a part of. In Avatar, Naytiri, the Na'vi princess and Dr. Grace Augustine are shown as strong females who lead their people with dignity and a respect that's well deserved. These types of strong female leads are quite prevalent in many of James Cameron's works, for example, in The Terminator, Sarah Connor is just one more in the long line of alpha females James Cameron portrays in his movies; giving more authority, strength, power and highlighting the resourcefulness women have in saving not only their family but humanity as we know it. Or are they?

The success of their emotional journeys which they seemingly undertake on their own accord, is still entirely dependent on a male "hero" if you will - Jake Sully, the handicapped brainlet who pervades Pandora, attempts to learn the Na'vi ways (and learns them better than the Na'vi themselves seemingly, being the first Na'vi in centuries to tame a dragon bird somehow), eventually ends up marrying Naytiri, the princess of the Na'vi and leads a war against his own people as the leader of the Na'vi, perpetuating the stereotype of the male hero getting the princess in the end. In the end, the male is still the "chosen one" in Avatar, like in The Terminator where even though Sarah Connor is a strong brilliant woman, in the end, it is John Connor who is the chosen one. So it is to be believed that instead of the James Cameron truly developing strong women, many single mothers, who have beliefs that flip the gender stereotypes on their heads, it could instead be viewed as merely good, developed characters.

My interpretation for this behavior is as accepting the social norms, and accepting that a male character must dominate their struggles for success to occur. This is slated into society and made into a norm by everyday culture from the media, such as papers and movies, but also in day to day life where the hero is almost always a male in anything. A male firefighter, a male doctor, though females also are shown, sometimes their stories are either shown less or just don't appear as often. The most common stereotype for males that shows the most in action movies is one of the "Action Hero", who is the silent strong type who seems emotionally unavailable to all around him aside from a select few, and the only one to whom he shows his true colors is to the princess, because every action movie has one. In Avatar, for this example, it is the literal princess Naytiri, whom Jake saves multiple times before falling in love and getting together in the end as everyone expected.

This interpretation is supported by the data gathered during and after the viewing of a few key aspects: In the first scenes, which shows Jake attempting to integrate himself into a society he knows nothing of and succeeding abnormally well, I noted that the audience seemed to have no qualms with this, as did I, until I stopped myself and truly looked at it. Jake, a foreigner, enters into a land and automatically is assumed into the culture without more than a slight hiccup and does the Na'vi culture better than the Na'vi themselves. After the viewing, I asked multiple people, including my friend what kinds of stereotypes were prevalent in Avatar, and though some saw through James Cameron’s apparent feminism and saw the generalities that were present in his work, about 90% (18/20 interviewed), saw it as a simple enjoyable movie that had no real social impact. In conclusion, in the normative society, heroes are almost always males, and no matter what they do, whether it be to pervade upon other races, or ruin towns and cities, they always come out on top with a “princess” if you will aside them. Even in James Cameron’s work, which is seen by feminists as very progressive, has very male eccentric undertones.