It's no secret that the success of the movie Avatar is driving conservatives ape shit bonkers, as noted in LA Times and Chicago Tribune. Most conservative critiques I've seen riff on the film's undisguised animus against corporate imperialism raping land and indigenous cultures in pursuit of money and power. After all if those aren't things that a conservative can love then they ought to go out and hang tea-bags or give Michael Steele some love.
But now NYT columnist David Brooks writes what he hopes is an intellectual sneak attack to engage those pesky suburban liberals and their supposed white guilt complexes. The column titled "The Messiah Complex is alive and well" draws a direct comparison with other movies that may or may not show a white outsider coming to the rescue of an indigenous culture threatened by western imperialism. He lists A man Called Horse, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, and At Play in the Fields Of the Lord. Although in the last film the "messiah" is a displaced part-American Indian whose native roots and western heritage internalizes the outward struggle.
Brooks wants us to cynically reject the anti-corporate and pro-environmental messages of the film so we can feel superior to everyone not seeing this film as based on western superiority leading both sides of the battle. Brooks is so enmeshed in this feeling of superiority that he purposely ignores that in each film the converted hero has rejected western teachings as much as possible and has been reborn into a new awareness or in the case of Avatar, literally into a new body.
Progressives need to use the opening supplied by Avatar to connect with less politically active Americans. The corporations have their Avatar tie-ins, so why not us too? The messages obviously resonate with a huge number of Americans and that is precisely what bothers the conservatives so damn much. If we can cut through the MSM haze and simply market the progressive cause as being like the Na'vi and remind them the republicans are like the RDA Corporation raping Pandora then liberal Hollywood wins again.