Avatar and Snow White: Technology-Enhanced Interdependence

Fox Films’ Avatarmakes a blatant comment on humans’ exploitation of the environment, arguing against “fair use” and economic approaches to ecology that promote the over-consumption of resources, especially the mining of a profitable mineral, unobtainium. Humans have left their own dying Earth to rip the mineral from the core of another planet, Pandora, where its people the Na’vi, illustrate how to build effective interdependent relationships with nonhuman nature in a biotic community that sustains them all.

Avatar, on the other hand, seems to reflect the same focus on interdependence found in the 7 minute cartoon, Molly Moo Cow and the Butterflies. As in Molly Moo Cow, nonhuman nature must combat exploitation to maintain interdependent relationships, not between a cow and her butterflies, as in Moo Cow, but between the Na’vi people and the humans who invade their world to extract unobtainable beneath their home tree. Although 40% of the film is live-action, the other 60% relies on photo-realistic CGI using motion-capture technology, linking the film explicitly with animated shorts and features that came before it.

Like the first animated feature, Snow White, Avatar awes its audience with the effects produced by ground-breaking technologies. It is, according to Roger Ebert, “a technical breakthrough” that “like Star Wars … employs a new generation of special effects.” Multi-plane animation technology used in Snow White transformed the “ more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings” (Boone) to produce “depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in `live action’ pictures, sprang into being for cartoons,” according to Andrew R. Boone’s 1938 Popular Sciencearticle. Boone describes the “novel picture-taking device” used to produce this effect, which looks like a printing press and “consists of four vertical steel posts, each carrying a rack along which as many as eight carriages may be shifted both horizontally and vertically. On each carriage rides a frame containing a sheet of celluloid, on which is painted part of the action or background.”

With the addition of Technicolor film stock, the images of Snow White were breath-taking, just as the world produced for Avatarinspires awe. Using motion-capture technology, James Cameron transferred live-action movements to CGI. He also created a new “picture-taking device” for the film to create better 3-D effects, “a filming rig that is more advanced than anything that has gone before,” Bobbie Johnson explains in a Guardian article. According to Rigg, “The setup consists of a number of stereoscopic cameras that each use a pair of lenses built to mimic human eyes.” These techniques create a spectacularly breath-taking world in which conflicts between ecological values are resolved.   

Pandora, the world produced for Avatar, embraces interdependence and a biotic community. The Na’vi people of Pandora remain connected to plants and animals of their world. Their hair, for example, forms a bond with the horse-like creatures they ride and the banshees they fly. At night, plants light their way. Pods close up to form closed hammocks for sleeping. As Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) explains, they have a “deep connection … to the forest.” Dr. Augustine teaches them that each tree has 104 connections to each of the other trees, more connections than those in the human brain. To emphasize the interdependent nature of these connections, the Na’vi believe all the energy found in these connections is borrowed and must be returned.

Espousing fair use policies and economic approaches to ecology, human invaders disrupt these interdependent connections when they invade Pandora to extract unobtainium, a mineral that is most abundant beneath the Na’vi’s home tree. With help from Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine now gone native as an avatar, and a natural world fighting for its life, the human invaders are defeated, leaving Pandora to the Na’vi and a few chosen avatar humans. 

The film’s narrative, however, is derivative, “a weak patchwork of [Cameron’s] other films,” according Onion A.V. Club reviewer Scott Tobias, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Aliens 1986), and of films with similar references to Native Americans (see Dances with Wolves [1990]), rainforest annihilation (see Ferngully [1992] and The Emerald Forest [1985]), and battles over resources (see Tank Girl [1995], Total Recall [1990], Pale Rider [1985], and countless anti-mining and oil drilling films). For Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.Com, “for a movie that stresses how important it is for us to stay connected with nature, to keep our ponytails plugged into the life force, Avatar is peculiarly bloodless.” Although technology does overshadow the blatant environmental message on display, however, its Dances With Wolves-like pull toward interdependence attests to the continuing influence of environmental history, especially a biotic community manifested in Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and organismic approaches to ecology.

Pariah and a new Coming-of-Age Tale

By exploring individual and public memory in a search identity, Pariah responds to both Eastern Illinois University’s 2013 WHAM theme, “Women and Public Memory” and its keynote address highlighting the life and work of Margaret Sanger and Helen Keller.  Pariah,as a coming-of-age film, follows Alike (pronounced “ah-lee-kay”), a 17-year-old African American lesbian from Brooklyn, N.Y., as she learns to embrace her identity.

Many critics praise writer and director Dee Rees’s debut feature, Pariah. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calls it “vibrantly alive.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times describes it as “stirring.” And Betsy Sharkey of The Los Angeles Times defines it as “a stinging, street-smart story.”

In an interview with GLAAD, Rees explained why it was so important to tell this story on-screen: Growing up, I rarely saw my image reflected on screen.  The Color Purple and Women of Brewster Place are the few films I was allowed to watch when I was younger that touched on sexuality.  I made Pariah to portray images on screen that we hadn’t seen before, and to bring to light the experiences of gay youth of color because those stories hadn't been fully told.  The film experience is powerful because by taking you into the world of Pariah for ninety minutes, I can prove to you that we all are more alike than different.  We all have dealt with the coming of age process and figuring out how to be ourselves.

According to Rees, the film also tackles gender, sexuality, religion, and class because ”Life and relationships are layered and nuanced for everyone – regardless of race, gender, sexuality, religion or class.  No one is a supporting character in their own life, so it was important to infuse the nuance and layers of gender, sexuality, religion and class into this story because that makes it a truly authentic depiction of these characters' lives and shatters stereotypes.”

Although Pariahdoes not explicitly address environmental themes, its approach to the coming-of-age story expands a poplar genre to provide an authentic portrait of a young woman’s journey toward identity construction and acceptance. 

Labor Exploitation and the Environment in China Blue

Labor Exploitation and the Environment in China Blue

Micha X. Peled’s China Blue (2006) highlights what happens when the UN principles go awry as it most powerfully updates the Norma Rae narrative and documents the consequences 130 million peasants, mostly women, face when they leave their rural homes to make and produce clothing in Chinese urban industrial centers. The film contrasts the nearly pristine farmlands these peasants leave to the polluted and densely populated cities they go to find jobs that will help offset rural poverty faced by their family members. It also presents characters with whom we are expected to sympathize after its opening photograph of working women and their managers: Mr. Lam, the factory owner, tells his story of a rise to the middle class from a low-paying job as a farmer and a police chief, and individual female workers in his factory give a face to the masses of clothing industry laborers. Jasmine is a thread cutter, Orchid, a zipper installer in Mr. Lam’s Lifeng Factory in Shanxi.  Jenny provides public relations for this jean plant where Mr. Lam plays music to inspire these women to be the hard working and courageous Chinese citizens the lyrics describe. Working from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. when overtime begins and may run until 2:00 in the morning or later, the women struggle to maintain their quotas, so they earn the highest paycheck possible to send home to their struggling farm families.

According to Dennis Harvey’s Variety review, this individualized approach strengthens it case against such exploitation. In the opening of his review, he declares, “While sweatshop scandals have rocked the increasingly international garment industry for years, Micha Peled’s documentary China Blue makes a stronger case against worker exploitation than any news item could, simply by showing the everyday lives of some Mainland China factory girls.” These individual stories also illuminate the girls’ struggles. For example, Jasmine tells us about her family farm with ducks, goats and chickens, where they work from dawn to dusk growing soybeans and winter wheat. When she went out to work for her family, she had to travel by train two days and nights away from her home in the Sichuan region through Canton in Southern China to the Pearl River Delta.

Jasmine’s entrance into Mr. Lam’s factory highlights the conflict between her rural home and the modern industrialized city she has entered. Outside the factory, a sign reads, “China’s Famous Clothing Town—Shanxi,” introducing the town and factory’s goal to build on China’s economic reform to achieve a capitalist dream of profits. Mr. Lam, for example, moved from farm labor to police work before becoming a factory owner. He rode his bike before he could afford to buy the car he now drives. Now as an owner, Mr. Lam watches his laborers on monitors. Security cameras help maintain productivity, he explains, but it also reminds us of the boss doing the same thing in Modern Times (1936). He hires more women than men because they are “docile and obedient,” yet conditions are better at his factory than others, he claims, and Peled and his crew had unprecedented access, even though Chinese authorities did try to stop the filming several times, according to the film’s closing inter-titles.

Jasmine lives in a dormitory with other women and learns how to cope from more experienced workers including Jade and Orchid, but Jasmine’s story serves as the everywoman tale in this documentary. She serves as a conglomeration of the best and most prevalent characteristics shared by the teen girls working in the plant. The film introduces her as the second child in a culture where special requests must be made to have more than one offspring.  She disappointed her family because she too was a girl, so she is working to support them, Jasmine explains, so she accepts her situation in the factory, even when the bulletin board tells them they must work overtime and must prepare for a long night since, as a sign declares, the customer is number one. Mr. Lan believes his workers are so uneducated they cannot learn, but Jasmine, a threadcutter, keeps a diary, writing down her story and dreams, and works to repay the 100 Yuan her father gave her.

Mr. Lam so controls his workers, however, that when American and European business representatives tour the factory, they believe the laborers are happy, even though they work seven days a week with no overtime pay, and inspectors are sent to jeans factories because of public outcries. They, like the business representatives, find only hard-working laborers because factory owners get advance notice and teach the women workers what to say when they are questioned. Conditions do not improve, and in this factory, where conditions are supposedly more humane, according to the narrator and the factory’s labor, workers cannot go to the restroom during their shifts; pay decreases from 900 to 300 Yuan for quotas of 3000 pieces per day; laborers sleep only four hours or less, and the factory decides how many hours they have worked, not the punch clock. Labor organizers are in peril in this dictatorial atmosphere. With rush orders all workers work overtime to make jeans for Wal-Mart. Yet the film also tries to sympathize with Lam’s situation, as a factory owner in a developing economy. As Variety’s Harvey explains, “buyers for Western brands and store chains negotiate manufacturers like Lam down to the half-penny. The real profits are made, and kept, in first-world countries.”

Jasmine’s story personalizes these horrific conditions, revealing her reactions through the diary she continues to keep. Over the course of the fifteen weeks documented in powerful images, Jasmine faces multiple obstacles. She is fined two days’ worth of pay for sneaking out to purchase energy medicine. She and other workers go without sleep for days. She gets sick and cannot eat. She and her fellow workers must endure cold temperatures with little heat in the dormitory and sleep in their clothes. And workers only receive their paychecks after they revolt, refusing to go back to work after a meal when the order due date has nearly been reached. The film ends at week fifteen, when Jasmine, a fictional character who contains elements of several teen workers, has money in her pocket and a lighter workload because the orders are completed. To connect with the Western world she helps support, she writes a letter to the next owner of a pair of jeans she helps create and places it in a back pocket hoping they will read her message and applaud her efforts.  Even if the letter does not literally connect East with West, Jasmine’s and the other girl’s poignant personal stories evoke strong emotions from viewers. As Harvey explains, perhaps because they are “disarmingly natural on camera, their welfare becomes a real concern to the viewer as the exhaustion and ill-health wrought by brutal work stints grow apparent.”

           

Their struggles in the south China factory conflict with the images of rural farm life provided when Orchid goes home during the New Year’s celebrations. Here an extended family celebrates around a table bursting with an opulence of local delicacies. The farm provides plenty to eat, the footage tells us, and opportunities to discuss the benefits of either capitalism or communism from an open-air family feast. Instead, because of lack of funds, Jasmine remains at the factory alone with only a gold fish, except during a scant dinner hosted by Mr. Lam where a few workers win prizes while the rest sit at dark tables afraid to debate any issues whatsoever. With this powerful concentration on individual stories, China Blue “examines the plight of the world’s largest pool of cheap labor and traces its exploitation to a retail outlet near you” (Catsoulis). It also highlights the lack of economic, social, and environmental justice in a fast fashion world.

Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman

The Headless Woman 

In many ways, Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, explores the dangers of erasing both personal and historical memory as it recounts the aftermath of an accident. Driving back from a family gathering, Veronica or Vero (Maria Onetto), an elegant, middle-aged dentist, hits something (perhaps a dog? a child?) as she searches for her ringing cellphone, leaving her confused and disoriented. The film explores the mystery of this event in relation to both class and gender differences, but it also heightens the impact of these disparities by aligning them with Argentina’s public memory.

On another level, then, The Headless Woman connects Vero’s disorientation with blurred historical memories associated with Argentina’s dirty war, a seven-year campaign by the Argentine government against suspected dissidents and subversives. From 1976-1983, military juntas maintained power by secretly abducting, torturing, and killing from 10-30 thousand people, now known as “the disappeared” because their identities were virtually erased from public memory.

In an interview with Reverse Shot’s Chris Wisniewski, Martel explains this connection well: “you can have doubts about whether she kills someone or not. But the film is very clear with how she decides to deal with this possibility, and how the family and social class decide to react to the situation. There is a beautiful and at the same time horrifying mechanism in society: if you want to protect someone, you can disown his or her responsibility across his or her class. This sounds really beautiful, but it only works for some layers of society. The film reveals a blurred moment of a woman’s life, and shows how things become more secure by making certain things disappear."

In The Headless Woman, however, this bifurcation by gender, class, and ideology also extends to the natural world. The lower class characters play a peripheral role in the film as not only outside Vero’s class, but also outside the urban culture she occupies. Boys and their dog, on the other hand, occupy a more pastoral world of wild nature. They run through a forest and work in a nursery, for example. Even Vero’s servants maintain a connection to the natural world of the garden surrounding Vero’s home.

 In The Headless Woman, memory is at the center, as Vero and her middle-class family conceal evidence of her possible guilt in what could be a hit and run accident. As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian declares, “It is a masterly, disturbing and deeply mysterious film about someone who strenuously conceals from herself the knowledge of her own guilt,” but it is also a film about public loss of multiple layers of the disappeared, losses that include both human and nonhuman nature.