After the usual right-wing vapors over the anti-capitalist and pagan implications of David Cameron’s Avatar, rightist David Brooks has expropriated the left-wing critique of the film as a White Messiah fable. Echoing Haiti-born Ezili Dantò’s widely disseminated critiques of the film, Brooks castigates the film’s hypocrisy that, while it fulfills what he calls the “formula” of “loincloth-clad good guys sticking it to the military-industrial complex,” it is a “racial fantasy par excellence,” in the tradition of Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai. In such films, Brooks reminds us, “[n]atives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.” The controversy has spread and is now the subject of an AP article by Jesse Washington.
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