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LIKE POCAHONTAS ON DRUGS: AVATAR AND ADAPTATION
Joyce Goggin
Earlier this year, I conducted an experiment with our in-coming first year students to help determine their language capabilities before the semester began. This involved students writing an essay on one of a selection of popular films that included Fight Club, Bridget Jones ’s Diary and Gone Baby Gone. The essay question on Avatar asked students to comment on the widespread criticism that James Cameron’s 3D extravaganza directly “ripped-off” Walt Disney’s Pocahontas, and to explain why this matters, or not. I was pleasantly surprised to find that none of the students who chose this question seemed to think that the derivation of Cameron’s blockbuster was of any import. Although students were all familiar with blog entries claiming that “ Avatar is a Pocahontas Rip-off’ as well as with the many obvious borrowings, including those I pointed out to them like the palette and the mise-en-scene, none claimed to care about the question of the film’s antecedents. Indeed, even the widely circulated article from the New York Times, arguing that Avatar is just another example of “The White Messiah Complex in Movies” didn’t seem to cause them much concern.1
In the present context, namely a collection that addresses the topic of “expanding adaptations,” I think my students’ lack of concern that Avatar might simply be a “rip-off’ of Pocahontas, or that Cameron merely offered a hyped-up version of the Disney cartoon, speaks volumes. First, as both myself and Thomas Leitch argued last fall at the fourth annual meeting of the Association for Adaptation Studies, perhaps the time has come to truly put aside the postulated notion that the “book was better than the film” once and for all. Indeed, I have yet to find this notion contained anywhere, including even in the first work on this topic, namely George Bluestone’s Novels into Film. Rather than forwarding the kind of notions about originality that one might expect from a work written in 1959, Bluestone actually argues for the specificity of each medium and concludes that “cinematic and literary forms resist
1 The following are the basic tenets of the White Messiah Complex in Movies : “A manly young adventurer goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit, meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. He emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization. In short order, he’s the most awesome member of their tribe : he has sex with their hottest babe. He learns to jump through the jungle and ride horses. It turns out that he’s even got more guts and athletic prowess than they do”. The White Messiah then, of course, saves the more “primitive” civilization. See Brooks, http :// www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html ?_r=0
