Is Avatar racist/anti-American/anti-monotheist?
And, perhaps most importantly, do the Na’vi eat quiche?
All topics tackled in this roundtable interview on Warren Olney’s KCRW show To The Point featuring conservative film critic Michael Medved, io9 editor Annalee Newitz, Otis College of Art & Design Film Studies Senior Lecturer Scarlet Cheng, Columbia College Professor of Philosophy Stephen Asma and yours truly.
The Times‘ Dave Itzkoff has a cool front page piece on the controversies swirling around Avatar in which I hold forth on, among other things, the use of allegory in Cameron’s films:
Ms. Keegan said that it was possible to read “The Terminator,” his breakthrough 1984 movie, as an anti-technology polemic, an anti-war film or a modern gloss on the birth of Jesus.
“Or,” she said, “ you could just watch it as a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stomps around like a robot.”
The also story quotes sci fi site io9’s editor, Annalee Newitz, who wrote one of the sharpest cultural critiques of Avatar I’ve read yet.