Avatar is a movie about how imperialism is bad, and then it became the highest-grossing film of all time. The irony is so thick you could build an oil pipeline through it. Michael Parenti once wrote about how Hollywood gives us the appearance of dissent while delivering the substance of conformity and Avatar is the perfect case study.
In his analysis of media and propaganda Parenti argued that even “anti-establishment” films ultimately reinforce the structures they claim to critique. They let the audience feel righteous without ever asking them to change anything. They are catharsis without consequence and avatar is the purest example of this phenomenon in Hollywood’s cinematic history
On the surface, Avatar presents itself as a straightforward anti-colonial allegory. White man goes to foreign land. White man learns the ways of the noble savage. White man falls in love with the land and the people. White man turns against his own kind to defend the oppressed. It is Dances with Wolves with blue cat people and a larger CGI budget.
And the surface message is clear: imperialism is bad. The Resources Development Administration (RDA) is an evil corporation that wants to destroy a vibrant ecosystem for a shiny rock called unobtanium (is it only me who thinks the name is kind of ironic like the un obtainable rock lmfaoo). The white man is willing to commit genocide to get it. The Na’vi are innocent, harmonious, connected to their land in ways the humans cannot understand. We are supposed to root for the Na’vi. We are supposed to feel disgust at the RDA.
And I do. But the film does not go far enough. It shows us the bad of colonialism and the violence, the destruction, the greed. But it also, perhaps unintentionally, shows us the ugly of how colonization changes the colonized. And it completely sidesteps the good that colonizers always use to justify themselves.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The bad is obvious. The RDA is a caricature of corporate evil mustache-twirling villains who blow up a sacred tree because it is sitting on top of money(this is America).
This is how most people understand colonialism: bad guys do bad things to good people. Easy to digest. Easy to condemn.
The good is what the film does not show. Because every colonial project in history has justified itself with a good the railroad, the medicine, the schools, the “civilizing mission.” The British in India built infrastructure. The French in West Africa built hospitals. The Americans… well. We will get to them. Avatar skips this entirely because it would complicate the narrative. Parenti would recognize this immediately the film gives us a sanitized version of evil, one that does not require us to grapple with the fact that imperialism has always come wrapped in benevolent rhetoric. The road to genocide is paved with good intentions, and Avatar refuses to show the paving stones.
The ugly is what the film shows without meaning to. The Na’vi do not win by being Na’vi. They win by adopting the tools and tactics of the colonizer. Jake Sully, a human in an avatar body, leads them. He uses human military strategy. The final battle is won not through Na’vi spirituality but through human-style coordinated warfare. The Na’vi win by becoming more like the humans who invaded them.
This is the tragedy that the film does not acknowledge: to resist the empire, you must become the empire.
Even in victory, the Na’vi lost something irreplaceable. Jake Sully a white man becomes the leader of the Na’vi. A Toruk Makto. The chosen one. The messiah. The white savior who unites the clans and leads them to victory. This is the most enduring colonial fantasy of all: that the native people need an outsider to save them. Parenti wrote extensively about how media naturalizes hierarchies and what is more naturalized than the idea that a white American marine knows better than an entire species how to save their world?
The Na’vi adapted. They learned English (or rather, they learned to understand the humans without the humans learning to understand them a familiar asymmetry). They used human weapons against human helicopters. They coordinated across clans in ways that their pre-contact society apparently never required. But what did they lose in the process? The innocence that the film spent the first two hours romanticizing. The very thing that made them “Na’vi” their isolation, their connection to nature, their otherness was sacrificed the moment they decided to fight back with human methods.
You cannot unlearn what the colonizer teaches you. Even if you win, you are no longer who you were.
The English language is violence, I hotwired it
I got a hold of the master’s tools and got dialed in
- Billy Woods - Jumpscare (GOLLIWOG)
The American Question
The RDA is not from a generic “Earth.” It is American. The soldiers have American accents. The corporation follows American corporate logic. The helicopters are Apache helicopters painted in military green. The film is not subtle about this. And it should not be.
Because America is the most successful colonial project in history. The United States did not just colonize land it colonized the idea of colonialism. Manifest Destiny. The frontier. The “city on a hill.” The belief that expansion is not just a right but a moral obligation. This is the same logic that drives the RDA. The same logic that drove the forced removal of Native Americans. The same logic that drives American foreign policy to this day.
Parenti, in his book The Face of Imperialism says that American empire has always presented itself as benevolent spreading democracy, freedom, and markets while its actual function is to extract resources and maintain control. This is exactly what the RDA does. The film shows us the extraction and the control. But it does not connect the dots to the real world where American corporations and the American military perform the same functions daily, with the same self-justifying rhetoric.
The Na’vi are not just a fictional alien species. They are a stand-in for every indigenous people who has faced a technologically superior invader and had to make the impossible choice: assimilate, resist, or die.
The Native Americans who survived European colonization did so by adapting. They learned English. They adopted Christianity. They fought with guns instead of bows. They formed alliances with one colonizer against another. And in doing so, they preserved their existence but lost parts of their identity. The same choice the Na’vi face. The same choice every colonized people has faced since the first ship arrived on a shore that was not empty.
Parenti would say: the film gives you an enemy you can hate the corporation, the military, the bulldozer operator so you do not have to hate the system that produces them. The RDA is a bad apple. The implication is that without the RDA, everything would be fine. But that the tree is rotten at the root, not just at one branch.
The Fetishization
Here is where the film reveals its deepest contradiction. Avatar shows us the horror of imperialism. But it also fetishizes it. Pandora is a fantasy of the pre-colonial world abundant, beautiful, spiritually pure. The Na’vi are the noble savage updated for the 21st century. They are everything the West has destroyed and now wishes it could consume in a different way.
Parenti wrote about how the ruling class uses media to manufacture consent. But Avatar goes further it manufactures dissent that then loops back into consent. You pay $15 to feel angry about colonialism. You buy the Blu-ray. You watch the sequels. You consume the resistance. The film becomes part of the same entertainment-industrial complex that the RDA represents in the story.
That is the fetishization of imperialism. Not just that we tell stories about it but that we enjoy them. We consume the pain of colonized peoples as spectacle. We feel righteous without acting righteous. We leave the theater feeling like we have done something when we have done nothing.
In All Honesty
Avatar is a comfortable movie about an uncomfortable subject. It lets you feel righteous anger at imperialism without ever asking you to examine your own complicity. It lets you cheer for the blue people without acknowledging that you if you are reading this in English, on a computer, in a country that probably does not belong to its original inhabitants are the beneficiary of the same forces that the film condemns.
The film cost $237 million to make. It was produced by a studio owned by a global media conglomerate. It was made using resources extracted from the same system it claims to critique. And it became the most successful film of all time.
if you have read Parenti or even heard his lectures you would not be surprised. Because Parenti understood that the system does not need to suppress criticism it just needs to contain it. Give people a story that makes them feel like rebels, and they will never become actual rebels. The catharsis replaces the action.
The Na’vi won in the movie.
But Pandora is a fiction. And we are still here, in the real world, watching the sequel.
Rest in Peace Michael John Parenti (1933–2026)
Author’s Note
Maybe I am being paranoid and have read into this too much, but it’s been such a long time since I have written something like this so that might be it but was fun writing this, maybe next i might right about something completely unrelated, cause while it might seem like that the pattern definitely exists