When James Cameron’s Avatar hit theaters in December 2009, it felt—and looked—like a revelation. A bona fide American blockbuster that considered with clear eyes the settling of the continent, Avatar’s white, Western director asked his mostly white, Western audience to confront the past cost of their present comfort: Indigenous genocide and dispossession. Cameron’s thinly veiled allegory worked precisely because it was thinly veiled, a ball-peen hammer—in the form of semi-nude blue aliens—aimed squarely at imperialism and extractive capitalism. It was about as radical as a big-budget Hollywood film could afford to be. And it was absolutely stunning to boot.
Unfortunately, Avatar: The Way of Water is a pale imitation of its predecessor. Don’t get me wrong: It is fun as hell, is somehow never boring even at 192 minutes, and looks like a million bucks (or perhaps I should say $350 million). But where The Way of Water falls short is not in its aesthetics or entertainment value—if anything, it surpasses the original in those departments—but in its message. Simply put, James Cameron is fresh out of ideas, or at least he’s out of ideas that feel fresh. The first film’s critique of planetary-scale capitalism, quite provocative for a mainstream movie in 2009, seems rather familiar in 2022. Likewise, the rat race for valuable off-Earth metals that the inaugural movie depicted has been outdone by reality in a decade when Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk talk openly about their very real aspirations to strip mine the solar system.
Most regrettably, Cameron’s metaphorical musings on Indigenous history—which earned both praise and accusations of “white saviorism” upon the first film’s release—have been merely warmed over the second time around. In The Way of Water, Cameron doubles down on the Indigenous caricatures. But unlike his prior film, which balanced its more problematic stereotypes with an anti-colonial message that at least had some teeth, this new film is thoroughly Disneyfied. It is a long, saccharine love letter to the myth of the “ecological Indian.”
Popularized by the anthropologist Shepard Krech in the late ’90s, the ecological Indian is a term scholars and activists use to describe the idealization of Indigenous life in Western media. Usually, images of the ecological Indian portray historical Native Americans—historical because Natives are almost always consigned to history—as having had a singular, nearly mystical connection to the natural world. According to this cherished cultural myth, Native Americans were the “original environmentalists,” people who mostly sat around ripping the peace pipe and fraternizing with wolves and sundry woodland creatures until the colonizers got here and screwed everything up. A subclassification of the “noble savage” stereotype, this widespread myth reduces the complex and heterogeneous array of Native cultures on the North American continent to one flattened, crunchy green core.
You almost certainly recognize the contours of the ecological Indian, even if you’ve never heard the phrase before. Unlike the white European settlers who stole and then despoiled Native land, this myth holds that they enjoyed a “harmonious” relationship with nature. Theirs was a worldview that prioritized “balance,” that was not wasteful—they “used the whole buffalo!”—and that never polluted. (Indeed, the high-water mark of the ecological Indian myth came in the form of an infamous 1971 “Keep America Beautiful” campaign—the so-called crying Indian ad—that featured a wizened Native American shedding a single, pearlescent tear at the prospect of pollution.)
On the surface, this stereotype doesn’t sound so terrible. There are worse things to be known for than being peaceable and treating the earth with respect. The problem, at least as Krech saw it, was that the myth isn’t terribly accurate: North American Indigenous communities held (and hold) a diversity of ecological attitudes, not all of which we would label straightforwardly environmentalist. Moreover, as the American historian and environmentalist William Cronon noted in his influential book Changes in the Land, pre-colonial Native communities did in fact transform the ecosystems they inhabited (though certainly to a lesser extent than European settlers did). More importantly, representations of Indigenous life that traffic in the “original environmentalist” fable often serve to reify an image of Native Americans that is implicitly racist and explicitly condescending.
As the Dakota historian Philip J. Deloria argued in his touchstone work Playing Indian, Western romanticization of Native life has tended to go hand in hand with its desire to possess and exterminate it. The ecological Indian is at once a cypher for American self-loathing—a foil that lets us declaim our dominant culture’s environmental predations—and a justification for white, Western hegemony. The Natives may be morally superior to their oppressors by dint of their ecological prudence, but that very prudence is taken as paradoxical proof of their racial inferiority.
If the ecological Indian leaves his land unchanged, the myth implies, it is because he lacks the knowledge to change it. If he enjoys a simple life of leisure and bounty, it is because he possesses a simple mind that can countenance no grander ambitions. If he enjoys a unique spiritual kinship with the animal world, it is because of his imagined evolutionary proximity to the same. In other words, if the Indian is ecological, it is because he is not technological. He exists forever frozen in America’s pre-modern past, a vehicle for all the environmental grief and nostalgia and guilt that quickens our colonial hearts.
The original Avatar flirted with the ecological Indian, but The Way of Water builds a shrine to him. In the first minutes, we are treated to sweeping vistas of lush landscapes, a montage of Jake Sully’s frolicking family gently rustling their basic necessities from the land. Over this bucolic scene, the reformed Marine colonizer offers a piece of insight gleaned from his new culture: “Happiness is simple.” Throughout, the dialogue bristles with grave, pseudo-mystical catchphrases like this, meant to capture the ecological wisdom of the Na’vi. (We learn that “all energy is only borrowed.” There are endless paeans to the “great balance.”) We are treated, too, to James Cameron’s half-baked pantheism, a mélange of magic-mushroom metaphysics, New Age sloganeering, and the Gaia hypothesis. (“It’s like the entire biosphere of Pandora is aware,” Sigourney Weaver’s interstellar botanist muses.) A new character, Kiri—who’s the daughter of Weaver’s character from the first film and is also voiced by Weaver—is portrayed as some kind of teenage medicine woman. (There is an entire scene where she rolls around on the grass, marveling at bugs. Later, she commands an army of peaceful, glittering sea critters.) The younger son of Sully, Lo’ak, is best buds with a whale. (To recount his sad story would be “too painful,” the lonesome cetacean tells Lo’ak, in whale.)
As others have noted, as transporting as The Way of Water is, the film gets cringey—most often in its breathless attempts to impart “Indigenous wisdom” to its audience. Yet all this eye-roll-inducing earnestness would be easy to forgive if the film’s extended alien allegory had anything interesting to say about colonialism, racism, or capitalism—its ostensible targets. To be clear, I am not criticizing a major motion picture for being insufficiently radical: I do not need to consume my political analysis with a bowl of popcorn. It is perfectly fine if a movie aspires to do nothing other than entertain. But James Cameron desperately wants to do more than just entertain us. (“That was my purpose in making the film,” he said of the original Avatar. “I wanted to make an environmentally conscious mainstream movie.”) He wants to make a point. But he has nothing to say.
All too often, “epic” films about gross historical evils—such as the genocide of Native Americans, chattel slavery, or the Holocaust—ride the coattails of their momentous subject matter, drawing on its gravity without possessing any weight of their own. Cameron is insistent that his franchise about blue cat people is doing serious work: “Avatar is a science fiction retelling of the history of North and South America in the early colonial period,” he has claimed. Yet this is also the series’ greatest weakness: It never moves beyond mere history. If the first Avatar film seemed brazenly futuristic—a technologically audacious blockbuster that spoke (some) truth to power—its sequel seems mired in the past, with ideas no less retrograde.
The issue with The Way of Water is that its brand of historical retelling doesn’t require anything of its presumed audience besides self-flagellation. Its obsession with the past—masquerading as serious reflection on the historical wrongdoing of the colonial period—abdicates responsibility for the present, to say nothing of the future. One can sit through the entire film without once being compelled to remember that today approximately 2 percent of people living in the United States identify as Native, more than a million of whom reside on reservations. The “ecological Indian” stereotype in the film matters not simply because it is a silly, reductive portrayal of Native American cultures, but because the myth of the ecological Indian—by presenting Indigenous peoples as relics of the past—frees us from any obligation to think seriously about the conditions of Native American life in the present.
Ultimately, The Way of Water is little more than a three-hour land acknowledgment in technicolor. And like a land acknowledgment, its progress is merely performative. There is nothing it would ask us to do, and we are never made uncomfortable. It simply seeks recognition of truths that everyone knows and almost nobody disputes: Racism is evil, colonialism is bad, whales are cool. It spends hundreds of millions of dollars congratulating itself—and forgets to say anything new.
