Why do White people continue to make movies like Avatar? "White man befriends indigenous people in order to get what they want" @jason?

This is White Man's Burden. The podcast Slate's Spoiler Special: Invictus goes into this a bit, suggesting that this should be a sub-genera. The current incarnation is that the white male shows up and shows the non-white males the error of their ways.In the end, the white guy is considered to be cooler than the locals and is made king, high priest, or martyr.

Possibly even a recreation of the plantation state where the minorities choose to stay and work for the white guy because he can take care of them. But it originally came to the forefront in, get this, Rudyard Kipling's poem The While Man's Burden in 1899.In it, Kipling talked about how Europeans had a responsibility to civilize Non-western cultures because they were essentially savages and unable to raise themselves up from an animal like existence. Why do these movies still get made?

Because they make money. Because it is a story familiar to us. Because it is the dream of every young suburban white kid to become cool enough to have black friends.

Because we can look back of Kipling and the attitudes of our parents and we want to say that we are sorry and that those ideas aren't our ideas and wouldn't it be great if we could be forgiven for sins that we didn't commit. And maybe a movie is the only place we can see that.

It is a movie marketed to Sci-Fi fans. The perception is that Sci-Fi fans are largely white males. Thus the movies have a ton of white people.

Personally I think the film industry does this to itself. Films show white heroes, white guys go watch it. More films are marketed to white males.

NOTE There are exeptions to this and notably Will Smith has starred in some great Sci-Fi movies. The theme of manipulating people is a popular one in Sci-Fi often it is giant Galatic Empires (Star Wars), Mega-corporations (Any Cyberpunk), or even Cult like dictators (Equalibrium) While it could look like "white guilt", I think the fact that these manipulators are almost always white simply ties back to marketing above. To address Avatar specificly, it does present a racially charged point of view, but you can read it however you want.

************* OMG SPOILERS ************* Pro-White: The young white hero rescues the savages. The most knowledgeable people in the film are the scientists, and the vast majority of them are white. Anti-White: The vast majority of the white people in the film are shown to be greedy and/or terribly violent.

The heroes are a mix of white and non-white humans, as well as the Navi, but the Bad Guys are ALL white males. The protagist (who started as a jerk) was just following orders to betray the Navi and had to fall in love to realise the error in his ways. Listen for this line, the hero had to "betray his race" to do the right thing.

Finally he gives up being human to live among the Navi. ****** Personally I think this was in some ways a tale about the "Trail of Tears" but with a more upbeat ending. http://ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.