Jake, Neytiri and Spider in Avatar: Fire and Ash - a meta essay on racism and post-colonial trauma
(Warning: heavy Avatar: Fire and Ash spoilers below, reader beware!)
AFAA has a lot of nuanced, meaningful things to say about race and cultural trauma.
1. Spider choking in his sleep
Spider’s exopack malfunctions and he starts asphyxiating in his sleep. The whole family panics and tears the pod apart searching for his spare, except Neytiri. She just stands there, eerie, calm.
At that moment, still in her mourning veil, the audience realises she would be happy for Spider to die. The Sky People took her son, and in her eyes, her son’s empty pallet has a Sky Person breathing in it.
It’s not a surprise that later, when Spider can breathe without a mask, she flatly suggests killing him outright. Jake is shocked. But the audience understands. To Neytiri, Spider is just another Sky Person, and she hates them with all her being. She does not see him. She just sees his exterior - a Sky Person.
2. Jake and Neytiri’s argument
This confrontation was the most important scene for Jake and Neytiri’s character development in the entire movie. Neytiri is forced to say ugly words out loud: she hates Sky People. She hates their pink fingers and pink skin. She hates, hates,hates.
Some people have defended Neytiri here by saying she is reasonable to hate genocidal colonizers who destroyed her people and slaughtered her family. But that’s not what’s happening here. Neytiri hates her internally-human husband. She hates her half-human children. She hates Spider, a child arguably more Na’vi than her husband in all but appearance, who underwent torture to protect her family.
Neytiri is racist.
It is true that she has suffered generational and personal trauma from racial genocide. But she is blinded by her suffering. And she is wrong.
Jake calls her out on it. Note that it’s very dangerous thing to have an effectively white human husband call out his indigenous wife for racism, because the audience may be tempted to “white knight” him.
- But then the script takes a fascinating turn that completely flips this on its head.
3. The flight back and Spider’s near-killing
On the flight back, Spider sits between Jake and Neytiri, the physical representation of the gulf between the two of them.
But Spider sleeps against Neytiri’s back, and she lets him. Neytiri is Omaticaya. And what Spider has done - save Jake’s life - through her own cultural lens, was enough for her to see that he is really Omaticaya at heart. His loyalty is Omaticaya. His heart is of Eywa. He may look like a Sky Person, but he is Na’vi at heart.
But Jake, who had seen the same thing as Neytiri (Spider heroically saving his life) interprets events through his own cultural lens, and his conclusion is that Spider needs to die. Jake may look Na’vi, but he is human military at heart. This mean he can be utilitarian in a way that Neytiri could never be, the way Na’vi can ever be. It is wrong. Jake, who looks Na’vi, makes a Sky Person choice.
The next scene is heartbreaking, not least because Spider is so unrelentingly Na’vi himself that he accepts his fate to “go be with Eywa”. He chooses what is best for the everyone else. He wanted to die loved.
Of course Jake doesn’t go through with it. But it’s not because he had a change of his moral values. He just didn’t have the guts. Meanwhile Neytiri, with her red face paint washing across her hands - she runs to stop this, because That. Child. Is. Omaticaya. And she knows it now.
It is telling, that when Neytiri finds them, Spider doesn’t look at Jake. He looks at her. She says “I see you.” And Spider smiles.
There is a connection based on a shared cultural understanding passing between Spider and Neytiri, that Jake does not understand.
Final thoughts: real connection comes from seeing the inside
Jake: a Na’vi body with a human heart. Spider: a Sky Person body with a Na’vi heart.
Neytiri: she learned to see past what is outside to see inside. That is what real connection is. That is what real love in the face of racial and cultural barriers is to see inside a person for who they are, as an individual, separate from the characteristics of the group they may externally resemble.
To say I love you. I know you. I see you.
