Hey y’all, I’m back from Juneau, and that means back to watching an episode a week of the ATLA live action, and…I can’t go anymore without writing about it. I’m feeling tired and a bit lazy though so am just going to roughly throw out some reactions to episode four for now.
To start with the positive note(s): Utkarsh Ambudkar acted Bumi quite well I feel (at least in comparison to Gordon Cormier—Aang—sorry!), and the bit with the singers in the cave was playful and well done. The cave singers was one of the few times I’ve felt the live action captures the original’s tone. “Secret tunnel,” let’s go! (Sidenote, though: Oma and Shu, the lovers who made the tunnels in Omashu’s backstory, are both women now! This is great on the one hand, though it’s funny because besides Shu being a woman, nothing is changed, it’s just a plug-n-play switch; the lovers have to meet in secret not because of hom*ophobia or anything relating to their now-queer relationship, but still because their villages hate each other. So, hom*ophobia doesn’t exist in the live action ATLA universe? Something here feels very liberal-representation-y and hom*onormative, idk!)
Now, positivity aside, first let’s talk Uncle Iroh. We get more development in this episode, but I feel Iroh in the original is a lot wiser and has grown way more from his past than the live action counterpart. Take the interaction with the Earth Kingdom guard, whose brother died in the siege of Ba Sing Se:
GUARD: All those lives lost, all that fighting. And Ba Sing Se still stands. Was it worth it?
IROH: We were at war. I was a soldier
GUARD: You were a butcher! You know, I can still smell smoke when I go to sleep at night. It never really goes away.
[GUARD turns, whips back around and slaps IROH.]
IROH [nose bleeding, angry]: War pushes us to the edge. Some of us don’t like what we find there.
GUARD: Is that your pitiful way of saying sorry for what you did?
IROH: I wasn’t talking about me.
[GUARD, enraged, earthbends a huge rock over IROH’s head.]
GUARD [holding rock still]: Oh it’s true, isn’t it? You have no humanity. You know nothing of loss.
This dialogue is all to set up the flashback to Iroh’s son, Lu Ten’s funeral, which comes directly afterward. Iroh’s character in this and the funeral scene struck me as strange, though: he only has grief for his son, not at all it seems for the loss others have lived through and carry as a result of his past actions. This is unlike the Iroh of the animation. In the dialogue above, Iroh is mad at this Earth Kingdom guard. When he says “I wasn’t talking about me,” we can only assume the “war pushes some of us to the edge…some of us don’t like what we find there” was about the guard and not at all about Iroh himself. But in the animation, Iroh’s character reckons a lot more with the death he brought to so many others as a general. He feels more humble, more understanding of others’ anger towards him. He’s not perfect (weird part with the bounty hunter lady), but he’s at least multi-dimensional in the animation. Ironic.
But one thing the writers did manage to see in the original series was the tropey conflict between idealism realism. Unfortunately, after seeing this, maybe they got too thrilled at their success and let their pens get away from them. Over and over in episode four, we see one of the “gaang” saying something idealistic, and a peripheral character shutting them down, usually with some version of “war is complex, you have to make complex decisions,” which, while it feels a bit warmongery in a way I won’t go into, is at least a little bit…true.
When the Mechanist explains why he collaborated with Fire Nation spies, Sokka blows it off, saying “my father would never have done that.” Shortly afterward, Jet confronts Katara, saying she betrayed them by foiling the plot to detonate an explosive during the Mechanist’s audience with the king. He tells her “Life may be simple in the South Pole, but here you have to make hard decisions. That’s what it means to fight a war.” As Aang fights Bumi in their last challenge, Bumi drops huge stones over both their heads, and as Aang struggles to keep them both afloat, Bumi yells for Aang to let go the one above him—you can’t save everyone, especially when you’re tasked with saving the world.
Of course, when Sokka and Katara show up, they push Bumi out of the way, and everyone is saved.
What’s weird to me about these moments is that they seem to demonize any level of morally complex (political) action. They say, Idealism always wins in the end, kids! That’s why you should cling to it, even if it paralyzes you from actually going out and acting in the world! With Jet, even if he is written to be, objectively, pretty bad (or at least use bad tactics), I still end up thinking of The Battle of Algiers or all the stupid arguments people make (from their couches in New York or LA, probably) denouncing Palestinian resistance. In ATLA’s world there is only one correct course of action, and it’s always the non-violent, straightforwardly “moral” one. This is maybe just as present in the animation as the live action, I’m not sure. Just something I was noticing.
On the other hand, I’m also thinking about how nuance and complexity often serve to paralyze resistance, movements, revolution, etc. The phrase “it’s complicated” floats up. But in any case, ATLA is not giving us a picture of what meaningful engagement with the complicated parts of (political) action looks like.
The tension between political nuance and the urgency of action is something I was thinking on a lot this week during Alaska’s Just Transition Summit. “Just transition” is a framework advocating that movement away from extractive economies (1) happens, and (2) happens justly. It also notes that an indigenized worldview is at the core of these things, that indigenous people play the central role in making these things happen.
What struck me as I listened to talks from Elders, other indigenous folks, and talks by non-indigenous allies was this question, perched silently in the background, of political nuance versus the urgency of action. In academia we are trained to follow the “truth,” even if that means dredging through hundreds of pages of complex argumentation. No doubt this kind of “truth-seeking” often puts the brakes on meaningful action. People are afraid of acting because they “don’t know enough,” because things are “too complicated.” In other words, they aren’t sure of the complete moral righteousness of an action yet, so opt for no action at all. So, on the one hand, acting, moving, doing is key. As prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has it: “practice makes different.”
But there is also some value in naming, in theory, in nuance and complexity; there is danger in anti-intellectualism. This is where the tension I was feeling seeps out from. I just finished reading Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. In this (stunning) book, there is an essay in which hooks writes about “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Throughout the book, hooks emphasizes education’s potential to actually change how we live, our habits of living, and this is where she locates the power of theory. “Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end.” Her conception of theory is also, of course, far beyond what one typically thinks of with theory—some dry, dusty, inscrutable thing lying unread in a corner. Children theorize when they question the routine social practices we’ve all been socialized to accept as “natural.” Theory for hooks, when it’s really theory, is inextricable from practice and the process of self-transformation.
The broadening of the conception of theory beyond white academics’ exclusionary definition does not, however, mean theory for hooks is “simple” or “anti-intellectual.” In an anecdote, hooks relates how she went to a gathering of predominantly Black women where they were discussing “whether or not black male leaders, such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, should be subjected to feminist critiques.” One woman, after being silent most of the time, said near the end that “she was not interested in all this theory and rhetoric…that she was more interested in action.” In response to this, hooks offers the following thoughts:
In many black settings, I have witnessed the dismissal of intellectuals, the putting down of theory, and remained silent. I have come to see that silence is an act of complicity, one that helps perpetuate the idea that we can engage in revolutionary black liberation and feminist struggle without theory.
She is talking specifically here about the role of Black intellectuals, but, within the context of other essays in the books, I think it’s safe to expand a bit from this quote, and to see it as generally affirming of theory’s place (theory, again, as hooks is seeing it!) in modern liberation struggles.
I’ve ended up quite far from ATLA live action episode four, but I think that’s okay. I don’t have anywhere to settle on for a nice, wrap-up ending, so I’ll just leave things here!
