Natural History Museum!

Successfully baited by the Smithsonian Natural History Museum!

First, the homages to evolution were overwrought as always. (This time, though, I saw the skeleton of a few-week-old fetus -- which I found ballsy. The "fetuses look just like you, only smaller" message was a nice counterbalance to "and apes do too" -- now if only they moved the fetus exhibit out of the corner and repeated it as many times as they repeated the evolution message! Boo, indoctrination.)

But yeah, no, neither the over-inclusion of evolution or the secreting of fetuses in corners was my problem with the Bones exhibit. Instead it was them completely missing the boat on portraying the underneath-the-surface-we-are-all-equal message -- hopefully, in any case, subconsciously. Here, a sample:


The explanatory plates read:

• Left: Individuals with Native American ancestry have proportionately wider faces and shorter, broader cranial vaults.

• Center: Individuals with European ancestry tend to have straight facial profiles and narrower faces with projecting, sharply angled nasal bones.

• Right: Individuals with sub-Saharan African ancestry generally show greater facial projection in the area of the mouth, wider distance between the eyes, and a wider nasal cavity.

Now, it's not the content I object to. It's all well-enough true, as far as generalizations go. Can you guess what I do object to?

Look at the language. The Native Americans and sub-Saharan Africans get a series of "-er" adjectives. Every time a "distinctive feature" is mentioned, it is as a comparative (to something else that goes unnamed).

Now look at the European language. That description has only one comparative, and the other two or three adjectives in the description go untouched -- even though another purely-comparative phrasing would be perfectly acceptable and not even noticed by the audience. "European" is the default to which everything is compared, and "European" itself goes almost unquestioned and uncompared. (This is echoed by the visual design, which uses the (white!) European skull as the centerpiece.)

C'mon, Smithsonian. It isn't like it'd be hard or noticeably liberal to use, y'know, actually scientifically neutral language when discussing dry bone.

Avatar fail

I never thought I'd agree with the Vatican, but ... "Vatican says 'Avatar' is no masterpiece". Now I love the Vatican (though the WaPo article is awful).

"Avatar" is wooing audiences worldwide with visually dazzling landscapes and nature-loving blue creatures. But the Vatican is no easy crowd to please. ... They call the movie a simplistic and sappy tale, despite its awe-inspiring special effects.

"Not much behind the images" was how the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, summed it up in a headline. "Everything is reduced to an overly simple anti-imperialistic and anti-militaristic parable," it said.

Some American conservative bloggers have decried its anti-militaristic message; a small group of people have said the movie contains racist themes. Blog posts, newspaper articles, tweets and YouTube videos have criticized the film, with some calling it "a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people" and that it reinforces "the white Messiah fable."

Okay, here we go. WaPo's editorializing on and minimization of legitimate concerns (that movie SO had a race problem -- and more than just the Messianic one) and the Vatican is highly disrespectful and rubs me badly. The movie, of course, upset me more than the WaPo article.

The Vatican has legitimate concerns about the overly-simplistic portrayal of everything. So do the anti-racists. And so, as much as my saying so might confuse some people, do the pro-militarist conservatives -- and in fact, that aspect of the film bothered me even more than the racial ones.

Avatar flattened the world into a black/white, right/wrong world; it portrayed military leaders as utterly ignorant; it featured ignorant natives (all speaking in their finest hybrid black-Latino accents) that a white man reaches out to; and it implied that Native Americans would have been a-okay if there had just been a white man there to lead them out of their hairy situation. I went into that movie with no expectations, the movie's first 15 minutes set up some great expectations (great premise, treated all characters -- even the military men -- with some respect), and then it was just downhill with nothing but special effects to keep it from sinking it into I-need-to-walk-out-or-I'll-claw-my-eyes-out hell. Even so it was significantly too long for its vapid and trite plot.

No cookies, James Cameron. No cookies.