Freeing Pandora: Militarism, Frontier-Making and US Identity in James Cameron’s Avatar Franchise

Abstract

The United States is well known for its interventionist policies regarding international conflicts. In his study “Frontiering International Relations: Narrating US Policy in the Asia Pacific” (2022), Oliver Turner links this behaviour to the myth of the frontier. Generally known as the frontier thesis, it was given form by Frederick Jackson Turner in The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893): he posed that a unique American identity was born in the Western frontier, by adapting but not succumbing to life-and-death situations and refusing assimilation. Oliver Turner claims that the US uses this frontier thesis to justify their military occupation, thus conflating militarism and the frontier as markers of US identity.

This strategy is not restricted to current events, but also projected into the future through narratives such as James Cameron’s Avatar franchise. Set in the planet Pandora, the movies follow a human settlement created by the RDA. While apparently post-national and post-racial, this organisation is heavily coded as American through its members, history and relations to the US marines and army. Additionally, its military branch repetitively combines frontier and militaristic rhetoric to justify their crimes against the native Na’vis and reassert their own identity, causing a sense of self-identification both in White American and Indigenous audiences. As the story progresses the idea of the frontier and the role of the military become ever more explicit. Rather than disavow this behaviour, the narrative offers a lukewarm criticism where the righteousness of US colonialism is not universally denied, but dependent on the individual White colonist.