Avatar is a record-breaking film containing awesome 3D effects and made my eyes think they were really in a breathtaking tropical planet.  The story line is wonderful and the emotional content is superb but Avatar is just a typical Hollywood production in gender representation because Avatar dichotomizes it.  When viewing the movie, I couldn't help but notice that the people who were out exploring, running and fighting in Pandora were almost all men. 

This is almost forgivable because the military is mostly made up of men, however the movie shows the leadership positions among the humans and Na'vi occupied almost exclusively by males.  In the movie, men are adventurous and fun loving but women tend to passively experience the planet and do not have such a sense of fun and excitement.  This movie portrays men as cutters (adventurous and active learners) and idolizes this mind-set.  Women are seen as the non-cutters (non-adventurous and learn passively).  This is a stain on an otherwise good film and unrealistically dichotomizes the sexes.

The main character, Jake, is especially of interest because he has the opportunity to live a second life in an avatar.  Jake is an adventurous character who became a cripple because of an injury on earth.  He dreams of flying over jungle and forest in complete freedom however his crippled body harshly remind him of reality.  In his avatar he is able to experience the joy of swinging through the trees and have enormous agility and athletic freedom in real life. 

In real life, our bodies are a part of our identities and limit its free expression.  On our homepages we have to ability to choose what we want to be rather than having our identities given to us by others.  Jake's avatar is not a digital being but his situation is similar because his identity is what he desires it to be.  Jake's avatar allows him to express his true self and enables him to be physically adventurous rather than just mentally so. 

Charles Cheung argues that homepages allow people to more freely create and express their identities in his essay "Identity Construction and Self-Presentation" when he states:

The distinctive medium of characteristics of the personal homepage allow net users to become active-cultural producers, expressing their suppressed identities or exploring the significant question of ' who I am', often in ways which may not otherwise be possible in 'real' life.

 (Cheung, p. 274)

Cheung also observed that homepages are under the control of users and they actively construct their new online identities (Cheung, p. 275).  Jake did not choose the characteristics of his avatar and it was not even modeled after him, but after his dead brother.  It was just luck that his avatar allowed him to express his true self.  Even though, his avatar was not modeled after him, it allowed him to pursue a second life far better than any homepage will because his avatar itself is in real life and is not a fictitious construct.

Avatar is seen by most to be a classic, but it is not a classic in the sense in that it dichotomizes gender like most other movies.  The relationship between Jake and his avatar parallel that between the Internet user and her homepage because it allows him to express his true identity in another world, however his avatar or new identity was constructed by others.

Bibliography:

Cheung, Charles (2007). Identity Construction and Self-Presentation. In D. Bell and B. M. Kennedy (Ed.), The Cybercultures Reader (2nd Ed.). London and New York: Routeledge