January 7th, 2010

James Cameron's Rorschach test

  • Jan. 7th, 2010 at 12:32 PM
crypto: Amy Pond (Default)
I haven't seen the movie, but I've gotten hooked on reading responses to Avatar. Some recent ones:

Erik Davis sounding very Erik Davis (Aya Avatar: Drink the Jungle Juice):

With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries.
 

k-punk sounding very k-punk ("They Killed Their Mother": Avatar as Ideological Symptom):

What is foreclosed in the opposition between a predatory technologised capitalism and a primitive organicism, evidently, is the possibility of a modern, technologised anti-capitalism. It is in presenting this pseudo-opposition that Avatar functions as an ideological symptom.

Bob Rehak sounding very Bob Rehak (Watching Avatar):

Cameron’s nifty trick, though, has always been to frame his visual and practical effects in ways that lend them a crucial layer of believability. I’m not talking about photorealism, that unreachable horizon (unreachable precisely because it’s a moving target, a fantasized attribute we hallucinate within the imaginary body of cinema: as Lacan would put it, in you more than you).

Maybe that's the true genius of the movie -- it's a magic mirror which reflects back what so many different people bring to it, an enchanted well that so many different people can drink from.

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