January 7th, 2010
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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chasethestars
chasethestars