James Cameron's Rorschach test

[crypto]

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.

Comments

[sara]

Heh. If nothing else, it's been very good at provoking comment.

(I think I will skip it; I get my RDA of white liberal corporatist fail right here on these internets and do not really need to pay for more.)

[crypto]

By this point, I've probably spent more time reading people's reactions than I would have spent in the movie theater just watching it myself. But I am impressed at how it compels people to talk about it.

(I remember back when you had to walk a mile both ways in the snow to buy a copy of the Wall Street Journal if you wanted a dose of white liberal corporatist fail. Maybe I'm romanticizing, but it felt more special back then when you had to actively seek it out.)

[sara]

(Hah. My parents still get the WSJ every morning and Barron's on weekends. I have never had to actively seek out fail. My father clips it out and mails it to me.)

[cofax7]

Since when is the WSJ a source of liberal fail? (White and corporatist I'll grant you.) I thought we had to go to the NYTimes for that. (Not that, in the end, there's that much difference between them once you get off the OpEd pages. Well, actually, there's probably more difference now that Murdoch is running WSJ. But still. WSJ? Never actually liberal.)

[crypto]

I must've read the phrase as OR rather than AND and got stuck on corporatist! Or just skimmed right past the 'liberal' part. :(

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