If I just didn’t like Avatar that would be one thing, but the proxy data of Avatar movies being one of very few series to approach – let alone maintain – the heights of yesteryear have turned it into a puzzlebox. Everybody has a Star Wars; for us, it was Star Wars. For Gabe’s youngest, Noah, his Star Wars is still Star Wars but it isn’t ours – it’s The Clone Wars. I hope there was a cadre for whom Lord of the Rings was their Star Wars, but I suspect this demographic slice was Star Wars’d by the books and movies about the wizards and the school.
Avatar was similar to The Matrix, oddly; it had outsized cultural freight because in addition to technical sorcery and innovative action it had this basic core of trying to figure out what consciousness is. If I recall correctly, you could take college level courses on these movies. It may be that they were simply branded versions of Philosophy classes already offered, with a few slides of blue aliens added to the decks.
I can elaborate for a very long time on these topics but ultimately I think I was just a fan of Old Cameron, in the way one can be said to be a fan of Old Kanye. I should have recognized at some level that the only material that could fund his various oceanic perversions from Titanic on would have to be mass market in nature. And I guess if you are a space person standing in front of a machine with two buttons – one of which says “make six billion dollars” and the other one says “forego your own shit and make what Tycho likes” your brow wouldn’t be as wet as this hypothetical man. It would, in fact, be bone dry. There would be no meme at all – the button would already have been pressed, collapsing the waveform.
My disease requires me to subject myself to anything even remotely salient, even to the point of self-flagellation, which means now I gotta watch these blue people do stuff underwater. If this shit is good I’m gonna be really mad.
(CW)TB out.