Avatar vs Pop Culture

In December 2009, I was surfing the IMDb message boards for Avatar, set to release in a week. At the time, the conversation on these boards centered mostly around the film’s mammoth budget which represented a colossal investment for the studio, an investment it was sure to never see returned. Noting how the movie was set to release against the Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel, one commentator even lamented how amusingly sad it was that rodents covering pop songs could draw more tickets than the finest cutting-edge film techniques our master craftsmen could offer.

    I’ve often wondered what happened to this guy ...

By the time I finally got around to seeing Avatar myself, the film had been out for over a month, and the discussion around the film had been universally celebratory. It was actually the Monday after I saw the film, I remember I was browsing the web in Spanish class, that I saw the headlines that Avatar had in fact eclipsed Titanic as the all-time box office champion over the weekend. Who knows? Perhaps it was my ticket that pushed it over the threshold. I was just in time to join the ballyhoo, but it was around this time that the rhetoric around the movie did a 180.

    Overnight the conversation went from “Holy crap! You have got to see Avatar!” to “I just don’t see what the big deal is.” The message boards and the YouTube comments suddenly started becoming obsessed with finding creative ways to flash their disinterest in the movie (I think my favorite was a thread title "A Feast for the Eyes But Not for the Mind") and congratulating each other on not remembering Neytiri's name. And when Avatar lunchboxes never flooded the shelves, the backlash only emboldened. Before long, there was little doubt that Avatar was a $230 M flash in the pan.

I've spent ten years trying to make sense of the Avatar paradox, how the film is so consistently scorned by the very same movie goers who made it the phenomenon it was, especially since I myself sincerely enjoy the film. "Nobody remembers Avatar," or so go the YouTube comments. "It's just not rewatchable," yet I get around to seeing it at a rate of roughly once every year and a half. On my calendar this is a respectable rate for a movie that isn’t Tangled. I used to think that maybe it was just a difference of opinion, but I've been listening to these talking points for a good ten years now, and I can't help but think there's something deeper at work.

  I've heard varying reports on what exactly it is that makes Avatar such an unforgivably bad movie. These will occasionally land on comments like "Have you ever heard such clunky dialogue? Don'cha wish they'd spent all that money on the screenplay haha?" But the dialogue in Avatar is no less cultured or refined than generally liked action movies, including the "good" James Cameron films like Aliens or the "Terminator" films. (Someone show me the line in Avatar that is cornier than "Game over, man! Game over!") But this kind of investigation was always going to be fruitless because at the end of the day, it isn't really Avatar's quality that people take issue with, it's the movie's street cred.

Avatar’s difficulty in taking hold in the public consciousness has less to do with the merits of the film itself and more to do with how abruptly it was asked to stand next to more seasoned cultural mythologies. Nobody hates Avatar, they just hate that is made more money than their favorite movie, and they really shouldn't.

Anatomy of the Backlash

Avatar is a 2009 sci-fi epic directed by James Cameron that follows former marine, Jake Sully, who ships off to the distant planet of Pandora. On this jungle planet, Jake is mentally linked to an avatar, an organic body resembling that of the native alien population, the Na’vi, allowing his consciousness to inhabit this body as the humans seek peaceful negotiation with the indigenous clan. When Jake earns the respect of Neytiri, the daughter of the chief of the local tribe, he is permitted to learn the ways of the Na’vi, and despite himself he begins to fall in love with this world. As the tensions between the two worlds escalate and war seems imminent, Jake must decide to which world he really belongs.

Critics of the film adopted the narrative that the film's pop culture reign was nothing more than "a flash in the pan," but the most interesting aspect of Avatar’s box office performance was its sheer persistence. Avatar actually didn’t have remarkable box-office harvest in the beginning. This was in part due to a snowstorm that overtook most of the East Coast of the U.S. and shut down a number of theaters opening weekend. The New York Times reported on the film’s opening day:

“That total is on a par with movies that are not built around pre-existing brands. But it falls short of expectations for such a buzzed-about picture, given its higher 3-D ticket prices, positive reviews and Mr. Cameron’s résumé.

That same day, Box Office Mojo reported “Avatar is not likely to see similar longevity” to Titanic, then the highest-grossing film, but time told a different story.

    As the weeks passed, the film's weekly drop hovered between 27% to 2%, a far cry from the typical 50% drop we expect from movies like this. Avatar did not drop more than 40% until early March, its 12th week in release, wherein it was still in the top 5 movies performing. People just kept filling the theaters. It wasn’t until its 8th week in release that someone else took the number one spot at the box office. (The movie that stole the #1 spot from Avatar in case you were wondering was none other than Dear John. What a world.) The prospect that people only sat down for the film for its theatrical sensory overload discounts its high DVD sales. It sits at the fifth highest-selling DVD release, putting it just behind The Dark Knight and ahead of most Pixar movies and all the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Avatar was not a movie that was "supposed" to break all the records, but that we suddenly had a new wing in the pop culture temple overnight could have been an exciting development, proof that we can still be surprised by the box office and that there's always room for one more at the top.

    That is not how pop culture chose to receive this movie.

    Past box-office winners had become a sort of canon, like pop-culture scripture for the age of social media, and Avatar was the first film in this age of Tumblr to claim the ultimate box office crown. That this film would swing in and swipe the holy grail of the box office left members of other fandoms reeling at Avatar’s audacity. Suddenly, the fans of these various franchises all had something in common: Avatar, this new kid on the block who six months ago didn't have so much as a trailer to its pop-culture bank, had taken what they wanted most for their own stories for years, decades even, and that just wasn't fair.

    Fandoms collectively retaliated by turning the movie into a punchline, the latest example of how box office doesn’t equal quality. Anything to let the world know Avatar does NOT belong next to Star Wars in the pantheon. This is where the fight against Avatar started to become unfairly stacked. People weren’t comparing Avatar against individual films so much as entire mythologies. And this is also where you get to see just how partisan and slanted the dialogue around Avatar became. 

    “I’ve grown bitter about Avatar and its box office and critical success,” writes Dalton Baggett in his piece for Medium. “This bitterness mostly comes from a place of deep personal bias as I believe that all of Avatar’s box office records belong to more worthy films, such as those taking place in the Star Wars galaxy." He goes on “comparing Avatar and the original Star Wars should be a felony offense. Star Wars not only advanced the technology of movies and changed them forever, but was also the beginning of one of the greatest science fiction stories ever told.”

Basically, we’re not comparing Avatar against Star Wars the 1977 film so much as against receiving our first lightsaber toy, watching "A New Hope" for the first time on dad’s lap, or seeing the teaser for "The Force Awakens" with family over Thanksgiving. There is a sort of circularity to this argument that leaves a newcomer like Avatar with no viable entry point: Avatar can never be as good as Star Wars because it doesn't have the longevity of Star Wars because it's not as good as Star Wars ... But Star Wars achieved its nostalgic deification over forty years. We gave Avatar a month.

One whole month.

From this space of resentment, three major arguments against the film started emerge justifying its exclusion from the grown-up table of pop culture--1. It’s just Dances with Wolves in space 2. People only like it because it looks pretty, and 3. It just doesn’t deserve to be the highest-grossing film of all time--and it is from these three arguments that we will launch this discussion.

1.  It’s Just Dances With Wolves in Space

The first major talking point tends to be Avatar's similarities to films like Dances with Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, Ferngully, and The Last Samurai. I'll say upfront that this issue has always felt stale to me because already we have cauterized any kind of discussion on archetype or universal truth. I myself have seen all of those films, and with the possible exception of Dances with Wolves, I enjoyed Avatar more than all of them.

     I actually caught Dances with Wolves several years after I first saw Avatar. As I hit play, I’ll admit I was anticipating losing some of my zeal for Avatar given how the internet had basically accused Cameron of plagiarizing the film, but I remember being surprised at how different they were. They had a similar premise, sure, but I was more taken by their divergences than their overlaps.

    I was surprised, for example, that John Dunbar requests to be stationed at the frontier so he could see the wild west before it disappeared, implying that he already has a somewhat romanticized view of this world. This contrasts with Jake Sully, who even midway through his study with the Na’vi comments “I hope this tree-hugging crap isn’t on the final.” I was also bracing myself for the moment when the Sioux turned their backs on John just as the tension rises in a “you will never be one of The People!” moment, but it never came.

    Both films offered uniquely memorable sequences, like Jake’s taming of and first flight with his ikran, or John’s buffalo hunt with the tribe. The movies actually have wildly different endings. John and his wife, Stands With a Fist (who incidentally is characterized very differently than Neytiri), flee for the safety of a tribe, while Avatar ends with the colonists returning to earth as Jake is once and for all initiated into the world of the Na’vi. There's a certain "Mad Libs" similarity to the two films, but that is kind of cutting the movies off at their knees, certainly not the behavior we tolerate when discussing our own favorite stories. (On the topic of Dances with Wolves, I'll acknowledge another grievance aired against both films has to do with the trope of the "chosen one" white guy swooping in to save the natives, and ... I do think there is something there to be unpacked, but I also think that particular current runs separate from this particular discussion, so I'm choosing here to table that talking point for another day.)

     Perhaps you have had the experience of arguing with a roommate or relative who didn’t care for Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Harry Potter because he or she felt they were all just the same story: chosen one (probably an orphan), magic world, dark lord, friendship conquers all, and the like. Those of us who love storytelling know that it’s the details, the things you miss in the two-sentence summaries, that really give a movie flavor and identity and make it worth loving. Both Luke and Harry have to overcome their respective Dark Lords, but Luke learning to trust his instincts and allow The Force to flow through him is a different experience than Harry learning that love is more powerful than death. Hence one person might prefer Harry Potter over Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, or just as likely enjoy all three for different reasons. Yet for Avatar we’re just not willing to give it that wiggle room.

Avatar is not the first film to have similarities to other films. The “tough guys with hearts of gold saving the day” motif featured in nearly every genre or locale before Guardians of the Galaxy discoed its way to the big screen, and Ridley Scott’s Alien was literally billed to the studio as Jaws in space. Stories are just assemblages of a million different moving parts, and no assemblage can say that it is made up of entirely original parts. The key is the creative arrangement of these parts. Consider for example what it does to transfer a Western-style story (indigenous population vs colonization) generally rooted in the past and drop it in a futuristic setting, implying that our appetites for consumption and exploitation still run unchecked today.

   Avatar also draws upon ideas and story elements that are not necessarily easy reaches for movies along the lines of Dances with Wolves or even other science-fiction or action movies. Avatar juxtaposes Jake's questions of belonging and loyalty against this dichotomy of dream vs reality, a motif much more commonly found in musicals than science-fiction or action-adventure films. Both Avatar and Dances with Wolves follow a character who effectively becomes another person as he immerses himself in another culture, but Avatar turns this metaphor literal by having Jake literally take on a new form in order to experience this world. This is also a sort of commentary on the nature of cinema itself, which has long gifted viewers with the opportunity to vanish into the fantastic, dreamlike world of film.

    Jake comes from a world that has replaced humanity with machinery, an extrapolation of our modern world. This is very much in line with most of James Cameron’s films which often spotlight man’s over-dependence on machines at the expense of a more freeing natural worldview. Jake tells us that the only thing he ever wanted was something worth fighting for, something he was lacking in his world of endless consumption, and it’s only when he falls down the rabbit hole and into the lush naturalistic world of Pandora that Jake finds what he’s looking for. When he finds it, he can’t help but be blinded by the light.

    This is where the immersive 3D world of Pandora becomes not just another line in the movie’s advertising but a part of the narrative experience itself. We’ll touch more on the role of the visuals in the next section, but as it pertains to the experience of the narrative itself, reveling in the spectacle of Avatar’s 3D landscape allows the audience to sympathize with Jake’s elation as he crosses into the incandescent world of the Na’vi.

    More than any of those other films, Avatar reminds me of something like The Wizard of Oz. Both follow someone stuck in a drab and dreary world who enters into a fantastical otherworld that feels too vibrant and magnificent to be true. Yet in embracing this magical sphere, they confront their deepest fears and insecurities while also unlocking their truest selves.

    But "Oz" kind of gives the viewer a copout by suggesting that Dorothy's magical playground really did all exist just in her head. Its net worth is nothing more than an exercise in hypotheticals.

    That's kind of what Jake thinks about this other world. The film goes out of its way to liken the experience of going off to sleep and being lost in some fantastical REM hallucination. Jake effectively has to go to sleep in a mechanical bed in order to access this land of wonder and beauty--a world that is dazzling, but perhaps too fantastical. As he says at one point “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” This begs the question, is Jake’s newfound freedom in the world of the Na’vi too good to be true?

    This is one of the reasons why it's satisfying at the end when Neytiri is finally sharing the same space as Jake's human body instead of just his avatar, when the membrane keeping Jake from this fantastical world is finally torn. It wasn't just a dream after all. Avatar and "Oz" fundamentally ask the same question, but frankly, I've actually always liked Avatar's answer more.

          

2.  People Only Like It Because It’s Pretty       

    When asked to explain why Avatar was so popular when it clearly had nothing to offer, detractors inevitably point to the immersive 3D world of Pandora as its sole merit. “Avatar’s effects were good,” the conversation goes, “but that's about it.”

    Avatar is hardly the only movie to experience this. If ever a movie championing visual thrills captures the attention of the public, there inevitably emerges a narrative of how said movie has good visuals but terrible story. It’s never just that the visuals are good, but that the visuals are the only things this movie has going for it. The movie in question can actually have a perfectly fine screenplay with clean character arcs, clear motivations, and a solid three-act structure, but that will all inevitably be lost under the chorus of “why couldn’t they spend that money on the screenplay?”

    That’s not to say this grade is never justified (you have my blessing in hating most Roland Emmerich films), but this line of thinking has become a ready-to-order excuse to hate something popular. As a result, movie lovers have been made to feel unduly stupid if they are taken by a film’s visuals, as though film wasn’t a visual medium and visual excellence not a worthy aspiration. As Barry Langford puts it in his book, Film Genres: Hollywood and Beyond:

The Sound of Music (1965)

“Spectacular elements have often been understood as tending to narrative redundancy or even interfering with narrative integration, interrupting the flow of the story by encouraging spectators to contemplate the technical achievement of a spectacular sequence—scenery, production design, special effects, and the like—at the expense of empathic involvement in the characters and the unfolding plot . . .

“In fact, narrative and spectacle have always existed in a two-way relationship. As much as classical Hollywood narratives focus on compelling central characters through whom narrative incident is focalized, ample space still exists for the narrative to pause and take in, for instance, large-scale tableaux that aim to impress the spectator by advertising the opulence and scale of the production.”

    The specific ambitions of Avatar also play a role here. With this film it's not just visuals for the sake of visuals--the film is making a point about nature as this treasure trove of splendor, something worthy of awe, admiration, and protection. The overstimulation the audience feels from the 3D neon jungle is a token for the rapture Jake experiences in the jungles of Pandora. We see the glorious vistas on the big screen and understand why he would leave his old life behind to protect this space. That is storytelling. Detractors can run parrot how "Avatar's effects do all the heavy lifting" and run that line into the ground without ever realizing what a victory that actually is.

    Unless that movie is My Dinner with Andre, every movie relies on spectacle to supplement its dialogue to some degree. The direction in which the balance tips depends on what experience the director is after, but we’ve been content to marvel at the spectacular nature of cinema without shaming ourselves ever since the idea of moving pictures stole our imagination over a century ago.

    A common slant against the movie and its $230 M dollar effects is that "all the money in the world can't buy true artistry." They're right, but that mischaracterizes the creative process of Avatar, as though the budget was the most significant feature of this film's production. (It wasn't.) While this wasn't the world's first time seeing motion-capture, Cameron and his team stretched the limits of what this tool could accomplish. (The featurette above gives a glimpse into that field.)

    There’s also the design process to consider—not just how good a thing looks but how it looks, which is just as important. A movie isn’t just designed to look “realistic,” but to develop a language through which it communicates meaning and theme. The choice of blue-skinned aliens, for example, isn't just a cool gimmick. It's a way of communicating the spiritual, otherworldly quality of the Na'vi, we the audience perceive them differently on a psychological level than if they had pink or green skin. There are a lot of instruments in this orchestra (color, form, texture, etc.), and getting it right is more than just a matter of having fancy computers. It requires knowing not only what information to convey, but also how to communicate that in a way that is effective, pleasing, and novel. It’s there that the true genius of Avatar’s filmmaking shines through. Here’s a look into the design process for the hammerhead rhino-like beast that confronts Jake, as read in “The Art of Avatar” for example:

    “This beast features a rapid threat display, in which an explosion of color fans out from the solid bone transverse projections on its ten-foot-long head. Early 2-D explorations, at best, only hint at the thundering grandeur called for in the script . . . Creature designers often employ a more subdued, camouflage color palette: the bright, flamboyant themes found in all of Avatar’s creatures are a unique departure.

    “‘Jim had a very specific goal. He knew he wanted a bony mass upfront because this creature was going to hammer its way through the forest,’ says Neville Page about the aptly named Hammerhead. Cameron also wanted this Pandorean herbivore to be more bull-like, kicking up dust and stomping at the dirt. Andrew Jones and Dave Clayton (both animation directors at WETA digital) were largely responsible for infusing it with bull-like movements. Clayton suggests that even though a lumbering, thick limbed creature would most likely just trot off, the initial scene with Avatar Jake called for the Hammerhead to flee, so a gallop was thought to be more effective."

    Multiply that by every creature, character, and plant on Pandora, and you can start to get a sense for exactly how big the creative process was for this movie.

    This, of course, all culminates in what is probably the most damning argument lobbed against Avatar and its mega-budget effects: "I just don't feel anything watching this movie. What good are all the fancy visuals if the film doesn't mean anything to me?" The very subjective nature of this argument makes it very hard to disprove, which is probably exactly how some detractors prefer it. Emotionality is a highly subjective feature within film. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that a person's emotional frequency might just not attune with what James Cameron is offering. That said, it is also well within the audience's power to abuse this argument and simply refuse to engage emotionally with the film, and then lay all the blame on the hands of film itself. In a discussion that is as nostalgia-laden as the pop culture canon, such an outcome feels more than a little probable.

    Avatar as a film is not lacking for emotional moments or sequences. You have those soaring airborne scenes with Jake and Neytiri that make me really want to visit Avatar-land at Disney World, and then you have emotionally devastating bits like the destruction of Home Tree. This scene especially makes the case for the integration between cutting-edge visuals and empathic storytelling. The detailed rendering of the tree crashing down synergizes with the lifelike motion capture of the Omaticaya people despairing at the razing of their home. The visuals do not compete with the film's emotional core--again, the two currents actually run together.

    There are certainly cases to be made for the potential conflict between overwhelming visuals and sound storytelling. But as we get further away from Avatar and see all the attempts Hollywood has made to recreate its effect, these start to feel less relevant to a movie that is all about learning to see not just spectacle but the beauty behind it.

    What Avatar doesn’t have in common with Dances with Wolves or most other spectacle movies is that it became the highest-grossing film ever made. And it was only after Avatar broke that ceiling that the backlash really began. That’s when the rhetoric of “it was good but was it really that good?” entered the public discourse and Avatar’s value became an all-or-nothing game. In a twisted way, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time was one of the worst things that could have happened to Avatar’s public image. But where things get more interesting is not how Avatar won the crown, but how it lost it. Let’s talk about Avengers: Endgame.

    

3.  It Just Didn’t Deserve to be the Highest Grossing Film

    As Endgame’s imminent box-office feast approached, there was naturally talk about this movie with its legions of devoted followers being the one to finally dethrone Avatar. But where Avatar did “reasonable” its first week and just kept delivering, Endgame followed a more firecracker approach. Moviefone reported a month into the film's run:

"It’s slowed down more than we all expected," Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice Media told THR of the hit Marvel movie.

Robbins first expected "Endgame" to eclipse "Avatar"’s record in mid-June. Now he thinks it may not happen until Labor Day, if at all.

 

"Avatar" spent 7 weeks as the number one film, compared to "Endgame's 3-week reign. It was also a steady earner, spending over 60 weeks in theaters and receiving a late summer re-release more than half-of-a-year after its December debut.

"Endgame" doesn't appear to have that kind of staying power so far.”

    It was only after Endgame’s conquest was in doubt, and after all the fans already had their chance to see the movie five times in theaters, that a campaign was mobilized. #BeatAvatar started trending, and people rallied around the notion that if everyone saw "Endgame" just one more time we would never have to talk about Avatar ever again.

    Nothing about this process was natural or organic. It was not a natural response to how audiences received the film. It was a fandom coming together to tip over the vending machine until they got the prize they wanted. Disney itself got in on the game by launching a re-release with extra unfinished footage before the initial release had even concluded, a re-release that even fans admit was shoddy and cash-grabby. Still, Avatar detractors got what they wanted, and "Endgame" booted Avatar from its throne, sounding cheers that “we saved cinema!”

    But here’s one element of the box office conversation that has gone under-discussed. Until Endgame’s box-office campaign, every film that had been “the highest-grossing film”—from Avatar to Titanic to Jurassic Park to Gone with the Wind and everything in between—had been an original film. Maybe an adaptation of a book or a play, but it was new to the world of film. Avengers: Endgame, the apotheosis of the franchising web, was the movie that broke that trend, and it only broke this trend after we sunk our hooks into its wheezing torso and towed it over the finish line. Given how our movie-scape only continues to grow more defined by remakes and sequels, and with the real possibility that soon remakes and reboots will be the only movies playing in theaters at all, who knows if we’ll ever have another original film take back that crown. Oops.

    Unlike with "Endgame," no one set out to make Avatar the highest-grossing film of all time. There was no #BeatTitanic movement. Two weeks into the film’s run, James Cameron himself didn’t think it was “realistic” to expect the film to overtake Titanic. Avatar’s success was a total surprise, a hopeful suggestion that maybe capturing the public’s attention with a film wasn’t as rote as tethering a movie to a cinematic universe. Avatar claimed the crown because people wanted to see the movie, and however internet-age cynicism spoiled the conversation later, people at the time were happy with what they saw. From Scott Mendelson’s 10 year retrospective on Avatar’s success:

“Like Star Wars 32 years prior, Avatar was an original sci-fi fantasy adventure, a cinema-first blockbuster that soared because it looked good, offered unique unto itself cinematic pleasures and delivered on what its obsessive auteur had promised for over a decade. That it didn’t spawn a multimedia empire has been seen as evidence that its success was a fluke, and maybe it was. But ten years later, that it wasn’t capitalizing on generational nostalgia or a prior cinematic glory has only made it that much more special compared to the blockbusters that followed.” 

Avatar couldn’t just be a new perspective on a timeless story, or a celebration of film's capacity for visual splendor, or a movie that just happened to win the lottery. It had to be this inside joke about Hollywood being out of touch with quality storytelling, and that's another part of why it is so frustrating that it was the film's detractors that decided to take control of its narrative. I have to imagine we’re worse off for punishing this film the way we did. If "Endgame" was deserving of our laurels while Avatar was not, and if "Endgame’s" coup of Avatar’s title was justified, what are we really saying about what we want from Hollywood? 

A Place at the Table

    Despite the cold shouldering, Avatar has managed to grab onto a few monuments of pop culture presence. The property enjoys a theme park presence at Animal Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort. Even my friends who hate the movie who’ve been there have conceded it's "technically spellbinding.” Even in researching for this essay, I was pleasantly surprised to find various comments on blogs or YouTube videos from individuals who are still enthralled with the movie and make the trip to Pandora every so often.

    We also see the film being used as a rallying cry outside the specific realm of pop culture. Consider something like the protesters in Bil’in, Palestine, who took on Avatars of their own by dressing up as the Na’vi while opposing their real-life conquerors (video here). Henry Jenkins notes the phenomenon in his piece “Avatar Activism.”

“The Bil’in protesters recognised potential parallels between the Na’vi struggles to defend their Eden against the Sky People and their own attempts to regain lands they feel were unjustly taken from them . . . The film’s larger-than-life imagery, recognised worldwide thanks to Hollywood, offered them an empowered image of their own struggles. The sight of a blue-skinned alien writhing in the dust and choking on tear gas shocked many into paying attention to messages we often ignore.”

    Repurposing pop culture icons as ammunition for advancing a chosen cause (e.g. using Disney Princesses as advocates for women’s rights) has been a part of the 21st-century fabric for some time, but as it pertains to Avatar, it speaks to an untapped reservoir of cultural power buried under the rhetoric of “the highest-grossing movie that no one cares about anymore.”

From the set of Avatar 2. Nope, I don't know whats' happening either

    With the Avatar sequels (finally) in the heat of production, in what James Cameron promises to be an epic family saga, maybe the multigenerational mega-story the masses have been demanding will step out onto the stage, and the gatekeepers of pop culture will finally permit Avatar to sit with them at the grown-up table. Yet, I worry sometimes that whether the sequels do or don't deliver, the damage has already been done. Given how the movie is almost more well-known for the criticisms lobbed at it, maybe the public just won't give the films the time of day, haters will assert that they told us so, and Pandora will fade into nonexistence. If we did let that happen, I'm not even sure it would be Cameron's loss so much as our own.

    At the risk of committing a felony offense . . . when Star Wars claimed the box-office crown in 1977, it was a singular entity, not the trilogy of trilogies what with its expanded universe novels and national holidays. It just told a familiar story about good and evil transposed onto an immersive new world brought to life with cutting-edge filmmaking technology. It was permitted to grow into its pop culture empire organically because people were excited at the possibilities it represented.

I'll repeat, personal taste is an active agent in what films an individual deems classic--I am not trying to paint it as a moral failing if you personally do not like Avatar. Neither am I claiming that no one can ever have a legitimate critique of the film. I AM saying that modern fan culture owes all of modern fan culture to the 1977 audiences who didn't walk out of Star Wars mumbling, “sure, the effects were nice, but does ‘King Arthur in space’ really deserve this success more than Lawrence of Arabia?”

    And, hey, there’s always that small chance that you like Avatar more than you think you do.

                                                     -The Professor