The Funnel and the Horn

“By now, Avatar’s lack of cultural footprint is a given of pop-cultural criticism — a fact so basic that any commentator may be expected to offer a take on its strange absence. Its forgotten status is so taken for granted that The Times can rely on it as a news peg, or that actually knowing one’s way about the Avatar plot constitutes a kind of alt approach, as Patrick Monahan demonstrated in this roundup in GQ.”

“how on Pandora is it possible that the most successful movie of all time, the movie that crushed all prior box-office champs on its way to making nearly $3 billion, is, kinda sorta, culturally invisible? We paid for it, so why don’t we care about it?”

“Let’s go big: Avatar disappeared because it almost immediately slipped out of sync with the globally dominant relationship between money and movies. In 2008, as Jamie Lauren Keiles put it, Avatar “promised one future for film — original world building, envelope-pushing effects, the theater as the site of cinematic innovation — [while] Marvel, and other endeavors that would follow, went on to develop a very different one.””

“Something shifted with Avatar. But what, exactly?”

“Hollywood is certainly more franchise-dominated than ever, but there had been powerful, even dominant, franchises before — Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, Friday the 13th. What changed was not the invention of franchises but the rise of these sorts of franchises. And if we look closely at how Avatar worked, while also looking at the political and economic world that produced it, we will have a better sense of why it all but disappeared despite its unprecedented market supremacy.”

“The renegotiation in the balance between cinema-event and cinema-authorship, a renegotiation that was decades in the making, sped up and gathered force at exactly the right moment to make Avatar possible. Then that balance shifted so completely that it made Avatar all but erasable”

“First, Avatar disappeared because it constitutes the endpoint of what I call conflictual studio auteurism”

“Second, the change in the industry rearticulated and was inflected by changes in both spectatorship and storytelling”

“Audiences were being enlisted as participants in a regime of IP surveillance. Fans policed and disciplined the franchises they loved; they produced content to fill the stretches between serial episodes in a differently financialized Hollywood. At the same time, the hyperattention of these 24/7 sentinels synchronized with the always-on technological assemblages of the Global War on Terrorism. The narrative mode best suited to this kind of viewership — most rewarding to it, most likely to foster it — entices speculative participation. It has gaps, holes, and figures in the background. It has ambiguities to theorize”

“We might figure this transformation of narrative as an opposition between the funnel and the horn”

“In funnel narratives, galaxies of reference are pumped into a story-form sturdy enough to contain them”

“Viewers repeat the author’s steps, hunting down the origins of this design element or that line of dialogue. (Noël Carroll discusses some reasons for this in “The Future of Allusion.”) Such reading undoes the auteurs’ processes, but it cements their status, driving attention to the auteur”

“In horn narratives, that same sturdy story-form blasts outward, opening onto an expanding universe of possible futures. Some of those possibilities will be filled by the franchise, or by one of its continuities, or by fanfic or other forms of participation. Form and authorship don’t always line up neatly: auteurs can spin tales out of their own obsessions, not out of the building blocks of cinema history”

“when the culture traded Avatar (2009) for Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), it swapped the funnel for the horn”

“Thus is the enormity of the Star Wars franchise’s funnel plus horn achievement cast into relief — a stunningly participatory and open narrative universe conjured out of the most embittered, antistudio, technophilic auteurism imaginable”

“Avatar was a movie that signaled a shift towards standard-bearers as slightly more forgettable events. And it was vulnerable to this because it is a signal instance of the technogigantism I call megacinema. Megacinematic endeavors are the Cheshire Cats of cinema history, events that disappear leaving little more than their event status behind”

“Megacinema is a loose conception that takes in a range of extremes — large formats, large film gauges, third and fourth dimensions, epic runtimes, purpose-built immersive environments, novel or bespoke expanded cinema technologies that you might find at a world’s fair or a theme park”

“The movie was always pitched as both itself and a demonstration of itself”

“that split spectatorship makes it hard for the immersion to take hold”

“The contradiction between experiencing and registering your experiencing makes the passage from “demo” to “mode” difficult. The medium gets stuck at the edge of gimmickry”

“As megacinema, Avatar’s potential hold on culture required extensive narrative support, support its retread white saviorism could not provide”

“Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and a multiracial coalition of anthropologist types and disgruntled soldiers join with the Na’vi — whose leaders are played by actors of Cherokee, Guyanese, Afro-Cuban, and Puerto Rican/Dominican descent — and, ultimately, all the creatures of the planet to battle against the golfing, mech-suit–wearing forces of extractive racial capitalism”

“Yet if that dynamic was familiar, albeit made modern through some interesting casting choices, another aspect of Avatar’s story could have given it more staying power, beyond its “Dances with Wolves/Last Samurai in Space” baseline. For within this gone-native parable is an inverted account of the attacks on the World Trade Center”

“While his allegiances are still in flux, Jake sells out the Na’vi and gives his military supervisors a detailed structural analysis of Hometree’s multicolumnar trunk (no word on its berries, blue or otherwise). Their attack on the tree allows us to see the Na’vi — and ourselves — as 9/11 victims, now marked as Indigenous rather than cosmopolitan”

“Yet at the same time, the mercenary army’s genocidal rapacity reads as a critique of the US backlash to the 9/11 attacks. That critique was consistent with Cameron’s long-standing opposition to US military imperialism. It was also tacit enough to largely escape notice”

“Without further entries in the series, and without a semi-speculative space for its fans to occupy as the story propelled ever onward, the movie could only remain a metaphor for itself”

“as Vice noted, if people didn’t walk out — they didn’t! — that was because the movie was also a “big, self-satisfied metaphor for the immersion of watching a 3D movie”

“The movie is both itself and a demonstration of itself”

“In the 2000s, Marvel’s new model was in a certain way a very old model: the profits from one movie would be plowed into the production of the next. What changed was the immediate narrativization of that linkage. The teasers at the end of each installment would open the window to the next. Every movie would anticipate its sequel. The result was, in part, a new managerial spectatorship”

“Just as fantasy sports aligned fandom with managerial rather than athletic emulation, so too IP surveillance aligns spectatorship with franchise and continuity management”

“You argue with Cameron; you play along with Marvel superproducer Kevin Feige”

“The World of Avatar at Walt Disney World in Florida constituted an important break in its erasure. Begun in 2011, it finally opened in 2017, at the nadir of Avatar’s notoriety. It offered another route to the experience beyond the cinema”

“Disney’s imagineered rides always add incrementally to the lore of a franchise even as they reinforce its experiential weight”

“in the Na’vi River Journey, you slowly meander through a faux bioluminescent landscape to meet the animatronic Shaman of Songs (a character who plays no role in the movie).

That shaman — voiced by Sandra Benton — may sing of Pandora’s past, ancient and recent, but she is enfolded in the ongoing tale of encounter. The “world” of Avatar was, at that moment, officially opened up; its Indigenous inhabitants were given a mythic past that you accessed not through psychedelics, but through song”

“The original has returned to theaters upscaled to 4K, and the release of the second and third Avatar will test whether his world can pivot from the funnel to the horn”