But in the current industrial configuration, centered on Marvel tentpoles and Disney live-action remakes, directors who wanted the studio off their backs have given way to directors who were “always big fans” of whatever IP is being rebooted. Even after the studios reasserted their dominance in the 1980s, the cult of the auteur had plenty of steam. Some studios then cannily marketed that revolt. But in the New Hollywood of the 1960s and ’70s, some of those directors led an artistic revolt against the studio system.
#FRAGMENTS MOVIE CONNOR HOW TO#
They knew how to make the system work for them. Studios had long had in-house auteurs such as Ernst Lubitsch and John Ford. First, Avatar disappeared because it constitutes the endpoint of what I call conflictual studio auteurism. There are three important aspects to this transformation. Then that balance shifted so completely that it made Avatar all but erasable. 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. At the same time, those artifacts - the hometree berries of the now - have to provide the feedback necessary to reckon with the still-congealing world they epitomize.
For them to take hold, a precise configuration of technology, consumption, and capital deployment must come together to make the artifacts that mark those shifts possible. Cultural shifts, when they happen, are never just about marketing. There are many facets to the relationship between movies and money - production, distribution, exhibition, reception, representation - and they can change relatively independently of one another, at different speeds, and with different intensities. 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. What changed was not the invention of franchises but the rise of these sorts of franchises. 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 - Marvel, and other endeavors that would follow, went on to develop a very different one.” We’ll get to the world-building, but the sense that this was the moment the shift occurred seems undeniable. 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. Let’s go big: Avatar disappeared because it almost immediately slipped out of sync with the globally dominant relationship between money and movies. Our critical interest in that forgetting hinges on the unexpected mismatch between money and culture - 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? 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. The unparalleled Disney marketing machine had been engaged, ready to make the whole world Na’vi blue in a full-court-press franchising effort for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, out in theaters today.īy 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. Tony the Tiger stood against a background from another planet and sported a purple cravat that made his nose look even more cobalt, with Frosted Flakes that were now dotted with blueberry-flavored “Hometree Berries,” according to Target’s product page. I SAW MY FIRST box of Pandora Flakes at Target this December.
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