The Dialectics of Avatar (2009)
The highest grossing original film of all time has left very little cultural impact. What this contradiction reveals about cultural memory, history, and ideology.
Writer/director James Cameron’s Avatar came out in 2009, which is not all that long ago, yet it belongs to a bygone time that will probably never return. It was an original movie taking the monoculture by storm, which would never happen now. Now there is basically no monoculture, or singular cultural phenomenon that acts as a touchstone for everyone—thi…