#me? i'm avatar georg

[gothprentiss]

people keep talking about how avatar had no cultural impact which i think is largely just a result of how media production and consumption are weirdly stratified, so that the fact that most people don't think about avatar regularly somehow outweighs the way that avatar was surely a bellwether for groaningly long cgi-heavy blockbusters, but that's just a side point. the main point is that every time i see that claim i'm like fuck me i may truly be the person who experienced avatar the most.

let me explain.

avatar 1 is the movie i have seen the most in my life. not by choice but because my dad is the dad variant which is moth-to-flame obsessed with the Phenomenon Of Technology and had a lobe of his brain dedicated to wanting to see avatar before the movie was even a twinkle in james cameron's beady eye. so when it came out on dvd in the late spring of 2010, my dad rented it from the library and set about to watch it, with his family.

one relevant fact here is that i grew up without any tv access. cable, network, whatever-- i literally don't know what it is we didn't have. the library dvd rentals were my closest brush with new and ongoing media that wasn't an extremely paltry collection of disney videos and focus on the family style christian children's movies. so whatever we got from the library i was watching, 100%, regardless of how much it sucked or how impenetrable it was. this despite the fact that, second relevant fact here, i'd already seen avatar-- my best friend and i saw it in theaters in 3d and thought it was dope or whatever, we were 13, the bit where everyone's linking up their hair tentacles was kind of weird, the big cat was metal, everyone was roasting it for being a rip off of pocahontas but with big space dinosaurs. in other words, i was ready to be like, apparently, everyone else on this god damn planet who saw it once and was like yeah, sure, whatever, and moved on with their lives.

but i've already told you how this ends, which is not with me getting to be normal.

the central conflict of this already too long story is that my mother's sleep schedule adjusts whenever she's sat down in front of a tv-- something about the blue light sets her on a 30 minute sleep timer. obviously this was a problem for a 2.5 hour movie. over the course of a week we managed to wrangle her sleep timer so that she made it about 45 minutes to an hour, before she'd promptly fall asleep and snore at a decibel level that implied conscious maliciousness.

my dad was undaunted! we rewatched the beginning over and over, i'd say about ten times over two weeks, until finally we just gave up on her and powered through the whole thing.

now, you might be saying, that's not that many times, i've watched my favorite movie well over ten times, maybe you just lack commitment to film, and i am so glad to tell you this story does not end here. my mother was also undaunted! and my dad had hyped up the movie to such an extent-- recall, again, he's a technology dad, and this was also a welcome and blessed break in the middle of a deeply cursed phase where he listened to french electronica and LMFAO for months on end-- that she was just as determined to see it to its close as he'd been.

so we resumed our lurching progress through the movie, again kneecapped by my mother's sleep schedule. my father and i had gotten out of the human colonies on pandora into the cgi marvels of na'vi land, but we were grounded again. i had suggested, back in the aught watchcount, that we could simply make note of where we'd stopped watching and resume there the next night, but my dad's avatar hype train had a weird purism car and he insisted that the True Experience was watching it beginning to end. i considered abandoning ship at this point, but i wasn't allowed to close my door and my parents watch movies at astounding volumes, so it wasn't like i was going to not be experiencing the movie.

this went on for weeks. i believe the library charged $2/day for new movie rentals, and capped their rentals at a week, no doubt in an effort to disincentivize this precise kind of rat brained behavior. but freezing my dad's library account until he returned the dvd wasn't going to have any meaningful impact: there was no space to want other dvds or books during the great avatar consumption. i believe we genuinely had the dvd out for a whole month, and during that time had it on every night that my parents weren't working late. if you remember the post about the kid who could just close their eyes and "play shrek" because they'd seen it so much, there was a period of my middle school life where i could do that with the first half to two thirds of avatar. the bit where sigourney weaver goes "hey marine, catch!" to jake sully is actually embedded in my mind because it was typically when my mother's deviated septum kicked up a fuss.

this isn't a great story, you know, it's just something that happened. i think we genuinely watched avatar, at least the first half, over twenty times, but it never occurred to me to keep count. long-term, somehow this month-long avatar fugue state didn't work as some sort of contemporary variation on the clockwork orange ludovico technique. my dad went back to tecktonik, my mother's sleep schedule regularized, and we finally could use the library again. i'd nearly forgotten about it (the Avatar Effect) until we started getting news stories about the sequels a couple of years ago, which i naturally sent to my dad. it turns out he does not remember his brief and consuming obsession with avatar, and thought i was just a fan of the movie. he is going through life without the weird sensation of being kicked in the brain by every avatar fact he encounters, such as the fact that the giant avatar shaman animatronic at disneyworld is the most expensive animatronic they've ever done and is yet another Feat of Technology, or how na'vi is an actual created language, or how there are FOUR avatar sequels slated, ensuring that the 2020s will be marked by the consistent presence of james cameron's giant blue space kitty movie and ever-evolving heights of discourse. his memory of 2010 is smooth and serene and unmarked by the single greatest film incident of my entire life.