Avatar x Hypermediacy
Material Girls
Rehak Hannah
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2023
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Did you love James Cameron's Avatar upon its release in 2009? Have you since watched it and thought, huh, now what were we thinking 14 years ago? Were you critical of it from the start? Baffled by the public's interest in colonialism and hot blue aliens? Then this episode is for you.
Tune in for a conversation about this beloved sci-fi blockbuster. Hannah leads Marcelle talk colonialism, sexism, marketing budgets and how the interests of white dude billionaires drives our reality. Together, they discuss Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s iconic 2000 book Remediation: Understanding New Media to better understand hypermediacy's role in this film's success. Ultimately, Hannah comes to some BIG conclusions about this movie and it's lasting impact on not just the zeitgeist, but also our literal planet earth. That's right! There are some pretty devastating ecological impacts of CGI and VFX — and in case you were wondering, yes, this episode is also a lesson on irony!
If you like our show, please share it with family and friends! Word-of-mouth is the primary way we reach new listeners who are interested in feminist materialist critique, pop culture and laughing at and from within *the discourse.* Share the show today!
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Material Girls is a new show that aims to make sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.
We'll be back in two weeks for another episode, but until then, be sure to check out all the bonus content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease. You can learn more about the show at ohwitchplease.ca and on our instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Want more from us? Check out our website ohwitchplease.ca.
*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is really interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.
Music Credits:
“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020
Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh! |
| 0:08.8 | этот volcanic Zelda |
| 0:14.9 | I'm here inside |
| 0:17.2 | I'm here in DearRay |
| 0:19.0 | I want to take a ride on a mini train |
| 0:22.4 | You can have it all |
| 0:24.9 | At the shopping |
| 0:30.0 | Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a scholarly podcast about popular culture. |
| 0:35.8 | I'm Hannah McGregor, and I'm Marcel Cosman. And today we are talking about James Cameron's |
| 0:42.0 | 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar, which, Marcel, you and I both just watched for the first time this week. |
| 0:51.0 | Oh yeah. Yep. We sure did. I'm glad that I decided to, because remember I texted and was like, |
| 0:59.1 | should I watch it? I was like, I mean, if you feel like it, sure. And then you did, and you texted |
| 1:05.3 | me while you did, and it was fun. It was a wild ride. So I know that this new podcast of ours is |
| 1:14.0 | about material culture. So we're probably going to talk about like the production of Avatar, |
| 1:20.8 | you know, rather than doing like an analysis of the content. Yeah, that's right. So before we do that, |
| 1:26.5 | I've just, I've got to get some stuff off my chest about how totally bonkers this movie is. |
| 1:34.6 | So, so I compiled, I wanted to make a top 10 list, but it was, I'm not going to lie, I had to skip |
| 1:40.4 | a lot of the movie because it was unnecessarily long. Oh, because it's so boring to watch when |
| 1:46.0 | you're not in a movie theater, because so many of the scenes are just them flying around on dragons |
| 1:51.5 | for like 15 minutes. Like the worst. Anyway, we'll get, well, I'm sure we'll talk to, we'll talk |
| 1:57.9 | about it. So what I did is I made a top five list of things about which I can say absolutely |
| 2:05.0 | nothing more intellectual than, wait, what? Good, I'm ready. Okay, so number five, our hero's name, |
... |
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