Marvellous Blue. Naturalization, Estrangement, and Digital Characters in James Cameron’s Avatar

What is it about?

Although it has been extremely successful at the box office, James Cameron’s sf epic Avatar has also been criticized for its lack of originality and its predictable story. In my paper I argue that this kind of disappointment is not so much a consequence of the movie’s plot but of formal aspects. Like in all sf, Avatar’s impact relies heavily on the interaction between naturalization and estrangement. On a formal level sf always na- turalizes its nova, it makes the alien look ordinary by employing an aesthetics of tech- nology. Estrangement, on the other hand, happens on a diegetic level, inside the story world, when a (naturalized) marvelous element is introduced into an apparently realis- tic world and causes frictions between the orders of these two worlds. This mecha- nism is partly suspended when it comes to Avatar’s most important novum: the digi- tally created Na’vi. Relying on the research by Barbara Flückiger, I show how Avatar is so concerned with properly naturalizing the Na’vi and not letting them appear as too strange, that most of its potential for estranging effects goes unused.

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