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. Here is Yeats in full rant: “And when you are old and full of weariness, the best any of you will have to recollect of your miserable, futile huckstering existences is that once you were in the presence of a Titan.I SAW MY FIRST box of Pandora Flakes at Target this December. A particular favorite is Yeats, who, at one point in the proceedings (Yeats’ poem “When You Are Old” figures as a leitmotif throughout), gives the Abbey Theatre’s cast a real dressing down because they lack a certain respect for Synge, someone Yeats ranks alongside Aeschylus and Ibsen. Kiss my Mary Street arse.”Īt other times Molly - O’Connor - entertains some choice memories of famous Irish writers to provide a little comic relief. The same Molly takes no prisoners when it comes to thinking about her old cronies, back home, and how they have written her off as a loser: “I am on the BBC, I’m not gone yet. Living in a dreadful room in London, she has twice married, endured the death of a son during World War II and is about to take her first “medicinal” sip of the day - it is 6:43 a.m. When we first meet Molly, it is 1952, and she is, at age 67, on the way out. As O’Connor himself says, “Most events in this book never happened at all.” And so we come to what is perhaps O’Connor’s final forgotten corner: an imaginary account of Allgood’s closing days - day - compliments of a syncretistic mix of fictive letters, well-hewn episodes, occasional fragments and timely reminiscences. These few biographical details aside, no one really knows what went on between Synge and Molly during their engagement or what became of Allgood in later life. Allgood was also, crucially, Synge’s teenage muse for Pegeen Mike in “The Playboy of the Western World” and his lead in “Deirdre of the Sorrows.” Yeats put it in his 1923 Nobel lecture, a player of genius. This particular venture into Ireland’s past features Molly Allgood (stage name, Maire O’Neill), who was engaged to John Millington Synge at the time of his death in 1909. O’Connor’s most recent novel, “Ghost Light,” adds to this impressive résumé and signals the end of a 10-year project to write three books set in “forgotten corners of the Irish past.” Since then O’Connor has published a series of novels, including “Star of the Sea,” which was awarded France’s Prix Millepages and Italy’s Premio Acerbi. Joseph O’Connor - brother of Sinéad O’Connor - published his first novel, “Cowboys and Indians,” in 1991 and immediately saw it shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.
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