Aurelia Butler

According to the teachings of the paduan theater artist Giovanni Fusetti, one of the great clowning masters in the world, the Italian word folle, as in il Folle, “the Fool,” comes from the Latin word follis, which means the bellows, that implement that gathers and directs air toward flame to feed it. The Fool, he says, is like the bellows: full of air, full of breath, full of spirits and full of feeling. Fools talk of everything and nothing, the silly and the profound, and their ability to talk freely without much culpability makes them fonts of truth. Their words propel plots and topple kingdoms. Conduits of air, of inspiration, are implements of ignition. Fusetti is known as the midwife of clowns. The theory goes that everyone has a clown inside, and instead of inventing it or imposing it, you simply coax it forth. The process of learning to clown is in fact the process of finding your inner clown, the part of the self that is full of inspiration and raw emotion, the part most in touch with the fact that “we understand nothing and we feel everything,” as Fusetti said in a 2019 interview. “The clown feels that life is beautiful and tragic.” The Irish actor Jessie Buckley — best known for roles that have placed her variously at the mercy of horrid vicars, mythological monsters, serial-killer boyfriends, ghost rapists, abusive husbands, nuclear disasters, warring dynasties and unseemly hungers — is currently fascinated with clowning and is an admirer of Fusetti’s, with whom she trained in Padua this year. This doesn’t quite track with her résumé, but it makes sense to the people who know her, or the people who understand clowning to be about, as Fusetti describes it, “the extreme sport of being alive.”“The first thing he has you do is carve your nose,” Buckley said. We were walking around a residential neighborhood of Toronto on an unseasonably warm day in October, kicking leaves. Buckley was on a break from the set of “Fingernails,” a new film she was shooting with the director Christos Nikou. “You have a red ball, like a play ball, and how you carve your clown nose is very important because it has to fit your nose perfectly.” Once you carve your nose and mount it on your face, you do an exercise in which you come into the world as a clown, as if seeing everything for the very first time — with the nose on. She found the exercise extraordinary in the way it surfaced people’s clowns. She is curious, however, about clowns’ relegation to a marginal art form. “They used to be in the core of society. They used to be, like in the Fool in ‘King Lear,’ you know, they were the ones kind of exposing the wounds in society.”I asked if her clown spoke. “Mine didn’t yet. Some clowns do. My clown was a very — well, I had kind of two clowns, but — she was a child. She was a very young clown.” She smiled. “And she was in utter awe of the world. And wants to get so close to it — but was terrified of getting that close as well.” Buckley rummaged in her pocket.“Here,” she said, holding out her phone. “That’s her.”There was Buckley, swallowed in a black oversize men’s coat and loose black pants. Her feet were bare, and her hands were lost somewhere in her coat sleeves. She looked hapless, amazed, delighted.“OK,” I said. “What was your other clown?” She smiled again lopsidedly. “Just mischievous.”Wonder and mischief, as twin temperamental undercurrents, form the complex charisma that Buckley brings to her work. She has an affinity for harrowing roles, which she then infuses with fierce vibrancy, wit and unexpected lightness. This year she has starred in two films that she has come to think of as a diptych: the folk horror film “Men,” directed by Alex Garland, and “Women Talking,” directed by Sarah Polley. In each film, Buckley portrays women who navigate the commingling of desire, pain, fear and awe. Her performances force us to consider how we can live with respect for the fact of human life’s murkiness. “In a way they were for me in dialogue with each other,” Buckley said about the two films, “Men,” with its male cast and a male director, and “Women Talking,” with its female cast and a female director. Each in its own way tried to get at the heart of a seemingly ancient monstrosity that can exist between men and women, one that necessarily exists alongside love. She wanted to put herself at the center. “Where is the wound?” she said. “I feel like I need, I want to understand the monster.”Buckley in “Women Talking.” Orion Pictures, via Everett Collection“I just don’t think since Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro that there’s been this kind of pure power coupled with this fierce intelligence,” Polley told me. “She’s just got this, like, atomic power that comes out of her.” On the set for “Women Talking,” Polley explained, they erected a large screen outside the main set — a hayloft — that functioned as a monitor. One day Polley found a group of people clustered around it. “It was a bunch of locations people and a few drivers, and a lot of the Covid team and P.A.s were all around the screen.” She asked what they were doing, and someone answered, “Whenever we hear you’ve turned around on Jessie, we all run in.” Polley was startled — she had never seen anything like that before. These were seasoned crew members who do several blockbuster movies a year, and who had no particular interest in “Women Talking” or its subject. But Buckley was like a magnet, she said. “They just didn’t want to miss a second of watching that pure explosion of power that happens when she’s onscreen or where the surprise is, what the hell she’s going to do next.”What did she feel couldn’t be said? ‘Female … desire. Female hunger, female bodies, female intellect — yeah, a female hunger.’“Women Talking,” adapted from the novel by Miriam Toews, is based on a true story. A community of Mennonite women spend years living with a gruesome mystery: They wake up in the mornings brutalized, apparently raped in the night, but with no memory of the violation. Their religious leaders insist that the phenomenon must be caused by ghosts or demons, but then the women discover that it was their own men, their husbands, fathers and sons, attacking them with the help of cow tranquilizers. The movie centers on a small group of the women gathering in a hayloft to debate how they will respond to this discovery. Buckley plays Mariche, a woman with a husband so violent that the mere mention of his name pales the faces of everyone in the room. Both Mariche and her young daughter have been attacked in the night; still, she is initially pessimistic that there’s anything to be done about it. Buckley plays Mariche in a way that highlights her deep fear, her biting honesty, her self-sacrificing courage, all of which are wrapped in a rage that’s practically radioactive.Polley was considering Buckley for a few of the characters in the film; it was Buckley who chose Mariche. This surprised Polley: Mariche is the hardest part. She’s meanspirited, funny, caustic. She mocks others’ vulnerabilities; in one scene, she berates another woman who is having a panic attack, complaining that none of the other women’s traumas have manifested in a way that demands so much attention. She laughs at the idea that women so sheltered as they are could possibly make their way in the world. Polley described Mariche as an obstacle to progress for much of the story. She has internalized much of the violence to which she has been subjected, and she finds herself spitting it back at others. Polley asked Buckley why she chose Mariche; Buckley told her it was because Mariche frightened her. In Mariche, Buckley told me, she saw “the kind of internalized monster,” the way that Mariche’s cruelty had been planted in her “from a legacy and archetype that goes way back, that has been given to her by her mother, and given to her by her husband, and given to her probably by her own children.” Reflecting on this dynamic during another conversation, she elaborated. “But I think the more interesting thing than that is about how, within violence — how people try to emancipate themselves from it or move out of it.”Maggie Gyllenhaal described to me something her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, said about Buckley after acting with her in “The Lost Daughter”: “She’s buoyant.” Gyllenhaal agreed. “She’s full of life, and it floats her back up to, like, where the light is,” Gyllenhaal said. “Even though she’s totally interested and curious and powerful enough to swim down in the depths of the darkest places, she’s going to emerge full of life in one way or another, including all the darkness and the pain and the perversity.” The clown goes down to the depths and then floats back up to the clouds. Buckley was born in a small town, Killarney, the oldest of four sisters and one brother. Her parents encouraged Buckley’s creativity, and she wound up in the school plays at her all-girls Catholic school, often playing the boys’ parts, like Tony in “West Side Story.” She remains close with her family, but she talks about those years as fraught with existential dread. All the life paths readily available to her seemed unmanageably constricted. She couldn’t imagine a future for herself; she felt trapped.“When I was a teenager, there was a lot of what I felt, especially as a woman, that wasn’t allowed to be said,” she told me. “I sometimes felt like I was going to explode, like I was too much. There was all this feeling in me — I felt so much, and it felt like it was being kept so quietly and tightly.”What did she feel couldn’t be said, I wanted to know, and she paused to find her words. “Female … desire. Female hunger, female bodies, female intellect — yeah, a female hunger. I felt like everybody was starving around me. And in a way, if you were starving, you were doing great. In order to join the world, you must starve and be smaller than yourself, and then you’ll be palatable. Internally, I was exploding.” When, as a teenager, she felt depressed and frustrated, she dove into old films, obsessing over Katharine Hepburn or Judy Garland. At 17, she applied to drama school and was rejected, bringing that dream to a halt.The next day, she decided to audition for the reality talent show “I’d Do Anything,” in which young actresses competed for the role of Nancy in a West End production of the musical “Oliver!” The footage of this competition is still on YouTube, and in it, teenage Buckley stands center stage week after week with her moussed spray of red curls and wide gold hoop earrings, doing something that can only be described in clichés: singing her heart out, singing for her life. Her voice was applauded, but she was criticized repeatedly for what the judges perceived as overly ‘’masculine” body language — she was coached to “be more ladylike” and to “get your womanly head on.” I looked back at the footage and found this assessment of her physicality to be bizarre, not to mention sexist. It seems, in retrospect, like another expression of the kind of rigidity around “palatable” displays of womanhood Buckley has spent her adult life reimagining. It’s not footage she seems to enjoy re-encountering. She was clearly a talent — she was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s favorite — but also just an earnest teenager gamely belting one power ballad after another, voice clean as brass. Still, there’s a blueprint of the present-day Buckley there: a certain urgency that comes through in her performances. When she sings “As Long as He Needs Me,” she looks hungry, as if she could swallow the whole world and it wouldn’t be enough. When she was filming “The Lost Daughter” during the pandemic, Buckley says Gyllenhaal developed a habit of whispering images and notions into her ear when they were between takes. What Buckley remembers her whispering most was, “You’re starving, you’re absolutely starving.” The film is based on an Elena Ferrante novel about an academic who abandons her young daughters to pursue a love affair and the space to write — a choice she looks back on decades later with mixed feelings. The film shows the protagonist, Leda, in both eras of her life: suffocating under the weight of early motherhood and domestic obligation, and reflecting on her life as an older woman vacationing alone. The older Leda is played by Olivia Colman; Buckley plays Leda the young mother, desperately in love with her children but even more desperate to get away from them. The movie probes the taboo of a mother whose needs don’t align with those of her children and, facing that conflict, chooses herself. Leda calls herself an “unnatural” mother. This self-accusation is undermined by the tenderness and pathos with which Buckley plays her. Buckley’s Leda is tired and trapped, but also playful, loving, dutiful. She resists villainization. She holds her children as if she never wants to let them go — until she lets them go. Who wouldn’t want what she wants — more time to think and write, to sleep with Peter Sarsgaard? Buckley said she loved the opportunity Gyllenhaal gave her to “be curious about what is maybe a version of what motherhood or womanhood might actually mean, not something that’s just palatable. The unspoken truth of what it is to be a woman and to actually really take a bite of the apple. And relish it. And not apologize for it.” If there is a thread connecting Buckley’s early work, it’s her taste for playing women who want something they are not supposed to want. In “Beast,” her 2017 film debut, Buckley plays Moll, a 20-something who is so desperate to get away from her controlling mother that she begins a relationship with a man she comes to suspect is behind a string of local rape-murders of young girls. In “Wild Rose,” often thought of as her breakout role, she plays a 24-year-old Scottish woman recently released from prison who is desperate to be a country singer in Nashville, a dream she struggles to subordinate to the needs of her two young children. In the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” she plays the pregnant wife of a firefighter who responds to the nuclear explosion; she chooses to be with her husband as he dies despite being warned that his body is radioactive and dangerous to her pregnancy, a choice that costs her the child. In Season 4 of the TV series “Fargo,” she plays a cheerful Minnesotan nurse who, calling herself an “angel of mercy,” surreptitiously kills her patients. In a 2020 filmed production of “Romeo and Juliet” for the National Theater, she plays an earthy, forceful Juliet with an adult sense of what she wants. These women might be seen by others as morally compromised — certainly the nurse is — but maybe more to the point is that they’re intentionally colliding with the most complicated aspects of human agency.In “Men,” Buckley plays Harper, a young widow who takes a solo retreat to a manor in the English countryside, where she is slowly hunted — or haunted — by a series of male archetypes: a policeman who disbelieves her; a vicar who accuses her of stirring his lust; a silent, naked figure covered in leaves, meant to evoke the Green Man, a pagan figure with a face covered by foliage, who symbolizes the cycle of life and death. For two and a half hours, Buckley is mostly alone onscreen with these many men who attack her, mock her, flash her, lurk outside her windows, gaslight her, blame her. (All of them are played by one actor, Rory Kinnear, with the exception of Harper’s dead husband, who is played in flashbacks by Paapa Essiedu.) Among other things, the movie is an allegorical recitation of all the ways men have ever brutalized women. Buckley in “Men.”A24, via Everett CollectionThe film is tough, obviously, and gruesome in a way — but it also has a soaring feeling, or perhaps it’s better to say that Buckley as Harper is full of awe and pleasure, both fight and spiritual flight. There’s a scene in which she is alone in the woods staring down the barrel of a dark, abandoned railway tunnel. It’s foreboding, pitch black, precisely the kind of passage you hope the woman in the horror movie comes to her senses in time to avoid entering. Harper lingers on the edge of the darkness, looking alert, apprehensive. Then she sings a quick note, sending it into the dark. It comes back as an echo. She smiles and does it again, and then again, singing calls and responses until the tunnel is duetting with her, wrapping them together in song.I’ve been meditating on Buckley’s choice of words, to “really take a bite of the apple.” That original sin — an ancient, biblical act — is unequivocally a disobedience, but it is also a foundationally human gesture: to expand oneself no matter what it costs, to demand the right to see the world as it really is, to eat what is delicious. The forces opposing this kind of act are fierce. In “Men,” one of the first things Harper sees upon her arrival to the country house is a tree teeming with apples in the front courtyard. She takes one on her way in, closing her eyes to enjoy it. A few minutes later, the house’s landlord, touring her around the home, sees the apple with a missing bite, and his face darkens. “No no no no no. Mustn’t do that. Forbidden fruit.” In a moment he will tell her he is kidding, but in the intervening seconds, as Harper begins to stammer an apology, she looks genuinely afraid. After we concluded our walk, I headed for the airport, and Buckley went to work: She had an evening of script review to attend. Still, before I made it home, she managed to send via email and text a shower of things she loves: a video of a Georgian men’s choir sitting around a table crowded with beer and thick sandwiches and bowls of waxy fruit, singing a Christmas carol (“I would give my clown’s nose to be a fly on the wall at that Christmas dinner,” she wrote); a playlist of songs that she has been returning to for the last two years; a book of works by Peter Birkhauser, who painted from his dreams; a Richard Brautigan novel; a more recent novel by Kiran Millwood Hargrave about a 17th-century Norwegian village where all the men died, leaving the women alone. Later, she sent me Joni Mitchell’s song “Little Green.” “Good auld Joni to crack the heart wide open,” she wrote. She signed off, “Big huge love.” From a different person, especially an actor under observation, I might have dismissed this as disingenuous. But Buckley seems to move in a spirit of abundance. She wrapped me, upon first meeting face to face, in a big huge hug while wearing a big huge puffer coat. She was full of big huge questions. (“Do you have dreams for yourself, for what comes next, as an artist and as a woman?” she wanted to know.) Her laughter is full-bodied. “Her laugh just takes over every space in the most glorious way,” Polley told me. “When I think of those times in that hayloft, we were dealing with such difficult subject matter, but one of my main memories is Jessie’s laugh and how infectious and contagious it is — how once Jessie starts laughing, everybody starts laughing, because it’s like with her whole self.” Frances McDormand told me that when Buckley arrived on set for “Women Talking,” “she immediately found a place in town that had bulk nut supplies. I guess she eats a lot of nuts — and so she brought everybody bags of nuts.” McDormand snorted with laughter. “She’s just — she’s just a good ’un.” McDormand also told me she recognized herself as an actor in Buckley. I pressed her on it, but she didn’t know how to be more specific. Gyllenhaal said something similar, telling me that she felt that Buckley was “somehow artistically like a sister.” The repetition struck me, but it didn’t exactly surprise me. One reason I have found Buckley so hard to look away from onscreen, no matter what her characters are enduring, is that she seems familiar to me, too. Her hunger is recognizable.Her current project in Toronto is a dystopian sci-fi romance about an institute that can measure, based on a sample of someone’s fingernails, whether you are 100 percent in love with your partner. Buckley plays a woman who is in a “100 percent previously tested relationship” certified via fingernail but who finds herself wondering whether what she’s experiencing really is love in its totality. “That hundred percent isn’t necessarily — it doesn’t feed her enough,” Buckley said, laughing. She has been listening to a lot of Peggy Lee’s “Is This All There Is?” It’s a jaunty, plucky song about a woman facing the worst, watching her house burn down and thinking, Is that all there is to a fire? I pointed out to Buckley on our walk that most people prefer not to spend their time imaginatively inhabiting the most unsettling contradictions of human desire, or confronting humanity’s ugliest responses to it.“I mean, I’m drawn to it.” She laughed. “And sometimes that’s scary. I can’t help it. I don’t know why,” she said. “But don’t you think it’s healthier, instead of denying our reality, that we live and die, and there’s pain, and there is damage, and there’s also a huge amount of love, and there’s hope, and there’s fear, and there’s institutes, and there’s chaos, there’s … ?” She shook her head, as if stunned. “Like, what the hell are you doing if you’re not, like, standing in the middle of it?” And it comes out one way or the other, she argued. Refusing to attend to the wounds won’t make them go away. What she noticed, working on “Women Talking,” is that “the violence is almost like air. You know, it’s always around, but it never actually presents itself. It’s something that’s continuous.” The women cannot isolate the evil behind what’s happened to them to one man; they can’t even only blame the men. The monster is everywhere, even behind the faces of people they love. It’s in some of their religious teachings; it’s in the ways they were taught by their parents. It’s in them, the women, too. The women are considering whether to stay and fight for change or to leave, a choice that would be made much more difficult because they were forbidden as children to learn how to read, or even to know where they were in the world. Most of them have never even seen a map. This, too, is a kind of violence, the women realize. Their way out, they have decided, is to look at the problem directly and to talk about it. What they will do next — whether that’s changing their culture or leaving it — requires inventing a conception of the world, and of their place in it, that they cannot even begin to fathom. They’re engaged, one woman says, in “an act of wild female imagination.” This phrase — wild female imagination — was used by their religious leaders to dismiss the assaults as fiction, to claim that the violence was all in the women’s minds. Now the women will adopt those words, and their wild minds, for a different purpose.That feeling, of pushing toward a better, bigger way of being in the world that you can only barely imagine, is familiar to Buckley. What she likes about clowning, Buckley told me, is the presence it demands. “Proper clowns are so alive,” she said. “The best part of clowning is it happens in the moment,” and failure is as likely as transcendence — the two things are bound up with each other. In images, the archetype of the Fool is often depicted balancing at the edge of a cliff, one foot hovering out over the abyss, suspended in the possibility of both fall and flight. There’s an openness to possibility, no matter what the outcome may be. “I love it,” Buckley said, pausing over every word for emphasis, a look of pure glee on her face.Jordan Kisner is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the essay collection “Thin Places.” More

First it was said that James Cameron was no match for reality. In late 2009, before “Avatar” came out, skeptics warned that the visual-effects behemoth would never recoup its unearthly budget, estimated to be upward of $237 million. In just over two weeks, it grossed $1 billion, quieting doubters, at least temporarily. After that, the story reversed: Reality was no match for “Avatar.” The condition went by different names: “Avatar” Syndrome, Post-Pandoran Depression or PADS (Post-“Avatar” Depression Syndrome). It was marked by despair and suicidal ideation, brought on by the insurmountable gap between real life and Cameron’s C.G.I. Eden.This was at the dawn of the era when a small group of people acting weird online could set off a dayslong cycle of news. Here, the source was a multipage thread on the independent fan site Avatar Forums — “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible.” By that point, January 2010, even certain well-adjusted people had seen the movie two or three times, lured back to theaters by the all-consuming tale of an ex-Marine fighting to save the Na’vi race from the venal designs of a mining corporation. For the people posting on the thread, watching was not enough; they wanted to live inside Cameron’s world, to fly through Pandora as a 10-foot-tall blue alien, in perfect symbiosis with nature. One of the afflicted, Ivar Hill, told CNN, “I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world.”Hill was 17 at the time, living with his parents in Borås, Sweden. He first saw “Avatar” at the local cinema and woke up the next day feeling empty and lost. On Avatar Forums, he found others who felt trapped, who yearned for a chance to start over on Pandora or dreamed of leading a Na’vi lifestyle here on earth. Some of them recognized the futility of the sentiment. Others went searching for a feeling of escape, seeing the movie again and again and brainstorming tips for improving their own lives. “Start living like Neytiri,” one wrote, “in touch with nature, the environment, and not being greedy and wasteful.” Hill belonged to the second group. He started reading philosophy. He devoted more time to communing with nature. “I would go out into the woods and spend time there hiking,” he says. “ ‘Avatar’ made me feel like I could sit out in a forest and just be.”Though the first ‘Avatar’ was the world’s top-grossing movie, its most oft-cited claim to fame is its surprising lack of cultural impact.Hill saw “Avatar” four times, once even traveling an hour to Gothenburg, at the time the nearest city with a 3-D-equipped theater. Eventually, with two friends he met online, he started his own fan forum, Tree of Souls, named for the holy site where the Na’vi go to experience the interconnectedness of all things. In the chat room, he met a woman named Heather, who had also experienced post-“Avatar” depression. After messaging about the film, they moved on to more metaphysical concerns. “Neither of us was the kind of person who had ever been looking for a partner,” he says. “But a few weeks after we first started talking, we kind of realized, ‘Huh, we’re feeling something here.’” In 2012, the pair met for the first time at an in-person “Avatar” event in Seattle. Two years later, they were married in Sweden. The couple now live in the Pacific Northwest, where Hill, who became an American citizen last year, works as a video-game developer. “My life would be very, very different if I hadn’t randomly ended up seeing that film in 2010,” he says.Hill still operates Tree of Souls, one of the few surviving “Avatar” fan forums. The site today is mostly speculation about “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the first in a series of four long-delayed sequels that will transform “Avatar” into a franchise. “The Way of Water,” which was shot simultaneously with a yet-to-be-titled third film (and part of a fourth), arrives in theaters Dec. 16. When asked about his plans for the premiere, Hill was nonchalant. Though “Avatar” altered the course of his whole life — arguably more than even James Cameron’s — he doesn’t really think there’s anything that special about the movie. It was just the thing that happened to cross his path at the moment when he was already searching. “Maybe if it wasn’t ‘Avatar,’ something else would have come along,” Hill says. He thinks of the sequel as just another movie. “It’s going to be really interesting to see, but it’s not like I’m counting down the days.”Of all the questions raised by “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the most pressing seems to be: “Who asked for this?” Though the first “Avatar” was the world’s top-grossing movie not once, but twice, reclaiming the title from “Avengers: Endgame” after a 2021 rerelease in China, its most oft-cited claim to fame is its surprising lack of cultural impact. While films of similar scale and ambition — “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park,” “Iron Man” — have spawned fandoms and quotable lines and shareable memes and licensed merchandise, “Avatar” has spawned mainly punch lines. On the fifth anniversary of the film, Forbes announced, “Five Years Ago, ‘Avatar’ Grossed $2.7 Billion but Left No Pop Culture Footprint.” A few years later, Buzzfeed ran a quiz titled, “Do You Remember Anything at All About ‘Avatar’?” challenging readers to answer basic questions like, “What is the name of the male lead character in ‘Avatar’?” and “Which of these actors played the male lead?”Even if you cannot answer these questions, chances are high you have seen “Avatar.” (According to a study by the consumer-research firm MRI-Simmons, an estimated one in five American adults saw it in theaters.) To jog your memory, a quick rundown of the plot: The year is 2154. Earth, as you might expect, is a husk. Four light-years away on an inhabited moon called Pandora, an outfit called the Resources Development Administration extracts a mineral called unobtanium. This is not an in-and-out mission. The air on Pandora is toxic to human lungs and mining operations are resisted by the Na’vi, an Indigenous group that lives off the land and is rightly distrustful of “the Sky People.” To learn the Na’vi mind and protect its own investments, the R.D.A. funds a side project called the Avatar Program, in which scientists create Na’vi clones that can be piloted by humans. Each of these “avatars” is matched to a single researcher’s DNA. When one researcher dies before his avatar is fully formed, his twin brother is tapped to take over his role. Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, is a paraplegic ex-Marine. In this avatar body, he discovers a new freedom. What follows is basically what you would expect: Guy goes native, has a change of heart, saves the local race from his own kind.“Avatar” was first mentioned in the press in 1996. Before a single frame was shot, the film was foretold as a kind of prophecy. A headline in The Tampa Bay Times announced, “Synthetic Actors to Star in ‘Avatar.’” At that point, motion-capture was practically science fiction, and C.G.I. had mainly been used to render nonhuman creatures or effects (the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” for example). Cameron was promising a marriage of the two that would produce lifelike humanoids. He would soon find out that the technology was not there yet. After “Titanic” in 1997, “Avatar” was set aside as Cameron began to work out the technological kinks. In the meantime, he produced an academically disreputable documentary about the lost tomb of Jesus. He designed and built a submarine and then piloted it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.Work on “Avatar” officially began in 2005. Cameron contracted a linguistics consultant at the University of Southern California to begin development on Na’vi — a lexicon of more than 2,800 words, drawing on the rarest structures of human language. From there, the anecdotes only got more insane: a team of botanists advising on imaginary flora; a bespoke head rig to record facial expressions; a motion-capture stage in Howard Hughes’s airplane hangar, six times larger than any seen before. Each new detail fed a tornado of hype, a low-pressure system of buzz so rapacious that it grew to encompass everything from the film’s tech — a 3-D camera system, invented by Cameron, which could mimic the spread between the human eyes — to its budget, estimates of which ranged from $237 million to $500 million. (No one could agree exactly when to start the meter — on the first day of production? With Cameron’s R.& D.? On the day of his birth?) One line that Cameron trotted around town was that watching “Avatar” would be like “dreaming with your eyes wide open.” An article in this newspaper skewered the hype: “James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that may: a) Change filmmaking forever, b) Alter your brain, c) Cure cancer.”The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Sigourney Weaver: Hollywood has never quite known what to do with the actress, who has four films out this season, including the “Avatar” sequel. She spoke to us about her unusually fluid career.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.“Avatar” premiered on Dec. 18, 2009, at No. 1, bringing in a respectable, if not astounding, $73 million. Celebrities logged on to newly ascendant Twitter to spread the word (Michael Moore), announce their plans to see it on peyote (John Mayer) or lament their sad fate to not bed a Na’vi (Rainn Wilson). The Los Angeles Times suggested that the film had done for 3-D technology what “The Jazz Singer” did for sound. By the first week of January, “Avatar” surpassed $1 billion, setting a record for reaching that milestone. By the end of the month, it was the first movie to ever gross $2 billion. In China, a quartz-sandstone pillar in Zhangjiajie National Forest Park was renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain. In Palestine, people put on blueface to protest an Israeli separation barrier. Oscar nominations flooded in, along with a wave of “Avatar” porn, suggesting a strong libidinal undercurrent to the hype. In April 2010, when two sequels were announced, it came as no surprise to anyone.These sequels would be repeatedly delayed, reportedly on account of: two sequels expanding into three (2013); delays in script delivery (2015); three sequels ballooning to four (2016); the epicness of this quadripartite undertaking, which Cameron at one point likened to “building the Three Gorges Dam” (2017); Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, which demanded a shake-up in the rollout strategy, to better harmonize with the “Star Wars” release schedule (Disney, by then, also owned Lucasfilm) (2019); and finally, the novel coronavirus (2020). (Disney disputed some of these accounts but declined to directly address the cause of the delays.) Over this 13-year period, the entertainment industry underwent a transformational shift, the beginning of which almost exactly coincided with the moment that “Avatar” was released. In 2008, “Iron Man” came out, the first of the 30 (and counting) movies that today make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As “Avatar” promised one future for film — ​original world building, envelope-​pushing effects, the theater as the site of cinematic innovation — Marvel, and other endeavors that would follow, went on to develop a very different one.Illustration by Kristian HammerstadIn this vision, any given movie was merely one installment in a more complex cultural product called the franchise. The on-again-off-again Disney chief executive Bob Iger defined the franchise as “something that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories over a long period of time.” A franchise is an ecosystem oriented toward an infinite horizon, in which a common set of characters and stories are constantly refreshed and reworked across platforms. From 2008 to today, entertainment brands, old and new, turned themselves over to the new model. “Harry Potter” turned seven books and eight movies into three spinoff movies, more than 30 video games, a Broadway show, five theme-park worlds, an interactive website and more; “Star Wars” turned the original trilogy into the nine-film “Skywalker Saga” plus two more stand-alone films, an animated movie, nearly 20 TV shows, action figures, trading cards, a hotel — the list goes on.According to data from Franchise Entertainment Research, in 2019, franchise movies made up 42 percent of Hollywood’s new wide releases and accounted for 83 percent of global box-office proceeds. The ascent of this networked form of entertainment has had far-reaching cultural effects on everything from the tone and plot structure of movies, to what it means to be a fan, to how we calculate success. If “Avatar” feels irrelevant today, it has less to do with the film itself and more to do with how the world has changed around it.After the success of “Avatar,” there were naturally some attempts to expand the brand under the franchise model that was emerging. Even when these brand extensions were thoughtful, few could withstand the long wait for the sequel. A novelization by the science-fiction author Steven Charles Gould was announced in 2013 but hasn’t yet materialized. “Avatar: The Game,” which was set before the events of the film, sold decently, but by 2014, its servers were shut down. Even the Mattel toys had problems: The Na’vi figures were produced at the wrong scale; the lack of young children’s toys overlooked future audiences. Those who might have shelled out for collectibles might not have been eager to do so for the articulated figurine of an R.D.A. bureaucrat, played by Giovanni Ribisi, putting a golf ball.In July, when I first started working on this article, a search on Amazon for “Avatar” returned only products for “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” an unrelated franchise owned by Nickelodeon. Today just one major vestige of the fandom still survives, Pandora: World of “Avatar,” a detailed 12-acre simulacrum rising from the flatlands of Orlando, Fla. The theme park offers the most fleshed-out look at how “Avatar” might remake itself in the age of the franchise.Pandora is inside Disney’s Animal Kingdom, an attraction that combines the pious conservationism of a zoo with the wacky extremity of a carnival. When it opened in 2017, about halfway through the sequel delays, it was widely regarded as Disney’s response to Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of “Harry Potter.” Wizarding World is all-encompassing, inviting its guests to live as Potter does, down to even mundane tasks like exchanging Muggle currency for galleons. With Pandora, Disney aimed to raise the bar, promising not just a world but an entire alien world to explore.Pandora is one of five “lands” within Animal Kingdom, the other four being “Africa,” “Asia,” “Discovery Island” and “DinoLand U.S.A.” In the spatial arrangement of this taxonomic nightmare, Pandora is in the southwest of the park, on a plot of land rumored to have originally been reserved for a never-built zoo of mythical beasts. The first thing I saw upon landing on the planet was a signpost offering a welcome in Na’vi: “OEL NGATI KAMEIE (I See You).” As fodder for an immersive theme-park experience, the plot of “Avatar” presents certain challenges, namely regarding the role of the immersed in light of the fact that the movie concludes with the Na’vi’s kicking major human ass and banishing their colonizers back to earth. To square the race-war thing with the hordes of human guests, the park is set more than a generation after the first movie, following a yet-to-be-cinematically-​depicted armistice. The sign cleared this up with some slapdash world building, introducing the “Pandora Conservation Initiative,” a joint venture between “the indigenous Na’vi people” and an Earth-based venture called Alpha Centauri Expeditions. In other words, we were tourists playing tourists.Like many postcolonial people, the Na’vi now support themselves by selling a version of their culture to outsiders. On Pandora, there are three major attractions: Flight of Passage, a 3-D-simulator ride; an “It’s a Small World”-style boat tour called Na’vi River Journey; and a scale replica of the Valley of Mo’ara, the massive floating mountain range that Neytiri, Jake Sully’s love interest, calls home. (The range didn’t have a name until after the park was built.) As I entered the park, these mountains loomed above me, held aloft by steel supports disguised to look like mossy vines. The pristine green of this false Amazon was interrupted only by the teals and magentas of plastic sprayer fans and sun-protective T-shirts and quick-dry bucket hats. Families all around posed for photos. Most of the children, I guessed, were not yet born at the time the first “Avatar” was released.According to Derek Johnson, a professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of “Media Franchising,” one major feature of a franchise versus a movie is not just its multiple sites of production — the theme park, the toy, the television show — but also its orientation toward the future. In order to survive, it must maintain a careful balance between novelty and familiarity, courting the next generation of fans without driving away too many of the old ones. By now, there are certain canonical tactics that work in service of this overarching goal: The prequel invites a new generation into an old saga. The reboot refreshes the father’s intellectual property to win the pocket change of the son. The spinoff inducts a new demographic, centering a side character (often a person of color or a woman). In between, a fandom is maintained through intermittent product tie-ins and announcements.Today it has been thoroughly demonstrated that superhero and fantasy movies are the best forms of intellectual property for the endless reiteration necessitated by the franchise model. But it was not always self-evident that they would come to dominate. In the years surrounding “Avatar,” executives were still experimenting with adapting different types of source material: the young-adult novel (“Twilight”), the theme-park ride (“Pirates of the Caribbean”), the board game (“Battleship”), the casual-​gaming app (“The Angry Birds Movie”) and even the Unicode pictogram keyboard (“The Emoji Movie”). The most successful franchises share certain principles: an epic plot, on the scale of all mankind, sweeping enough to encompass different stories; a detailed setting, with high specificity, implying a world beyond what gets shown onscreen; assorted sects and institutions, providing easy points of fan identification; a set of distinctive totems to merchandise — a scarf, a shield, a mask, a ring. One challenge facing Pandora: World of “Avatar” is the relative thinness of the actual world of “Avatar”: The movie offers few clues about Pandoran life beyond just what is shown onscreen.This was evident at the Satu’li Canteen, an air-conditioned fast-casual concession housed in a reclaimed R.D.A. mess hall. In “Avatar,” the Na’vi eat something called Spartan fruit, which grows from the fictional kuchenium polyphyllum. Short of bioengineering a new species, park designers were left to fill in the gaps for what a restaurant on Pandora might serve. This prompt was made even more challenging by a mandate that the food appear alien, while also looking and tasting familiar — or, in the words of one Imagineer, “like chicken” — enough to satisfy the average Disney visitor.The menu that day offered strange-but-​recognizable delicacies: “steamed pods” (beef bao buns), “teylu” (hot dogs wrapped in dough) and “ber’ri” (blueberry cream-cheese mousse). I ordered the crispy fried tofu bowl, which arrived topped with bright orange, fruit-flavored boba. Pandoran appeared to be a fusion cuisine: local ingredients mixed with the traditional lunch fare of Midtown. After lunch, I went outside for a drink at Pongu Pongu. On tap was a Pandoran craft beer called Mo’ara High Country Ale. I ordered the Night Blossom, a nonalcoholic slushie, presumably conceived as Pandora’s answer to Butterbeer at the Wizarding World of “Harry Potter” — a soft drink so delicious and successful it sold one million units in six months, substantially offsetting the cost of the park. Night Blossom tasted the way your teeth feel after eating a Jolly Rancher. Suffice to say, it would not be paying for Pandora. As I took three sips and threw it in the trash, I struggled to picture a Na’vi onscreen sucking one down under the Tree of Souls.After lunch, I downloaded an app and scheduled reservations for both rides. Conventional wisdom about Avatar’s cultural irrelevance notwithstanding, the park was swamped, and the first available time slot was hours away. I wandered into Windtraders gift shop, curious to see which elements from the preindustrial world of “Avatar” might lend themselves to merchandising. In one corner, I found T-shirts that said “Pandora” in the type style of a national park, riffing on the tourists-playing-tourists conceit. In another corner hung a wall of light-up “woodsprites,” the omniscient seeds from the Tree of Souls, which play a pivotal role in the film. Bioluminescence — in the form of light-up toys, black-light Christmas ornaments and glow-in-the-dark sweatshirts — was a key feature of “Avatar” merch. This choice made sense, in the way that light evokes the 3-D spectacle that real dimensionality cannot. Still, it was hardly a light saber.Leaving the gift shop, I strolled back through the mountains, dreading the hours I still had to kill until my scheduled ride reservations. I walked around in desperate search of a Na’vi. I studied a replica of the mech suit worn by the movie’s forgettable villain. Eventually, I just got in line. Waiting, by that point, seemed more entertaining than spending the rest of my evening in the park. As it turns out, a 3-D simulacrum of a 3-D movie kind of cancels itself out. Divorced from the dazzle of visual effects, I could see the aesthetic universe of “Avatar” for what it was: a glorified World Market sale section. The Na’vi alone were just a tiki-bar mishmash of traits that white people perceive as foreign: dreadlocks, beadwork, body mods, loincloths, feathers, cowrie shells. Compared with that of Hogwarts or Tatooine, the logic of their world seemed to lack imagination: What were the odds that, galaxies away, a society not only had two genders, but those genders were “male” and “female” — and the females were stacked?Six weeks later, on Sept. 23, Disney rereleased “Avatar” into theaters, in an ostensible effort to revive the intellectual property and prime the viewing public for “The Way of Water.” I went to see it with a group of 20 friends. In two rows of recliners, as the previews played, we took turns leaning over and asking, “Are we supposed to wear the 3-D glasses for this part?” The action did not leap from the screen so much as stumble forward in a seasick kind of way. I worried that I would not make it three hours, but from the first moment Jake Sully appeared, my skepticism slipped away, replaced with sudden, overwhelming understanding of why people once lost their minds for “Avatar.”Here is probably a good place to disclose that when I first started working on this article, I had never seen “Avatar.” The film came out my senior year of high school, when I was still committed to the thought that nothing popular could ever be good. (I have spent my life revising and re-​revising this position.) My plan was to see it for the first time in 3-D, as it was intended to be seen, but all my attempts to make this happen led nowhere. I ended up watching “Avatar” for the first time on a laptop screen in my hotel room in Orlando. Everything I had heard seemed accurate — the plot was rote; the dialogue, forgettable. The experience was so unremarkable it left me questioning my own humanity: Was the movie’s success a global mass delusion or was I lacking in some fundamental trait that would let me even understand why it was loved?Watching in 3-D was a different experience. As Jake and Neytiri darted through the forest, the special effects brought me into their world. The action did not just come forward as one frame, but instead wove me into the movement onscreen, the tendrils of plants and falling drops of water each reaching out from a different point in space. The Na’vi bodies appeared to have mass. It was hard to discern what was real or C.G.I., which led me to wonder, “Why even distinguish?” This, in turn, produced a twisted surge of delight at the prospect of man’s becoming God.The history of recorded images might be described as an incremental quest to master the building blocks of consciousness — first sight, then motion, then sound, then color. With “Avatar,” Cameron revealed that human ingenuity could marshal even more: physics, light, dimensionality; the ineffable sense of an object being real; the life force that makes a thing feel alive. As Sully soared through the floating mountain range, I thought of those apocryphal Victorians, ducking as a train appeared to rush out from the screen. I thought of all the geegaws and novelties and illusions of the latter part of the last millennium: the magic lantern show, electric lights, the Ferris wheel, color television and Pong. I didn’t know that I could still be dazzled.This is not to say that “Avatar” is good. The movie is basically a demo tape, each plot point reverse-engineered to show off some new feat of technology. The awe it inspires was not just about itself but rather the hope of new possibilities. It was easy to imagine someone in 2009 leaving the theater and asking: “What if we made more movies like this? What if we made good movies like this?” The year 2009 was a relatively optimistic one: Obama had just won on the audacity of “hope.” Climate change still felt far away. The forever wars were going to end. Surely we would fix whatever caused the recession. “Avatar” pointed toward a widening horizon — better effects, new cinematic worlds, new innovations in 3-D technology. It did not yet seem incongruous to wrap a project based in infinite progress around a story about the perils of infinite growth.Watching that day, I could still access these feelings but they were tied to a sense of melancholy, knowing that “The Way of Water” will emerge into an almost total deferment of that dream. Today, 3-D is niche (at best); digital effects are used to cut costs; home streaming is threatening the theater; and projects of ambitious world-building are overlooked in favor of stories with existing fanbases. We did not get here by pure chance: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated broadcast media, allowing companies to form megaconglomerates. In this world of mergers and acquisitions, the franchise blossomed into a highly efficacious product, allowing companies to maximize intellectual property across their numerous platforms. As the economy grew more financialized, and even movie studios began behaving more like banks — promising profits quarter over quarter — the franchise product became even more appealing. Because franchises have a ready audience, they effectively functioned as a way to manage risk, allowing companies to bet bigger and win bigger.Pulling a tactic from the franchise playbook, the screening ended with a post-credit sequence previewing “The Way of Water.” The movie takes place 15 years after the events of the first film (but still before the world of the theme park), following Sully, Neytiri and their children on some sort of partly undersea adventure. Most of what we know about the movie comes from a decade of tabloid oddities — it was shot in a 265,000-gallon ocean simulator! Sigourney Weaver plays a teenager! Kate Winslet trained to hold her breath for seven and a half minutes! The preview showed a young Na’vi splashing alongside a whale-like creature. It felt obvious that the clip had been chosen to show off Cameron’s latest innovation: underwater motion capture. The ocean was rendered so effectively it was hard to remember I was seeing something new.The story of “Avatar,” however hacky it may be, still suggests that humanity can save itself in the face of rapacious profiteering. This is something we have a moral imperative to keep believing. In today’s franchise movies, visions of the future are inherently constrained by the mandate to keep the franchise up and running — a project that forecloses any story line critiquing growth, consumerism or globalization. If the business of the franchise points toward an ever-widening horizon, the movies produced within its logic must do the opposite. Their vision of life is necessarily circular, always pointing back to itself.Jamie Lauren Keiles is a contributing writer for the magazine. They are currently working on a book about the rise of gender-neutral pronouns and nonbinary identity in America. More

It has become a social credential to be in therapy. It’s also incredibly difficult to access.About 30 minutes into “Stutz,” a new Netflix documentary from Jonah Hill, the movie’s slick veneer cracks open to expose a deeper artifice. We see Hill and his therapist, the 70-something Phil Stutz, shot in crisp black and white, sitting side by side in what appears to be Stutz’s Los Angeles office. Hill has long hair and a scraggly beard; he says he’s going to use one of Stutz’s treasured “tools,” and he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Then he makes a confession: “I’ve been lying to you in our private therapy sessions.” As he reveals this, the film flips into color and lays bare that they are actually on a set, in front of a green-screen simulation of Stutz’s office. Hill removes the wig he has been wearing to hide a haircut. The film’s initial premise was that we were seeing a single session unfold, but we now learn that it has been filmed over the course of two years — and Hill, in his real sessions, has been hiding his feeling that the project is stuck.Hill’s mission, announced early in the film, is to spread the healing power of therapy and share Stutz’s psychological tools with Netflix’s enormous audience. But the whole endeavor, he now tells Stutz, has felt “weird and false.” For half an hour, Hill has played the role of a distanced documentarian, interviewing Stutz while dodging any personal questions he received in return — like one about being an overweight kid and the conflict that generated with his mother. “I’m not going to go into it because this film is about you, not me,” Hill says. But the film, he eventually comes to realize, is like therapy itself: It can’t work unless he is willing to be vulnerable and share his own grief, fear and insecurity. The movie’s breakdown, however contrived, is meant to replicate a breakthrough — an opportunity to take a risk, connect with others and move forward.In today’s therapy-saturated culture, you hear countless messages about what therapy is and what it is for, many of them starkly different from Hill’s. Back in 1979, the historian and critic Christopher Lasch wrote that the New Left had retreated from politics and turned inward, focusing on personal psychological well-being instead of external collective struggles. These days that is funnily reversed: Psychology is often used, especially online, as a way to collectively press others. In some corners therapy has become a kind of social imperative, something anyone can urge strangers to engage in — not so they can explore their own experiences, but so their psychic toxicity can be contained before it spills onto others. Social media is filled with memes and jokes in which people “beg” men to get therapy, or deploy variations of the formula that “men will literally do anything but go to therapy.” On dating apps, being in therapy can vouch for your emotional soundness, while not being in therapy may be considered a red flag. Articles suggest, in the words of one writer, that “therapy could be the secret to a flourishing love life.”Hill had to confront the fact that therapy is irreducible to a set of abstract tools.These competing images of therapy — one personal, the other social — each stem from the basic assumption that therapy can do a lot of people a lot of good, and from the impulse to share it widely. The version we see in “Stutz” is based largely on self-exploration; by revealing the parts of ourselves we often hide, it suggests, we come to know ourselves more deeply and live our lives more fully. (Hill says he originally came to Stutz “out of desperation to get happier,” having “no healthy self-esteem” despite his wild success in Hollywood.) Therapy as a kind of social credential, meanwhile, is more about proving to others that you are safe to engage — that your projections, defenses and unresolved traumas won’t hurt those around you. One is akin to cleaning up roadside litter because you think it’s the right thing to do; the other is like slipping on a fluorescent vest and picking up garbage because a court so ordered.It did not take long for therapy to go from a social taboo to something very much out in the open. The pandemic only furthered this shift, leaving countless Americans alone (meaning, for some, in bad company) amid incessant talk of mental health and an ever-growing bombardment of content taking therapy to the masses. Young people have been especially hard hit: In 2021, 44 percent of high schoolers reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless. No wonder that young people have also seemed especially receptive to absorbing the ideas of therapy into their lives and their lexicons — speaking with casual familiarity about triggers and traumas and diagnoses.On “therapy TikTok,” therapists amass millions of followers, to whom they offer tidbits and buzzwords about things like attachment styles. Pop stars like Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato serve as spokespeople for teletherapy companies. Other celebrities incorporate mental-health awareness into their work. The singer-actor Selena Gomez has released a documentary, “My Mind & Me,” about her own mental illness; in September, the rapper Megan Thee Stallion introduced a mental-health website linked to her album “Traumazine,” which features a song called “Anxiety” (“I’m a bad bitch, and I got bad anxiety”). Divulging mental-health struggles has become routine among pop figures, a way of both connecting with young fans and offering a message that it’s OK to seek help.And yet high-quality psychotherapy remains staggeringly expensive and hard to find. According to the American Psychological Association, six in 10 psychologists say they don’t have openings for new patients. (My own therapist’s website says there’s a waiting list for teletherapy.) Reading about therapy on social media, I came across a popular post from the writer Casey Johnston, who summed up the search for a therapist like this: “Finding a therapist is simple, just contact 50 people, 25 are no longer in network, 15 don’t answer, 5 have switched to $600/hr life coaching, 2 don’t like your vibe, one now only does pets.” The shortage is especially acute for professionals who work with children and teenagers.In lieu of access to actual therapy, we seem to be inundated with content about therapy, as though its material scarcity creates an urge to spread the gospel by other means. You can devour never-ending media feeds promising tools to help process trauma, techniques to regulate emotions, tips for setting healthful boundaries. But something crucial to therapy feels missing when we’re absorbing these ideas passively, in solitude.What Hill came to realize while making “Stutz,” after all, is that his true subject isn’t his therapist or the tools he has learned. The real action is found in the sui generis nature of the patient-therapist relationship itself — one that is vulnerable, endearing and genuinely moving to watch. Those of us doing the watching are mere viewers engaged in a risk-free parasocial relationship, connecting to someone else’s connection. Hill had to confront the fact that therapy is irreducible to a set of abstract tools. This is something different from any of the millions of articles or TikTok videos offering, say, nine tips for handling a narcissist. All the therapy content online helps to demystify something that long operated behind closed doors, but it also underlines a new problem — that many of us are facing these challenges alone.Source photographs: Netflix More