With ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ about to be released, the usual debate has returned: Has it found its way into pop culture or is it simply a mass success that doesn’t quite permeate? Supporters that nobody remembers her require fans to tell them the name of only one character, and those remember his influence on cinema for years. What to consider a world without sterile debates, if that, for another time.
Even more so when a small HBO Max documentary series already settled the debate last year, in a rather defining way and almost unintentionally. If you haven’t discovered John Wilson and his ‘How to’, we are going to give you the perfect excuse to get hooked: an ‘Avatar’ fan club that keeps the film’s flame alive and shows that, however marginal, there is a fandom.
Merry Christmas
In Season 2 Episode 5, ‘How to Remember Your Dreams’, John Wilson tries to extricate himself from the non-fiction and rational world he lives in with hoping to be able to remember something in the mornings. This takes you to the most unexpected place possible (as usual in these fabulous comedy and documentary pills): an ‘Avatar’ fan club.
In a comic book store John Meets a James Cameron Movie Fan who recommends you to enter his web page: Kelutral, which right now reads “Prepare for the return to Pandora. Learn the Na’vi language”. Neither short nor lazy, the documentarian goes to one of his meetings in a small room of a New York hotel, commanded by a life-size image of Cameron saying “Kaltxi”. Which, to those not versed in Na’vi, means “Hello.”
In the hotel, six people talk about ‘Avatar’, discuss in Na’vi, learn the basics of the language as if it were Quenya (“The adjective is placed next to the noun it describes because of flexible word order.”) and they even eat purple food in honor of the movie. But if ‘How to with John Wilson’ stands out for something, it is for finding the oddities of the world and never, ever laughing at them, but treat them with heart and empathy that other shows lack. And just like that, this group of fans (and, you could tell by looking at them, misfits) find redemption.
The beauty of the everyday at Pandora
After watching the movie, the central axis of the meeting in question, the members of the club begin to talk about their experiences with ‘Avatar’ and it’s impossible not to feel sympathy for this bunch of absolute sick fans of the work of James Cameron. One of them states that every time he sees her he gets depressed for a couple of weeks because of her helplessness knowing that Pandora doesn’t exist. Another simply lowers his head and drowns internal traumas thanks to the film. How and in what way, is something that you will have to discover on your own.
John Wilson, who could be an American Javier Cárdenas, always tends to embrace rarities and treat them with care and love rather than create monsters. ‘How to with John Wilson’ is the best show going, and the episode about the fans who still live in Pandora is a good example of why: without being sugar-coated or cautionary, with subtle and intelligent humor, it manages to make instead of having pity, sorrow or mockery, the only thing you feel is the desire to live something with the intensity of this group.
But this story has an epilogue: as always on the Internet, nothing beautiful can last forever. Shortly after the episode aired, it came to light different transphobic tweets from the creator of Kelutral (tweets that I will not reproduce here for obvious reasons). The texts reached Reddit and from there to the general controversy, in which members of the Kelutral LGTB collective faced off against people from other associations for the study of the Na’vi. Will they increase their participation after the premiere of the sequel? Who knows. I just hope John Wilson is there to prove it.