Avatar, Judd Apatow, and Movies with Cultural Impact

Or, Not Another Cultural Impact Movie

When was the last time you heard someone talk about Avatar?

That’s usually how the argument goes. It’s a rhetorical question designed to prompt thought about how, hey, that’s right, nobody is really talking about Avatar—beyond, of course, the monthly-if-not-weekly rhetorical questions prompting people to think about how nobody is talking about it, which themselves are often prompted by news about the four upcoming Avatar sequels that no one wants to see, because, as you may recall from a few lines ago, nobody is talking about them.

What this argument is really getting at is the cultural impact of Avatar, the 2009 James Cameron movie that recently reclaimed its position as the biggest global blockbuster of all time in unadjusted grosses. (Apparently, a fair number of people in China gathered in movie theaters not to talk about how none of them have heard someone talk about Avatar recently, but to actually watch the movie Avatar.) The idea maybe that while Avatar might have ridden some combination of fluke 3D novelty, Cameron brand association, and crazy hype to $2.7 billion worldwide, no one really cares about it, and it has absolutely zero cultural footprint, like one of Nathan Rabin’s Forgotbusters (like, a lot like one of Nathan Rabin’s Forgotbusters). It’s a ghostly blockbuster nobody loves for the era of quick-kill hype.

I can’t say whether Avatar is as beloved as Titanic, the last time James Cameron made the most expensive and most popular movie of all time (in unadjusted grosses). Part of that uncertainty has to do with the fact that I can’t, in fact, measure any kind of audience devotion to Titanic, beyond that it—like Avatar after it—opened to very good box office numbers but set its records by keeping those numbers high for many weekends in a row, vaguely suggesting some combination of positive word-of-mouth and the enticement of infrequent moviegoers. Anecdotally, there were stories about Titanic both reaching hard-to-snag audiences (enticing senior citizens out to theaters for one maybe-last hurrah) and reaching easier-to-snag audiences over and over (enticing teenage girls to see it five or eight or twelve times). But ticket sales do not come with much demographic information, and 24 years on, all we older-timers can do is say what it felt like when Titanic was out. It sure seemed like this was a different kind of fanatical love than what Avatar generated 12 years later. Speaking personally, I saw Titanic three times in movie theaters to Avatar’s mere twice (at a time when I had the means to see it many more times, if I so chose), but then, the same year I also saw Starship Troopers three times. So clearly I’m not the bellwether of anything.

Which brings us back to something broader than how many times you or I personally saw a movie: that elusive cultural impact. Titanic made an unprecedented amount of money and won a record-tying number of Oscars and people said “I’m king of the world!” a lot, first in tribute to Leonardo DiCaprio’s scrappy charm and then to mercilessly harangue James Cameron for quoting his own movie at the Oscars. It feels like Avatar wasn’t as beloved as Titanic. It also feels like Avatar made $2.7 billion, resulted in a decade of splashy 3D large-screen moviegoing experiences, and killed off 35mm projection at multiplexes. That seems impactful. But where are the quotes, the more obstinate Avatar-was-nothing crowd will demand. And returning to that rhetorical question: When was the last time you heard someone talking about Avatar?

Then again, we’re also just starting to possibly emerge from a yearlong global pandemic that condensed many interpersonal relationships into 200-character tweets and occasional catch-ups on Zoom. When was the last time you heard anyone talk about Titanic? When was the last time you heard anyone talking about Goldfinger? When was the last time you heard anyone talking about The French Connection? When was the last time you heard anyone talk about any movie unless that person lives with you, or you “heard” a conversation online? By the latter metric, the most popular movies of the past several years are Uncut Gems, The Irishman, and whichever MCU movie has offered the most recent example of amazing cinematography (by which is meant, digital paintings of outer space). Only one of those things is reflected in real-world box-office receipts. Since last March, even those have been mostly erased, while Netflix’s top ten feature is happy to show you that the movie people are really watching is some Jason Statham programmer that came out eight years ago to little acclaim.

I’m not mentioning all of this to stick up for Avatar; James Cameron can cry himself to sleep at night in his gold-plated submersible (just kidding, Jim! Please don’t explain to me why you would never plate your submersibles in gold! But please keep reading my Substack until such time as I figure out a subscription option!). I’m mentioning all of this to stick up for Judd Apatow. OK, not really, but recently on Twitter (I’m sorry), I saw a similar prompt take hold, asking whether Apatow’s movies really wound up making much cultural impact. Held aloft by the fraying threads of the author’s anecdotal account of peers not quoting the likes of Knocked Up and nonsensical disqualification of the many movies Apatow has produced and influenced but not personally directed, I do not suspect that this observation will become part of the film-discussion boilerplate that informs those regular reminders about Avatar.

But like Avatar, the impact of The 40-Year-Old Virgin is only minor-to-nonexistent if you consider whether it has permanently altered the cinematic landscape to make itself an immovable fixture. The stars it helped to mint and the comedy style it helped dominate American cinema are arguably starting to fade, after a scant 15 years of influence. Steve Carell and Seth Rogen are no longer two of the biggest comedy stars in the U.S. Instead, they are merely very, very famous actors who will probably be working in film and television for the next 20 to 30 years.

I thought about poor, neglected James Cameron and Judd Apatow while watching Not Another Teen Movie for the first time—I think so, anyway. I’m pretty sure I caught 30 to 40 minutes of it on home video or cable sometime around 2002. I remember the gag about the slow clap, which (unlike the various nudity-based gags about the naked foreign exchange student or Chris Evans doing the Varsity Blues whipped-cream bikini) may not have been in every ad. It’s a good gag. The rest of the movie is mostly less good. It was the first splinter spoof after Scary Movie revived the subgenre in the year 2000—it has a few writers in common with the Wayans’ horror-spoof omnibus, though not, as I’d long assumed, the guys who went on to make a cottage industry of terrible spoofs with Date Movie, Epic Movie, and so forth. Not Another Teen Movie has that grab-bag approach that characterizes both that bottom-of-the-barrel spoof series and the Scary Movie sequels, but it has at least a modicum of discipline in that it sticks very closely to the teen-movie genre.

At the same time, Not Another Teen Movie has the same absurd recency bias that colors Date Movie and its ilk, where newer targets take precedent over genre touchstones. Teen Movie gestures toward John Hughes teen comedies and its ‘80s-era siblings (there are nods to The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Risky Business, among others, as well as the setting of John Hughes High School), but it holds ‘90s teen movies in a tight, viselike embrace. 20 years later, it’s admittedly impressive that a single spoof movie that serve as a more or less complete catalog of every mainstream teen movie from the short but intense 1998-2000 boom: Can’t Hardly Wait, Varsity Blues, She’s All That, Ten Things I Hate About You, Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, Never Been Kissed, American Pie, and Bring It On are all very specifically represented. If you count the presence of Melissa Joan Hart in a cameo, relative obscurity Drive Me Crazy makes it in there, too, and while the plot of Save the Last Dance doesn’t really figure, its teen-movie mainstay co-star Sean Patrick Thomas (who also appeared in Can’t Hardly Wait and Cruel Intentions!) makes another cameo, calling attention to the insulting tokenism of the genre—another pretty good gag in a sea of add-shit-to-familiar-scene-style wannabe escalations.

Not Another Teen Movie is the only spoof in the history of spoofdom, perhaps the only thing in the history of things, that might prompt the question: “Hey, what about the 2000 teen comedy Whatever It Takes?” It would make sense not to mention Whatever It Takes or, to cite an inexplicable sorta-fave of mine, Get Over It, as they were both relative obscurities even within a year or two of their respective releases. Yet at the same time, Not Another Teen Movie makes the time to pay homage to Jawbreaker, an absolutely terrible Heathers knockoff that bombed hard at the box office in early 1999. It’s not just a fleeting reference, either; the movie licenses a particular Imperial Teen song used in Jawbreaker just to make what amounts to an extended quotation.

There is something deeply perverse about a supposedly comprehensive spoof of teen movies that has more time for Jawbreaker than Heathers, or that treats Can’t Hardly Wait—a movie that was just three years old in 2001—as a holy text worth of meticulous costume-design imitation and in-joke casting (future Mean Girl Lacey Chabert steps into her Party of Five co-star Jennifer Love Hewitt’s role). Not Another Teen Movie is weirdly agnostic about the differences between teen-movie breakouts, as benchmarked at the time by American Pie, and instant obscurity, as established by Jawbreaker. Here is a movie produced with utter blindness to the concept of cultural impact. Going by Not Another Teen Movie’s indexing, every stupid, half-assed teen comedy produced during a particular three-year period wasn’t just passively consumed but memorized by the entirety of its target audience. BuzzFeed owes this movie royalties; it was calling everything iconic a full decade-plus early. I wondered if I might be doing the same thing by scoffing at the supposed irrelevance of Avatar or Apatow.

Watching Not Another Teen Movie for the first time straight through, I was still struck by how utterly limited it feels by sticking to that late ‘90s playbook, how it’s both a fascinating artifact and a depressing missed opportunity, only really focusing on the movies that were right in front of it. (This was actually why I was moved to finally catch up with it; I co-write scripts for a YouTube channel on a freelance basis, and I’m working on one about teen movies from this era.)

But I was also haunted by the vague sense that Jawbreaker did ultimately attain the cult status it so nakedly desired. Like its cousin in sour black comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, it became a VHS-then-DVD mainstay for a certain audience, maybe including teenagers who had lost patience with the plastic sheen of even the more charming 1999-era teen comedies. Maybe Not Another Teen Movie helped that perception along, too, by conferring a certain status with its spoofery. And hell, if a spoof movie in 2021 somehow busted out a Jawbreaker reference (in addition to, you know, existing at all), it would be greeted with absolute delight by that movie’s fans—and frankly, even I’d have to give it up, because 20 years can easily make up the distance between the craven presumption that today’s pop culture is everything and the impressively encyclopedic nature of obtuse references.

For that matter, Not Another Teen Movie itself, which garnered poor reviews and middling box office back in the 2001 holiday season, is pretty well-liked in some corners now, too. At the time, it was a spoof of disposability that was itself so disposable that even I, a fairly dedicated student of teen movies and spoof movies, failed to so much as glance at it until it hit video. A full viewing confirmed for me that it’s more of an opportunity missed (and covered with shit) than a lost classic. But plenty of people grew up with its ribald takedown of other movies they also grew up with, and will go to the mat for it now. (The reactions when I mentioned my late-breaking disdain for it on Twitter were far more affectionate than disgusted. An unscientific survey, to be sure, but, again, that doesn’t stop anyone from acting like Uncut Gems made $1.5 billion worldwide.)

Is that cultural impact? A week or two ago, I probably would have said hell no. But, hey, Not Another Teen Movie probably did its part to encourage the likes of Date Movie and Epic Movie. Chris Evans, who plays the Freddie Prinze Jr. figure in it, eventually became Captain America, and a much bigger star than Freddie Prinze Jr. And while it may not have reached She’s All That grosses, Not Another Teen Movie made more than Jawbreaker or Whatever It Takes or even Can’t Hardly Wait. I probably won’t ever be able to stop myself from pointing out when classics of later generations were actually yesterday’s poorly reviewed box office flops (guys, I promise you, Hocus Pocus was not beloved in 1993, and I don’t think it was misunderstood, either). And I’ll probably keep arguing occasionally in favor of some movie randomly called out as something nobody saw or nobody likes or nobody has ever thought about. But cultural impact, I must admit, is fluid, and nebulous, and, if Not Another Teen Movie can wield it, maybe not that important. Not uninteresting to study, to be sure, but also no particular value judgment one way or the other.

This might seem counterintuitive for someone who tries to offer some measure of pop-culture analysis, but trust me, it’s nice to have a break from trying to get into someone else’s head. (Isn’t that what fiction is for, anyway?) I cannot be made to appreciate Not Another Teen Movie as a brilliantly meta savaging of classic teen cinema. Your friend group cannot be made to quote Knocked Up. Your dead grandparents can’t return from the grave to watch Avatar 2. Impact is for falling rocks. Even the best movies can slip through countless fingers.