Neytiriyä Waytelem: Representing matrixial entanglement as songcord in James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Original Research

Abstract

Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) construct digital storyworlds that reconfigure liminality through a matrixial, maternal lens. Drawing on theories of immersive digital storytelling, this article situates James Cameron’s Pandora as a hyperreal environment that approaches what Jean Baudrillard terms the simulacrum: a copy without origin that generates its own experiential reality. Within this digitally constituted ecology, the songcord in Avatar: The Way of Water emerges as a central symbolic and affective device. Whereas classical theories of liminality, as articulated by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, frame the liminal as a transitional phase oriented toward transformation, the songcord instead embodies what Bracha L Ettinger conceptualises as a matrixial borderspace: an encounter grounded in co-emergence, relationality, and shared affect. Through close analysis of the audiovisual staging of Neytiri’s song in the film’s closing sequence, the article demonstrates how sound, gesture, and digital imagery render the songcord an enduring, rhizomatic threshold rather than a passage to be transcended. In contrast to Jake Sully’s teleological hero’s journey, this matrixial logic sustains familial bonds across life, death, memory, and Eywa’s planetary network, reframing liminality as ongoing relational becoming.