Tentacular (Re)thinking and Environmental Uncanny: Reading James Cameron's Avatar as Chthulucinema

ABSTRACT This article reads Cameron's Avatar (2009) as a “chthulucinematic” narrative, extending Fleming and Brown's (2018) term beyond its existing applications. Through a closed contextual reading, we contrast the autopoietic enclosure of the film's neoliberal antagonist, the Resources Development Administration, with the sympoietic world‐building of the Na'vi and their planetary network, Eywa , drawing on Donna Haraway's concept of “tentacular thinking” to argue that the film's neural bonds and interspecies kinship model a viable alternative to anthropocentric extraction. We further employ Amitav Ghosh's “environmental uncanny” to locate the sites of ontological alternatives this reading produces and Sara Ahmed's theory of “affective economies” to trace how the film redistributes emotional and moral capital away from neoliberal detachment and toward multispecies solidarity. In doing so, this paper contributes to ecocritical inquiry by clarifying what an onto‐epistemic shift toward tentacular thinking would require of popular cinema, and by positioning Avatar , despite the persistent critical controversies surrounding its racial politics, as a significant sympoietic, chthulucinematic text.