It was intended to be the movie-going experience of the decade, but James Cameron’s eye-popping science-fiction/ fantasy Avatar has left thousands of people feeling very low, and not just in inverse proportion to rising ticket prices. Apparently, the “3D” in Cameron’s opus really stands for “depressed, despondent and dejected” (which basically mean the same thing, but who would ever go for a “1D” film?).
The story broke when the Avatar forums website (http://tinyurl.com/y9jpn3a) began recorded a large number of posts under the wordy topic head “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible”. For the uninitiated, Pandora is the beautiful moon on which the film is set in the year 2154. It’s inhabited by gentle, blue-skinned creatures called the Na’vi, whose lives are taken over by colonising human beings from planet Earth. But back to 2010 now, and human beings are stumbling out of movie theatres, looking at the glass-and-concrete buildings around them and feeling a profound anguish that idyllic Pandora doesn’t really exist.
This is, to an extent, a familiar phenomenon: anyone who has ever become deeply involved with a fantasy world (whether through books, epic films or even a TV series) will understand it. But there are at least two interesting subtexts in the current situation. One, Avatar is frequently interpreted in terms of a yearning for a mythical “simpler” time, when primitive man lived in harmony with nature. And two, most of the young viewers who are reporting depression hail from a generation that spends a large part of its time online, already well-ensconced in various virtual worlds.
A third factor is the sheer intensity of the reaction. “I contemplate suicide, thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed (sic) in a world similar to Pandora where everything is the same as in Avatar,” writes a poster named Mike on the Avatar forum. There is support and counsel for this sort of thing. On the TTL Depression Forum (http://tinyurl.com/yk4x4nz), a savant explains how to cope. “Be in touch with nature and don’t be greedy and wasteful,” he says, “Pass on the burger (sic) for something more healthy for you. Jump on the leonopteryx.”
(A leonopteryx is an airborne animal in the Avatar universe, but how jumping on one can help depressed people get the film out of their heads is something I can’t fathom.)
The Internet being a cruel place, there’s a great deal of scorn for the afflicted too. On the SodaHead blog (http://tinyurl.com/yfxxfat), a commenter endorses the suicide idea. “The human race will be better off without these genes in the pool. I say go for it. See if you come back on some distant planet...Good Luck!” On Daily Record.com (http://tinyurl.com/y97nzyb), Matt Manochio worries that “we’ve devolved into whiny weaklings. Getting depressed because you don’t live in a world inhabited by 9-foot-tall blue cat creatures? Really?” Realest Niggas (http://tinyurl.com/y8972et) has an expectedly irreverent take: “Bet it’s all white vegans who feel guilty about all the terrible things they did to coloured people in the past.” And on Twitter, someone wonders, “A movie so good you don’t want to live anymore? But if you kill yourself, how will you see part 2?”
A relatively literate discussion can be found on the Althouse blog (http://tinyurl.com/yfsah3s), where a commenter mulls that in the pre-Internet days most people had to keep their angst about such things to themselves. “Besides, even living in an escapist fantasy — playing Dungeons and Dragons, for instance — meant you had to actually meet new people and navigate the real world. Nowadays you can exist in fantasy and never leave the house.”
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As millions of Netizens routinely do. “I really wish this message-board wasn’t real,” grumbles one commenter, as the “Avatar depression” posts hit the 10,000 mark.
News for him: it isn’t.
[The author is a freelance writer]
