Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues

[• Aerys •]

James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle "Avatar" may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

On the fan forum site "Avatar Forums," a topic thread entitled "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible," has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope. The topic became so popular last month that forum administrator Philippe Baghdassarian had to create a second thread so people could continue to post their confused feelings about the movie.


"I wasn't depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy ," Baghdassarian said. "But I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed."

A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie," Elequin posted.

A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site "Naviblue" that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

Other fans have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race and disengagement with reality.

Cameron's movie, which has pulled in more than $1.4 billion in worldwide box office sales and could be on track to be the highest grossing film of all time, is set in the future when the Earth's resources have been pillaged by the human race. A greedy corporation is trying to mine the rare mineral unobtainium from the planet Pandora, which is inhabited by a peace-loving race of 7-foot tall, blue-skinned natives called the Na'vi.

In their race to mine for Pandora's resources, the humans clash with the Na'vi, leading to casualties on both sides. The world of Pandora is reminiscent of a prehistoric fantasyland, filled with dinosaur-like creatures mixed with the kinds of fauna you may find in the deep reaches of the ocean. Compared with life on Earth, Pandora is a beautiful, glowing utopia.

Ivar Hill posts to the "Avatar" forum page under the name Eltu. He wrote about his post-"Avatar" depression after he first saw the film earlier this month.

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning," Hill wrote on the forum. "It just seems so ... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep ... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."

Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality.

"One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality," Hill said.

Cameron's special effects masterpiece is very lifelike, and the 3-D performance capture and CGI effects essentially allow the viewer to enter the alien world of Pandora for the movie's 2½-hour running time, which only lends to the separation anxiety some individuals experience when they depart the movie theater.

"Virtual life is not real life and it never will be, but this is the pinnacle of what we can build in a virtual presentation so far," said Dr. Stephan Quentzel, psychiatrist and Medical Director for the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. "It has taken the best of our technology to create this virtual world and real life will never be as utopian as it seems onscreen. It makes real life seem more imperfect."

Fans of the movie may find actor Stephen Lang, who plays the villainous Col. Miles Quaritch in the film, an enemy of the Na'vi people and their sacred ground, an unlikely sympathizer. But Lang says he can understand the connection people are feeling with the movie.

"Pandora is a pristine world and there is the synergy between all of the creatures of the planet and I think that strikes a deep chord within people that has a wishfulness and a wistfulness to it," Lang said. "James Cameron had the technical resources to go along with this incredibly fertile imagination of his and his dream is built out of the same things that other peoples' dreams are made of."

The bright side is that for Hill and others like him -- who became dissatisfied with their own lives and with our imperfect world after enjoying the fictional creation of James Cameron -- becoming a part of a community of like-minded people on an online forum has helped them emerge from the darkness.

"After discussing on the forums for a while now, my depression is beginning to fade away. Having taken a part in many discussions concerning all this has really, really helped me," Hill said. "Before, I had lost the reason to keep on living -- but now it feels like these feelings are gradually being replaced with others."

Quentzel said creating relationships with others is one of the keys to human happiness, and that even if those connections are occurring online they are better than nothing.

"Obviously there is community building in these forums," Quentzel said. "It may be technologically different from other community building, but it serves the same purpose."

Within the fan community, suggestions for battling feelings of depression after seeing the movie include things like playing "Avatar" video games or downloading the movie soundtrack, in addition to encouraging members to relate to other people outside the virtual realm and to seek out positive and constructive activities.




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/end lulz. The general human populace never ceases to amaze me with its shenanigans. Thoughts?

[emma]

... whoa. The movie made me experience sensory overload, but in a good way. It didn't make me depressed afterwards, and it's fairly easy to get me down. In fact, it just made me want to become an astronaut really badly. XD AND I DO!

[Ezekiel Macauley]

Heh. Ah, hell.

My thoughts:

--Pandora is a dream world that couldn't exist without white guilt. Educated Americans realize their/ our country's current boundaries were forged from greed and Puritan roots that proclaimed we were to be the 'City on a Hill,' a shining example of what civilization could achieve given a fresh slate & new start. The price: wholesale genocide of the native populace (I found it very interesting in the movie that there was no smallpox analogy, no mention of disease-- perhaps a bit too overt?). Avatar tells the story of what the latter-day educated dominant population wishes it might have done with that fresh clean slate...

--...in an environmental context as well. We live in an eco-conscious age, perhaps for the first time becoming aware of the undeniably measurable ways in which we are destroying the environment (yes, it is definitely human activity; the drastic volume & rapidity of the increase of carbon in the atmosphere and worldwide average temperature compared to all available records back to the ice age & beyond cannot possibly occur as natural processes in the short timespans we've seen). Pandora is Eden, a place we haven't ruined yet. Pandora is what we feel powerless to stop destroying and what we still desperately, illogically hope can redeem us.

--And Pandora is also a world where hearing God is as easy as putting your ear against a tree. I'm Pagan and on the one hand, it's incredibly invigorating to see my spiritual frame of reference (connection of all things, recycling of energy / reincarnation, immanent deity) respected as fact, even in a fantasy setting. On the other hand, no matter how viscerally I think I feel Hekate's presence or how utterly I lose myself in abandon to Dionysus, I can't hear the gods. At least, not in the ways I long to hear them, the way we always talk about in our wish fulfillment stories: burning bushes, booming voices, old men with beards and thunderbolts, beautiful women with their bodies made of tree trunks. Imagine not relating to anything through a screen again; imagine a powerful, visceral connection to the entire planet, the ability to feel a universal life force matter-of-fact inside you, to never doubt that you belong in it.

What do we have instead: an ineluctable march of progress, poison to the earth, but what are we going to do-- burn our apartment complexes down in January and start hunting deer? The broken thermostat in my apartment makes it a constant low-fifties, and I can barely stand that. As Chinese economists told the US when asked to comply with proposed international environmental codes: the US was able to take advantage of coal and other cheap, dirty fuel sources when it was ascending to industrial preeminence; why can't everyone else? We're a crowd of children shitting in a cramped sandbox, hyperstimulated, completely without solutions.

/ashcan rantings

So. yes. I understand longing for the world Cameron hath wrought. It's everything we want, long for, and can't imagine achieving.

[Ezekiel Macauley]

...and not to be all doom and gloom: the sense of ecological despair / disappointment in ourselves can be funneled toward positive ends. After seeing the movie, I've had to fight a sudden strong urge to abandon my Master's program in secondary English education and go back to undergrad for an environmental science degree. d'oh.

ETA: and the immersive, more-real-than-real 3D CGI helps: remembering parts of the movie sometimes feels like remembering what I've actually done. 3D = crack.

[thebadman]

"Bah! Slash the forests, and scorch the wood, I say'. If we ruin the first floor, move on to the next. The whole house'll crumble soon enough."

"But where will the Wood Ducks go?"

"We'll eat 'em. Then, we'll sell the feathers for pillow down."

"How cru-el!"

"It's a vicious cycle. Love it while it lasts, honky-tonk!"