Avatarted
By First Ringer
If seeing James Cameron’s boffo blockbuster special effects extravaganza Avatar doesn’t give you a 3-D induced headache, apparently it will give you thoughts of suicide instead:
The beautiful alien planet Pandora depicted in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is so captivating that some audience members are becoming depressed and even suicidal when they fail to find meaning in real life after the film is over…
“I just watched avatar a few weeks ago and I’m feeling depressed and sad. It’s like I want to reach out and be in Pandora. I’d do anything to be in Pandora. I’ve tried so hard to dream about me being on Pandora but it hasn’t worked.”
“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. 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.'”
I’ll admit I felt the urge to grab a gun after seeing “Cool as Ice”, but I don’t think it involved the same motivations.
While there’s nothing amusing about the serious depression and social alienation that allows individuals to be driven to thoughts of suicide from a 3-D film with 2-D characters, Cameron’s opus isn’t the first nor the last work of science fiction to do so. There’s Star Wars depression. There’s Twilight depression. Who knows, maybe even Mitch’s light posting this morning caused a few cases of SITD withdrawal.
But regardless of the source, the causes for such depression from a work of fiction seem as much culturally based as personality-driven:
Tamara Nichols, who practiced psychotherapy for 11 years, says, “[The genre] can provide a sort of a symbolic model for people who don’t fit into the more mainstream ideas of what a man should be, what a woman should be.”
…it seems that many people who read science fiction as children had similar experiences: raised outside their mother countries, moved frequently, had health problems, troubled childhoods, and/or were academically gifted. These circumstances led these people to delve more deeply into books than to reach out to other people.
A multitude of critics as varied as the floral and fawna on Cameron’s fictional Pandora have expounded on the political and social messages that Avatar and its appeal suggest. But regardless of the film’s real or accidental messages (and Cameron leaves little doubt about environmental intentions of the movie), the concept that Avatar’s appeal is largely what filmmakers 50 years used to call a “sword and sandal spectacle” is seemingly too timid a conclusion for some to be willing to reach. What would columnists and bloggers have to write about without broad, overreaching conclusions on social phenomena? Especially when your protagonists are giant blue cat people.
Maybe that’s the real underlying message of Avatar – millions of people are secretly suicidal furries.
January 13th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
“Maybe that’s the real underlying message of Avatar – millions of people are secretly suicidal furries.”
Laughing. Sides hurting. Stop. C|N>K!
January 13th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
I remember a time when Sci Fi was the genre all about the joyous prospects of the future, where nothing is out of the question, where what we see as fantastic is something attainable, once the technology catches up to our imaginations.
I grew up reading Sci Fi. I still find an occasional new one worth reading, but not many. I have always wanted most of what I read to be ENTERTAINING, first and foremost, rather than being brow-beaten about my current culture. I can read non fiction for that. What lessons were taught in the earlier science fiction were about shaking up the status quo, stretching our minds and abilities to the limit, and inspiring us to look forward, rather than becoming a lamentation of how awful living in the now is.
So many pieces of science fiction, and fiction in general, fail in inspiring the imagination, the writers filling them instead with platitudes and a pot full of message. No wonder it’s making people suicidal.
January 13th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Wanting to kill oneself over a movie. How sad.
Maybe they could find meaning helping the people of Hati rebuild. Seems like a good idea to me.
Also, I second Troy on that last line.
January 13th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
“Maybe that’s the real underlying message of Avatar – millions of people are secretly suicidal furries.”
I’ve assumed this about my coworkers for many years. I work in IT.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:54 am
Goofballs that are disappointed real life isn’t like a cartoon where trees talk to the animals and people fly around on friendly dragons are threatening to snuff themselves?
Ruh roh…..that’s bad news for any Democrat who planned on using the Hopey/Changey routine again any time soon.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:24 am
I once read some autobiographical musings by NYT columnist Paul Krugman in which he described reading Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as an adolescent. For those not familiar: a classic SF series in which a scientist figures out how to describe the sum total of human behavior by mathmatical equations and how he sets out to short circuit a coming period of chaos by establishing a foundation of psych-historians to manipulate galactic events. Of course, this is what ultra libs like Krugman believe they are doing now: dictating to the rest of us how to live, but all for the greater good of humanity. See: Hitler and the Third Reich, Stalin and the New Soviet man, Mao and the Great Leap Forward.
January 14th, 2010 at 10:55 am
The fictional character’s name was ‘Hari Seldon’. With Seldon as his hero and role model he can never be wrong. He is the one man with understanding enough to order all of human affairs. This explains why his columns are such miserable hackwork; with key points depending on willfull distortions of fact, misuse of statistics and artfully constructed timelines.
Daniel Okrent, the last NYTimes ombudsman, famously said of Krugman:
“I can’t come up with an adverb sufficient to encompass his general attitude toward substantive criticism.”