Wednesday, March 10, 2010

"Avatar" and Depression


When I saw the trailer for Avatar, I laughed. (Blue people on another planet? Really now?) Then my oldest girlfriend called to say that she was coming into town and that she was dying to see it. Her treat. Guess who caved.

After the visual roller coaster ended (yes, I was impressed), my friend observed that the real world now looked one-dimensional and colorless. I had to agree. (The fact that our immediate surroundings were colorless—it was a dark theater, people—might have heightened the impression just a tad.) In contrast with the dazzling, lush world of Pandora we had just been immersed in for the past two and a half hours, reality did look dwarfed and bland.

Later, I was unsurprised to read about extreme reactions of other viewers. CNN quoted fans who experienced a whiplash of depression after the movie:

"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."


Read the rest of the post here.