When the director James Cameron accepted his Best Picture trophy for Avatar at the Golden Globe awards on Sunday night, he had a very specific message to sell. “Avatar asks us to see that everything is connected,” he began, explaining to the packed ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel the true meaning of a film that’s set almost exclusively in the hyper-real jungle world of Pandora. “And if you have to go four and a half light years to another made-up planet to appreciate the miracle of a world we have right here, well, ya know what, that’s the wonder of cinema right there. That’s the magic.”
The magic of Avatar, however, has been so potent that some film fans have felt it linger long after the closing credits. The movie, which is presented in the most sophisticated and convincing 3-D process yet (called “Fusion 3-D”), depicts Pandora as a place full of wondrous bioluminescent flora and fauna, and details the adventures of the local “Na’vi” tribes as they fight to save their homeland from plundering human invaders. It has been described as the first completely “immersive” film experience. And yet it is precisely this brief and bounteous immersion that can lead, according to an increasingly vocal number of Avatar fans, to a bad case of the blues.
Recently, internet chat forums on the film’s fan sites have been clogged (one was closed after more than 1,000 posts) by viewers reporting feelings of depression and despondency after seeing the movie. On one site, a discussion called “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” featured myriad fans recounting just how repulsed they were, contrary to Cameron’s speech, by the reality of life on Earth after witnessing the phosphorescent beauty of Pandora.
A typical post reads, “After I watched Avatar for the first time, I truly felt depressed that I was awake in this world again.” Another reads, “It’s so hard, I can’t force myself to think that it’s just a movie, and to get over it, and that living like the Na’vi will never happen”. While one, on the website, Naviblue.com, simply says: “I want to go to Pandora because life here sux \[sic\], with no sense of companionship, and because mankind has destroyed our planet.” On the same website, one fan claims that, “I even contemplated suicide, thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora, and that everything will be the same as in Avatar.”
Of course, films have provoked extreme reactions before, although in most cases — A Clockwork Orange, Natural Born Killers, The Matrix — homicidal violence was the alleged result. Yet with Avatar, the effect seems to be both widespread and profoundly different. Here, thanks to a 3-D film-making process that was 14 years in development, the experience of watching the film is so absorbing, and the subsequent fantasy world so hyper-real, that nothing in life outside of the local multiplex can possibly compare.
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“With Avatar, the technology has become so highly sophisticated that it makes the screen world seem more vivid than reality can ever be,” says the author Michael Foley. He claims that it is the pinnacle of a subtle process, prevalent in modern culture, that prioritises screen realities over lived experience. “In the modern world an event has not happened unless it has been photographed or filmed,” Foley writes in his forthcoming book The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy. “The failure of primary experience means that the film becomes the reality instead ... The reality of the screen is infinitely more real than the reality around us.”
There are parallels in the misnomer “reality TV”, and the fashion industry, where airbrushed cover-girl avatars create an idealised beauty myth. And in the very landscape of the Western world, copycat cities such as Las Vegas provide a touchstone to thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard who see around them replicas (or simulacra) of a reality that no longer exists.
The seduction of a fake reality such as Avatar “works on an entirely unconscious level”, says Foley. “But what you’re absorbing is so stimulating, and what it offers is so frenetic, giving you a new stimulus every second, that it makes real life feel sluggish, slow and impossibly dead in comparison.”
Perhaps, however, we are being oversensitive to the complaints of a certain section of sci-fi obsessives. Or perhaps movies such as Avatar actually attract a specific core audience — potential depressives — who are already keen to escape the grimness of reality. After all, movies can’t make you ill, can they?
Yes they can, says Dr Gordon Claridge, a professor of abnormal psychology in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. Claridge, who says that he once taught a student with bipolar disorder who became suicidal after seeing a horror movie, believes that Avatar’s use of 3-D, and its approximation of reality, is the key. “The closer a movie gets to reality, the more it has the ability to move you,” he says. “If something is written fiction you need to use your imagination to visualise it. But if it’s 3-D, and very realistic, it can become difficult to distinguish from reality in that moment.”
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And this, surely, is the crux of the Avatar conundrum. For in the Gadarene rush to transform cinema into a 3-D medium, the industry’s focus has all been placed on technique and technology rather than on the artistic, emotional or even physiological effects of that same technology. Since 2003, when Cameron released his highdefinition 3-D documentary The Ghosts of the Abyss, Hollywood has been enthralled by the idea of a wholesale transformation to a format that cannot be pirated, and one that demands, for no obvious reason, prestige ticket prices. (Theatre owners argue that the switch to new 3-D projectors and screens costs a lot of money.)
But now that the transformation is almost complete (Avatar opened on 3,671 3-D screens worldwide), is the dark reality of the 3-D dream to be found in a bunch of film fans teetering on the brink of suicide? Or further still, is the real Pandora in the 3-D story not Cameron’s blissed-out planet but a Pandora’s Box of disaffection opened to impressionable audiences by this fully immersive experience?
Claridge, for one, thinks that we underestimate the effects of 3-D at our peril. He explains that, in psychiatry, virtual reality is commonly used to treat paranoid disorders. “A screen is used, and we look at how people who are paranoid respond to virtual reality scenes that play out,” he says. If the presentation of a virtual reality under laboratory conditions can affect behaviour, it is not hard to believe that it also has power to do so in the cinema. Claridge hopes to instigate a study to compare the mood reactions of audiences watching 2-D and 3-D movies.
Foley, meanwhile, says that there needs to be an entire cultural shift away from products such as Avatar. “There’s a kind of cultural conditioning going on,” he explains. “The culture favours these kinds of movies, so the people think that this is what they should be seeing, and they’re not aware that they have this kind of adverse effect until afterwards.”
Cameron himself, meanwhile, is likely to be untroubled by the stories of depression that surround his movie. The film is already set to be the most successful film of the year, perhaps even of all time, and with the Oscars on the way in March it will no doubt be one of the most celebrated too. The director, in the end, may have the last laugh, after one fan forum recently revealed a novel way to deal with the Avatar blues. “I’m still experiencing it, but I’m OK with it,” began the fan. He had come to respect his depression, he said, so that whenever he felt it lifting from his Avatar-obsessed mind, he found that there was only one thing left to do: “I go to it again!”
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The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy by Michael Foley ( Simon & Schuster) is out on February 11, priced £10.99