Friday, January 22, 2010

Avatar is causing depression

Jan 14, 2010

Fans of the film have inundated dedicated websites with their confused and depressed postings, setting up discussion threads like 'Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible', which already has more than 1,000 posts.

LOS ANGELES - THE perfection of an idyllic planet populated by perfect blue aliens at one with nature and each other from the hugely successful movie Avatar, is causing ordinary humans to become depressed, reported entertainment media on Thursday.

The world created by director James Cameron is so perfect that entire support groups have sprung up to help fans cope with the fact that it doesn't exist.

According to an article in The Daily Telegraph, fans of the film have inundated dedicated websites with their confused and depressed postings, setting up discussion threads like 'Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible', which already has more than 1,000 posts.

In another forum a user wrote: 'When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed grey. 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.' Other fans are even more affected by the situation, reported The Daily Telegraph, with one posting: 'I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora.'

Another report in The Daily Mail newspaper said that the detailed visual realism could be leading viewers to become particularly attached to the idea of the world.

Dr Stephan Quentzel, psychiatrist and Medical Director for the Louis Armstrong Centre for Music and Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Centre in New York told CNN: '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. 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.'

[What is depressing is that people can's seem to tell reality from fantasy.  I guess if these people were faced with the blue pill-red pill choice in the Matrix, they would have chosen the Blue (Avatar/pandora) pill. I guess this is also a reason why people chose religion and afterlife - because the reality is just too stark for them. Perhaps that is the failure of agnosticism/atheism for them. But then again, I have always maintained that atheism isn't for everyone.  Nor is religion (or the fantasy of Pandora) for everyone.]

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