What began as a visionary tale soon turned into a multifaceted phenomenon that drew people in and left them stranded. After an extended 13-year wait, Avatar 2 makes its way to the theatres to set the audience on a path to Pandora’s inner sanctum once again. But even as James Cameron’s creation potentially speaks to the director’s enduring and overarching vision, there have been some among the crowd of moviegoers and cinema lovers who have fallen prey to the epic scale of the narrative that Avatar presents, so much that reality of the world around us now presents itself as a lifeless grey landscape when compared to the expansive beauty of the fictional Pandora.
The after-effect that follows in the wake of that reality is what some have termed as the ‘Post Avatar Depression Syndrome’ and the crippling feeling has potentially reared its head once again as Avatar 2 lands among the masses.
Also read: Avatar: The Way of Water — An Immersive, Beautiful Vision
James Cameron’s Avatar & Its Accidental Consequences
James Cameron’s Avatar was a product of the mind that had somehow evaded the curse of the ‘eccentric genius’. As a result, the art that Cameron creates has the potential to inflict such force on the mental limitations of the human brain that it almost drives an average person to the brink of madness and death. And all of it has been rooted in reality as opposed to the exaggerations of one single person’s experience.
According to a group established on Discord, people have experienced clinical depression and have had to treat themselves with psychotherapy in order to get over the colorless reality of a post-Pandora world. The immersive experience that Avatar delivered to its viewers often pulled people in inadvertently and treated them to such a utopian vision that left them feeling swept up in the dream-like adventure of Cameron’s landscape. When the dream broke off, they did not like the world they had to live in as compared to the shocking beauty of the Na’vi community.
Avatar 2 Brings Up the Dreaded Past & Uneasy Emotions
Max Perrin, a member of the Discord group that calls itself Kelutral — an online community for all those who seek support and camaraderie after the Avatar experience, says,
“I remember being blown away by the visual spectacle of [Avatar] and the compositions and emotional beats of the story. I went in blind and I was swept off my feet. I was kind of in tears. I was also just like, ‘I need to talk to somebody about this’…
I felt like that was an amazing dream, but now I had to wake up. I had to return to the doldrum of reality, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my adult life…”
Perrin isn’t the only one, however, as a fellow Kelutral member, Jacob Williamson too suffered the consequences of being swept up in Cameron’s story. He claims to have had to drop out of school for a semester to deal with the repercussions through therapy.
Kelutral’s user experience designer, Nick Paavo states that almost 20-30% of his peers have experienced a similar phenomenon as that of Perrin and Williamson. Perrin further claims,
“A lot of people have experienced this in the community. It really made me rethink a few things. I had no idea that I could be so deeply influenced by something like this. I had no idea just how deeply it was going to change me.”
As Avatar 2 now wades through the entrenched emotional evaluations of its viewers, the community has grown somewhat more receptive to the prospect of moving on from the mentally painful shackles of Pandora and accepting the film with more passion than fixation. Speaking of the impact that the long-awaited sequel could potentially have on its audience, Perrin states, “It is going to be more solemn, sentimental, and retrospective.”
Avatar 2 is now playing in theatres globally.
Source: Variety
