I have recently fallen victim to a new mental illness: Post-Avatar Ecological Depressive Disorder (PAEDD). Don’t try to look for it in the DSM-IV; that book is full of imaginary pathologies. This one is real. My symptoms include hissing at cars, wishing I were twelve feet tall and blue, feeling a painfully nostalgic yearning to “return” to the magical world of Pandora depicted in James Cameron’s latest film Avatar, and simply wanting to die as I watch Planet Earth perish all around me. I feel a bit better with each passing day, but climbing out of a sadness like this can be a daunting, arduous process.
I realize that this may seem like a strange, somewhat juvenile affliction, but before telling me to “get a life” and reminding me that Avatar is “just a movie,” I’d like to try to explain how this terrible sickness befell me, how I have managed to cope with it thus far, and, seeing as how I’m not the only one suffering in this manner, I’d like to address what I believe to be the implications of PAEDD for society at large.
For those predisposed to the disorder, PAEDD is triggered by two directly related, yet violently dissonant events: 1) Watching the movie Avatar and 2) leaving the theater. Below is a realistic dramatization of how this disease might typically seize hold of a person.
You enter the theater, Avatar begins, and you are catapulted with an almost entheogenic force into the world of Pandora, a verdant moon throbbing with transcendent beauty. Pandora is inhabited by a species of sapient humanoids known as the Na’vi. The Na’vi—twelve feet tall, big-eyed, blue-skinned, beautiful—move through their forested biosphere like dolphins cutting through open ocean. Their home is alive; the entire ecosystem of Pandora is permeated by the sacred energy of Eywa, a silent, Gaia-like deity who is as ethereal as she is organic. All beings on Pandora commune with Eywa, and each other, by physically plugging themselves into the interconnected web of life that encompasses the entire moon. When you hug the trees, the trees hug you back. Although most everything seems to be trying to kill you on Pandora, the exhilaration of survival is so pure that you begin to wonder how true human freedom is possible without it. Through the power of James Cameron’s special-effects sorcery, you lose yourself in the hypnotic colors and cadences of this majestic new world, ego subsumed in bioluminescent wonder, sense of self humbled and transformed by an enchanting, nurturing, all-encompassing immanence.
Then the lights turn on in the theater, and you find that your sneakers are sealed fast to a Pepsi-sticky floor. You exit the building, and step out not onto pure soil, but filthy, ungodly concrete, littered with cigarette butts and plastered with rotten splotches of discarded chewing gum. Fumes from arrogant cars fill your lungs, and the snow on the ground is leprous with oil and other toxins from off the street. Metal is everywhere, you’re standing in a strip mall, and tomorrow, you recall, you will have to go sit in a gray cubicle for eight hours, withering under the stuttering rays of fluorescent lights. The Earth is vile, human beings are worse still, and Eywa is nowhere to be found. Suddenly, the heart-wrenching words of Jake, Avatar’s narrator and male lead, echo in your ears: “Look at the world we come from. There is no green there. They killed their Mother, and they’re going to do the same thing here.” In that instant, you realize that something is horribly wrong with everything.
Epiphany and counter-epiphany collide in your mind: the film has inspired you to believe that somewhere in your spirit you, like the Na’vi, have a “port” that is intended to connect with nature, but as you frantically search your surrounding environment, you simply don’t know where to plug this port in. You long to commune with a holy, green, transpersonal home, but you realize that you are destroying the closest thing you’ve got to that. It’s time to get back to the garden, your spirit whispers to you, but there is no garden, it appears, to get back to, and, what’s worse, it’s all your fault.
As symptoms of PAEDD intensify, what was once considered merely unsustainable becomes unendurable. What was once irresponsible now seems intolerable. As you yearn to see yourself as an integral part of the dynamic planetary system around you, you are suddenly awakened to the fact that your corporeal spirit is mingling with garbage. You have profaned your home planet, your life, and, quite possibly, your afterlife, for you now imagine your body buried in a cemetery next to a bunch of strangers on the side of the highway, with unknown chemicals seeping into your coffin like grave robbers. If, as a member of the audience during Avatar, you could not endure the destruction of Eywa, how, as a human being, could you possibly tolerate the destruction of Gaia? You cheered the heroes of the film on to victory against the greedy and myopic mercenaries, only to discover that, in reality, you are among the evildoers. You don’t walk the Earth; you trample it. You are an eco-pathological rapist and murderer, and you are committing slow-motion suicide with every industrial movement you make.
Planet Earth, Live and In Color
But shame, outrage, and despair are not, in themselves, horrors sufficient enough to catalyze a full-blown case of PAEDD. To be truly out of your mind, you must be filled with an infinite love for something that you cannot touch. Fortuitously, as confronting hardship so often involves the magic of paradox, the way into the disease is also the way out from it. Pandora may seem like an exotic and impossible fantasy, but, save for the floating mountains and some far-out megafauna, it is modeled almost entirely after a vision of Planet Earth restored to its original beauty. The best hope people with PAEDD have for a long-term cure, then, is to actualize this vision in real life by taking the pathos and reverence they feel for the fictional Pandora and using that energy to actively participate in the restoration of the celestial body that miraculously sustains our existence right here on real, live 3-D Planet Earth.
Tags: an inconvenient truth, avatar, deep ecology, depression, earth, ecology, environment, film, gaia, movie
I feel most connected to nature as I sit quietly in my comfortable lawn-chair at the lake in summer watching the small wildlife. Mrs. Squirrel just told off Mr. Squirrel (at least it sounded like that to me) and chased him from one tree to the next (or maybe she's frisky!) Mrs. Robin has built her nest (again) in the overhang of my deck and takes dives at my head if I go near it.
My older fifth-wheel trailer sits sedately in the background. Not that I need to be pampered but I'm grateful for it at night when there's something solid between me and Mr. Bear.
The pipe that brings water to my lot (many trailers are nestled among the naturally occuring trees and shrubs) is dripping and I'm selfishly glad not to have to walk miles to get water.
Unlike Pandora, Mother Earth isn't this pretty everywhere. I certainly wouldn't set up my trailer in the Gobi Dessert, or the Australian Outback (although I'm sure the people who live there like it just fine)! Nor would I like to set up camp in places that are susceptible to tsunami's, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes or volcanos.
Mother Earth has her own methods for purging the planet and we are often helpless if we get in her way.
I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar but it was too one-sided and I don't look good in blue. I think moderation is the key.
I have seen Avatar four times and dream about it all the time. I think this movie could really shake a lot of people into action, and it needs the support of all the skeptics who criticize it around the edges instead of embracing its huge potential. On balance, this film is truly good for humanity (and all the non-humans that share this planet with us)!
A very thoughtful response. My just published book traces the many tributaries to the very kind of spirituality Ryan called for; he is not alone, even before Avatar, as I show in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future , which was recently covered in Religion Dispatches and is introduced also at www.brontaylor.com
This nature worship naivete is a lovely vision of Eden which ignores the rigors of reality. Consider the US in summer: a furnace full of bugs, a carpet of poison ivy....
Avatar shows us the ultimate beauty of nature doesn't have to be real. Your summertime bug furnace and ivy carpet can be recorded in HD and enjoyed in the air conditioned comfort of IMAX 3D long after the nature is paved over.
Ah, but perhaps there can be no God without mosquito bites? Or poison ivy rashes. I think of John Muir, now, climbing to the top of the tree during a thunderstorm, ecstatic. All senses and emotions -- even fear --- should be open and activated, pleasant or otherwise. You can't fully breach the gap between yourself and nature by immunizing yourself to the hardships that we were evolutionarily intended to confront out there. There are tribes in the Amazon that deliberately inflict insect bites upon themselves. Exact opposite of bug spray.
As far as IMAX spirituality goes, I would suggest that movies like "avatar" can remind us of --- but not replace entirely --- an immersive interconnection with the natural world, which is why some viewers experience a kind of "culture shock," so to speak, after exiting the theater.
We are a long way off from Brave-New-Worldian "feelies," and even if this hyperreality could be perfected, I think that, for most people, the fundamental dissatisfaction experienced by Huxley's main character would persist.
There are tribes in the Amazon who drag themselves into Christian missionary stations after they do that.
What do you mean by "the gap between yourself and nature?" What gap. Your house stands between you and the blizzard, the bugs and bears. That's the "gap"? If you're not in the open wearing a loincloth and eating roots and nuts there's a gap?
Thank you for this article. I really enjoyed it.
I always wonder if the conservatives (and most Americans) realize that they're the "bad guys" in this movie.
Oh, they know it! I'd say "Follow the right-wing blogs" -- but who would wish that on an innocent stranger? Still, the movie has aroused plenty of outrage at its lefty tree-hugging America-hating politics.
(Did I forget quiche-eating?)
I saw Avatar recently. As Larry David says, "It was 'pretty, pretty, pretty good'. Fast-twitch muscle testing 3D gimmicks were blessedly rare. But nauseating vertiginous tightrope walks across fallen trees connecting floating mountains or soaring flights on the back of a Toruk awaiting a stall, a spin, a death spiral happened often enough for me.
At first, I thought there was lack of imagination in the realization of the creatures of Pandora. Six-legged creatures that look remarkably like four-legged horses, dogs and vicious Plantegent lions on earth. And humanoids but for really flat noses, articulated ears and tails who took an amazingly similar evolutionary path as we did, except for the blue skin, of course.
And why Pandora? Not the self-programming internet radio but the first woman who opened the box supposedly packed with god-given horrors as punishments for the fire-stealing Prometheus. She's the one who innocently released burdensome toil and sickness, death and desease to all mankind, and "a myriad other pains"— leaving only Hope inside that box by the time she had closed it again. Alone and imprisoned inside the box, Hope is forever withheld from humans.
But I gotta ask, what the hell is Hope doing in a box of human wup ass anyway? Hope is one of the Big Three, Faith, Hope and Charity. It's the second one!
How could a celluloid Pandora become the scene of a grand cosmic reunion?
Could it be the movies very lack of imagination, its obvious similarity to our mythical milieu that the millions who fork over billions to see Avatar relate to. They see our world like you might a cousin. The family connection acknowledged but conveniently once removed.
Some might call this the dumbing down of an inconvenient truth. But can you reach that many people without some sort of common denominator sacred narrative explaining how we can rescue our world and ourselves from our fate.
We want to find Pandora's box, open it and release the last 'gift' from the gods, right. But what happens if Hope is just one more plague? One more tribulation and not the missing secret ingredient of salvation? "Just give us a Hope," we cry. "There's always Hope," someone always answers. Yes, there it is sitting in Pandora's Box like Schoedinger's Cat never dead, never alive.
Avatar is showing us a future of a new generation of computer generated HD movies, and changing the standard to 3D. Hope will come in time if it can find a story that can compete with other human emotions at the box office. Until then, the only peek into Pandora's box might be on noncommercial websites like this.
In the Eastern Orthodox tradition,
man is conceived as the priest of Creation. It is the human vocation to make an offering of the world to God in thanksgiving and in praise.
We are responsible for the glorification of the Earth, and all our acts, all our transformations of the gifts of Creation, our arts and sciences and social forms are so many offerings to those we love, to the community and to God. By accepting the gift of the world, transforming it and releasing it back towards the mysterious source from which it flows, we transform both the world and ourselves.
After reading Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion, it seems to me that the PAEDD is caused by misplacing the "mirror" by which we attain our perspective. When the illusions in movies become more desirable than reality, as is now technologically possible, it will create this kind of depression anytime there is a story on the screen with a hyper-realistic portrayal of the intangible. But the depression only manifests if you use the movie itself (or a particular celebrity, political party, etc) to gain your perspective on life.
I have been doing a podcast recently on the culture of celebrity (Letters to Laodicea), and have a two-part series on my reaction to Avatar and these issues.
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