Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Althouse

Legal Commentary

: Althouse

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed."

"Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.'"

"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... 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."

When I was younger ? I'm 59, starting today ? movies had a very strong effect on me, but it wasn't that it turned the world disappointingly gray. When I walked out into the light after a great movie, my experience was that things seemed sharpened, intensified, and refreshed. The real world felt newly real. It was more in color ? the opposite of depression.

Is it something about the movies that has changed? Is our relationship to film different now? Are young people today different from the way we were then? Maybe nothing has changed, and there were post-film depressives then as now.

Full post as published by Althouse on January 12, 2010 (boomark / email).