Okay, Avatar‘s been out for a few weeks now. It’s made more money than you know how to count, it’s made James Cameron the most powerful man in entertainment since David Hasselhoff, and everyone’s opinion of the movie is pretty firmly set. Just one thing: can people stop taking it so goddamn seriously? Multiple news reports are saying the most devoted fans of Avatar are succumbing to crippling depression at an alarming rate. Somehow they can’t come to terms with the fact they don’t live on Pandora. How dreadful to live on Earth, with its garishly un-blue color scheme and its boringly prosaic 3-D geometry. Naturally, support websites have been created to deal with this problem, like naviblue.com. Another, Avatar-Forums.com, has thousands of people discussing their intense need to be one with Cameron’s fantasy world, including this winner (quoted at the first link above):

I was there just thinking and crying for about 15 minutes before an usher asked me to leave. I told him I never wanted to leave and he was confused for a second. Then he said I had to go and if I wanted to see this ‘crappy movie’ again I’d have to pay for another ticket. Well to cut to the chase it got a bit heated at that point and we ended up in a shoving match. The police officer who took me out of there didn’t seem to care either. When I told him he was a tool of an oppressive society that is destroying the world he laughed at me.

The comment goes on for several more paragraphs, and every one of them is golden. Clearly Cullenism is on its way out, and James Cameron is probably scheduling a fitting for his new pontifical robes as we speak. Too bad, really. I was hoping the “Twilight” craze would still be burning white-hot when Breaking Dawn hit the theatres. That uterus-chewing scene is going to be really, really hard to incorporate into a coherent worldview.