18th January 2010

HOW COULD I NOT HAVE SPOTTED THE HORTA FOR WHAT IT WAS?

My big, semi-guilty secret is that I'm a Star Trek fan. By that I mean I enjoy the show, but it doesn't amount to much more than that. I don't have any rubber Spock ears or a Starship Enterprise duvet, my mobile doesn't ring to the Star Trek theme tune (it hardly ever rings at all, really) and I wouldn't spend X hundred dollars on eBay to get a pair of De Forrest Kelley's old trousers.

Nor do I hang around internet websites moaning that something Sulu said in Series 3 directly contradicts something Picard said in a Next Generation episode or mocking (or defending) the frankly rubbish Horta monster in "The Devil In The Dark". I don't spend hours and hours putting all the episodes in StarDate order, translating Hamlet into vernacular Ferengi or rebuilding my kitchen to look like the Transporter Room. I have the first two original series on DVD and an steadily working my way through them, but I'm not obsessing over it. A while back I caught a Next Generation episode and could only take about fifteen minutes of it because it just wasn't any fun. I've always maintained that it's only Star Trek if William Shatner is in it, and all the other subsequent incarnations are just imitations trading on the name.

The excesses of fandom aren't restricted to Trek, of course. Back in the Peter Davison years, an offhand line of dialogue fixed the regeneration limit at twelve, and Dr Who fans all want to know how they can get round it once Matt Smith decides he's had enough of wearing a bow tie to work - even though according to the Tom Baker story The Brain Of Morbius he's already onto at least regeneration number 14. I used to lurk in an online Dr Who discussion group but checked out due solely to the preponderance of illiterate nutters. Yet for years I was a mainstay of an online Red Dwarf group and one year I even attended the convention, met a number of the cast, got some of my DVDs signed. Most of those Dwarfers were rational, intelligent, witty people and they didn't really care about dodgy effects shots or gaping plot inconsistencies (though admittedly they did look at you a bit funny if you said you liked Series 7).

Because ultimately we weren't taking Red Dwarf that seriously, and crucially neither were the makers. Doctor Who has also largely managed to avoid taking itself too seriously although it does waver in that direction sometime. But Trek did, I think: it stopped being a camp, colourful pantomime and started thinking it had Something Important To Say About Humanity. Much like Spiderman, Batman, and countless other comic-book heroes, it fell into the trap of thinking it was something more than a colourful diversion. That's why GI Joe worked last year while Transformers 2 didn't.

I mention all this because there's been a report recently about Avatar fans feeling depressed and suicidal because the grey inhumanity of the real world contrasts so strikingly with the bright, happy world of Pandora:

"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," Hill wrote on the forum. "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."

Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality.

"One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality," Hill said.

Another:

"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," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the [sic] everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

I genuinely don't get this. I enjoyed Avatar a lot but at no point in the movie did I actually want to be a 9-foot turquoise Thundercat living in a tree. In fact I can't think of a single movie that I'd like to live in fulltime, to the extent that I'd top myself and hope to be reborn into it. But the idea that you'd think of killing yourself just because reality doesn't measure up to a CGI fantasy world? A wonderfully detailed and beautifully rendered world, granted, but still a world that is no more real than The Land Of Far Far Away in the Shrek films. By the same logic, one ought to come out of films by Ken Loach or Aki Kaurismaki feeling elated and uplifted with the knowledge that your real life is a lot better than the one on screen. At the end of Avatar I was back on Planet Earth, in the foyer of the Cineworld Northampton (with the funny glasses on) and I'd had a good ride, but it wasn't a substitute for an actual, genuine, real life. (Whatever that might be.)

Untill the next time.

Richard.

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