Article: The Avatar Blues

"Looks so Good it Hurts": ‘Avatar’ and American Escapism

by Salvatore Brown

     ‘Na’vi’ is the spoken language of the Pandorans, the resident humanoid life forms of the moon Pandora. The language has a complete structural system of grammar, syntax, and phonetics. In 2009, it had a vocabulary of about a thousand words, and this number continues to grow, despite the fact that Na’vi is NOT REAL. It’s a constructed language director James Cameron paid a USC professor some exorbitant sum to create for his 2009 film ‘Avatar.’ So why and how does the vocabulary continue to grow? Fans are learning to speak it and actually adding to its lexicon; and this is but one indicator of a much larger, much stranger Avatar obsession.

     The inventor of ‘Na’vi’ is Paul Frommer, a linguist at the University of Southern California’s business school. Frommer has conducted research in disparate languages throughout the linguistic spectrum, from Hebrew to Mandarin Chinese. Before his work on Avatar, he penned a linguistic textbook which oddly included an exercise in ‘Klingon,’ the fictional language constructed for Star Trek’s infamous alien villains by linguist Marc Okrand. James Cameron knew the book; he also claimed in an interview during Avatar’s pre-production that the new language he was making for his film’s alien race would “out-klingon klingon.”

Paul Frommer was intimately involved in the filming process, teaching actors rudimentary usage of the language to fulfill the needs of Cameron’s script, and even putting Na’vi audio exercises on iPods for the likes of Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington. On set, Cameron kept the linguist close at hand to tweak actors’ pronunciation between shots and provide extra lines and suggestions. Frommer taught the actors enough of the fabricated language to speak their dialogue, but he remained the only one who could actually speak it. Interviewed in production, he said: "At this point, I'm pretty much the only one who knows the grammar,… Maybe that'll change as time goes on. ... Who knows?" It did change.

     The website ‘Language Log’ is a popular linguistics blog from the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. A mere day after ‘Avatar’s’ theatrical release, fans of the film bombarded the site with questions about ‘Na’vi.’ Flattered and surely flustered, Paul Frommer appeared in a ‘guest post,’ satiating fans for the time being with an exhaustive lesson on his language creation’s “Word Classes and Morphology,” and “Phonetics and Phonology,” which included detailed sections on Na’vi’s “20 consonants, 7 vowels, 4 diphthongs, and 2 syllabic “pseudovowels,” rr and ll.” One industrious commenter on the site stated his earnest hopes for further language instruction. And he did so in Na’vi, using Frommer’s mini-lesson to proudly proclaim: "Ngaru ätxäle … oel set futa Hal'liwutta tsayeyktanru ngal peng futa lì'fyati Na'viyä nume nereeiu a ngeyä wotxa lì'utìtäftxurenu sì aylì'uyä sänumeti perängey ayoel. Ayoel nereu a tsa'u ke tsayängun lu txo ayoel pänutìng futa rawketi sayi nìwotx ulte Eywafa ke txayey. Kawkrr!!;-) Eywa ngahu.," or,

"I now ask you to tell the Hollywood [Hal'liwutta] bosses that those of us who want to learn the Na'vi language are waiting (impatiently) for your full grammar and lexicon. We promise to raise a lot of hell if what we want is not forthcoming, and 'by Eywa' we won’t stop. Ever!! ;-)" (‘Eywa’ being the equivalent of ‘Gaia,’ God, or Earth-Mother)

     The author of the post, known as ‘Prrton’ on the site, has since started an online petition to back his demand for a full, official explanation of grammar and a Na’vi dictionary-- the petition is now nearing 4,000 signatures. And die-hard Na’vi language fans like Prrton now have a home on the internet-- ‘learnnavi.org.’ Here, fans help each other learn Na’vi, chat in Na’vi, and daily spread the good word about the glories of Pandora and its fledgling linguistic tradition. The site has over 150,000 posts, from more than 4,000 contributors.

     Depending on who you are, and regardless of whether or not you saw the movie, all of this may very well sound a little bit frightening at first. And it probably should. But it’s not like there haven’t been similar cases in the past. We’ve all heard of Trekkies’ obsessive exploits. Did you know there’s an opera coming out in Klingon? This country is notorious for its fanboys, and its terminal affliction of escapism manifested in the ever-advancing army of better iPods, videogames, and internet role-playing games. All of this seems to meet a terrible apex in ‘Avatar’ fandom, despite the fact (not the opinion) that any randomly-selected single episode of Star Trek is probably better scripted than the entire 2 and a half hours of ‘Avatar.’

     Above all, Avatar fandom is troubling. It’s troubling not because the centerpiece of the craze is a hackneyed storyline, but because the centerpiece is a mesmerizing visual escape. The fact (alright, opinion) that the film was poorly written only makes the obsession, and its aftermath, all the more disturbing. Welcome to the world of the ‘Avatar blues.’ The phrase is a pun CNN Entertainment used to headline its article on the sensations many fans of the film have described felling after removing their 3D glasses and leaving showings of ‘Avatar’ for the ‘harsh’ realities of actual life. We’ve all felt that slight lagging feeling upon leaving the dark, comfortable confines of a movie theater to go squinting in the sunlight of reality, but ‘Avatar blues’ appears to have taken this feeling to a whole new level.

     “Audiences experience 'Avatar' Blues,” “Avatar Fans Suicidal because Planet Pandora is Not Real,” “Post-Avatar Depression Hits Fans,” “Avatar Depression On The Rise, Fans Seek Help,” are only a few of the many news headlines calling attention to the ludicrous and startling idea that ‘Avatar’ is causing bouts of depression in some segments of the American audience. There is a thread on the official ‘Avatar Forums,’ “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,” which is supposed to provide some sense of solace and community to lonely Pandorans-at-heart whose realities have apparently been blemished forever by the beauty of the fictional planet Pandora. A proud and penitent member of this cult of disenchantment, ‘Eltu,’ describes her particular brand of ‘Avatar blues’ on the forum: “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.” Another, even more helpless and truly saddening case is described by ‘Naviblue,’ who said: “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 everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’” Something, it seems, has gone horribly awry.

     Were there ever any suicidal Trekkies? Thinking only in terms of probability, there probably were a few suicidal Star Trek fans throughout the decades. But it’s been only a few months since ‘Avatar’ came out to wreck havoc on the psyches of a lonely subset of the population. And at least Trek fans sometimes met in real-time, at conventions and the like. Avatar fans, as of now, have only the internet. So what happened? Why and how has Avatar ‘ruined’ people’s conception of reality? Perhaps James Cameron is the evil puppet-master, covertly stealing nerd-souls and ferrying them across the River Styx into a Pandoran Elysian Fields. Or maybe the sorry saps peppering the ‘Avatar Forums’ with suicide notes for attention need to wake up and leave their basements. Or still yet, maybe all this nonsense is a harbinger, here to warn us of a tragic development in escapist ease and omnipresence. One can only speculate. At least one contributor to the ‘Avatar Forums’ depression thread, ‘Neytirifanboy,’ seems to be getting a handle on things, and all it required was some good old-fashioned practical thinking: “I just remind myself that Pandora is very dangerous. Probably five minutes after admiring the beauty of the place there is a good chance I would be:

1) Ripped to pieces by a pack of viperwolves

2) Trampled by a Hammerhead Titanothere

3) Devoured by a Thanator

4) Pecked to death by a group of Ikran

5) Snatched away by a Toruk

6) Pinned to a tree by a Na'vi arrow

7) Stung, bitten or eaten by some other Pandora plant or animal

Then even if I survived that I'd probably be crushed to death by a RDA Bulldozer or hit by a stray RDA bullet. The real world may be mundane, but at least I know how to survive here.” Bravo, Neytirifanboy, and welcome home, son. Mark one down for the real world… sort of.