"To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which
tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit
an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron
or Fox.
But a number of enthusiasts who have been swapping notes on the
message boards at IMDB.com claim to have already seen the movie -- in
their dreams. "The special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons,
but they looked 3-D still," wrote one "planetshane," whose particular
dream involved a pirated copy of an early version.
"It was the best movie I had ever seen," the post continued."
tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit
an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron
or Fox.
But a number of enthusiasts who have been swapping notes on the
message boards at IMDB.com claim to have already seen the movie -- in
their dreams. "The special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons,
but they looked 3-D still," wrote one "planetshane," whose particular
dream involved a pirated copy of an early version.
"It was the best movie I had ever seen," the post continued."
:
via The New York Times, full article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/movies/25avatar.html?_r=2
So this is about some enthusiastic fans discussing a movie they have not seen, pushed to a level of obsession at which they are seeing the movie, and describing this dream to other obsessives on the Internet.
I thought about this today because I was thinking about a similar incident I witnessed.
I was attending a certain liberal arts college (to protect the innocent let's call it "Bard College") and was attending a lecture given by a certain famous American poet (who we will be calling "R. Kelly" after "The World's Greatest").
I don't remember what the theme of the lecture was, or why I was there, but it wasn't a class and was held in a large auditorium. Perhaps there were other lecturers. Perhaps I was there to impress a girl or to have something to talk to a girl about afterward. I don't remember.
Anyway, at some point R. Kelly got behind the lectern and started giving some kind of speech.
In the speech he was describing a dream he had, in which he had witnessed the burning of the Ancient Library of Alexandria. (The largest library of the ancient world, purportedly burned by Julius Caesar, though this is contested)
R. Kelly gave a rousing speech in which he described the horrified feeling of watching those ancient texts vanish, never to be read again, disappearing into the fire and falling columns.
I looked around the auditorium and saw that everyone was transfixed. R. Kelly described waking up in tears, thinking of how close he was to all of those lost texts, and the tragedy that he witnessed was beyond his description.
It was absolute maudlin bullshit. But I looked around and everyone seemed to be totally taken in by it. There were almost audible sighs, and people wiping tears away from their eyes. Maybe I am exaggerating.
But I had the overwhelming feeling that R. Kelly was lying. That he had indeed not actually had this dream, but had made it up.
I don't know if I was justified in this feeling.
Maybe it was because at the time I felt entirely opposed to the pretentiousness and ridiculous solipsism of academia at "Bard College". I was annoyed that I had been locked out of two majors. I was pretty pissed that I was expected to have an opinion about Jacques Derrida. (I was nineteen years old.)
I also hated R. Kelly despite not knowing his work. (I still haven't read anything by him)
Regardless, I felt deeply, as if by some kind of instinct, that R. Kelly was lying. He never had a dream about the destruction of the library in a dream, and he was lying about it.
And I think I know why I felt that way when I think about it now.
R. Kelly was attaching himself, via the semi-supernatural act of dreaming, to a historical event (which, by the way, might be apocryphal, because some archaeologists contest that there is one single event which destroyed the library, nor is it in Roman records)
Then again, maybe R. Kelly was not lying about the dream. Maybe Planetshane really did get a sneak preview in his mind.
I once watched five episodes of the Sopranos in a row and had a dream which vaguely had something to do with the Sopranos. I remember having a dream about The Legend of Zelda as a kid.
Nah, fuck it, I still feel like he was lying. Not only was the content of the dream too pretentious to be true, his maudlin delivery was totally suspect.
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