This week has been dominated by the long-spreading shadow preceding the anticipated touch-down of Christopher Nolan’s latest Batman opus. Has there been such a brouhaha over the theater since the O.P. Riots of 1809? Or perhaps New York City’s Astor Place Riots, in which the patriotic supporters of homegrown American Shakespearian Edwin Forrest ran Englishman William Charles Macready’s Hamlet out of town? The case of The Dark Knight Rises is rather the inverse of that of Forrest, for it involves an Anglo director and principally Commonwealth cast putting a histrionic, tony polish on that most lowbrow and American of products, the comic book… and, per H.L. Mencken, “No good American ever seriously questions an English judgment on an aesthetic question.”
Among other things, the rising of The Dark Knight resulted in the shutting down of User Comments on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes when a slew of the film’s anticipatory superfans began throwing virtual brickbats at the film’s critics. As of yesterday, I noted that my own Village Voice review has garnered some 258 Comments, none of which I will ever read, though a friend was good enough to forward along one which, in tenor and grammar, will have to stand in for the whole: “whats the matter… not enough naked butts of men for you to like the movie?” This morning, I awoke to the news that a man had opened fire on a packed midnight crowd at a Batman Rises screening in suburban Denver. Discounting the possibility that this very pathetic and well-armed individual had received some precognitive influence from the film’s vision of domestic terrorism, this only offers tragic further evidence that this is the current event.
The environment in which a Dark Knight Rises could be so fervidly, even violently, anticipated was discussed this week in a Los Angeles Times piece by Neal Gabler, addressing the perceived lack of respect with which the, er, rising generation treats film history.
Mr. Gabler’s work as an entertainment historian deserves the greatest respect. I count his An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood and his biographies of Walter Winchell and Walt Disney as invaluable, and I am already a-tremble with anticipation of the tales of sponge-dicked, Jameson-fueled orgies with Christopher Dodd that await within Gabler’s announced Edward Kennedy bio. As a theoretician on the sociological effects of entertainment, however, Gabler seems to me singularly tepid, obvious, and useless. Gabler’s 1998 polemic Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, the subject of which can be well extrapolated from the title, was a collection of bastardized Debordisms with Debord’s name conspicuously absent from the Index, and none of the master’s epigrammatic flair or crabbed, bitchy wit. The final chapter scurries back from any and all conclusions of the previous 200 pages, second-guessing all propositions while confessing that maybe, just maybe, social role-playing does, indeed, pre-date the Latham loop. It would be a doorstop were it not for Life’s first-chapter historical overview “The Republic of Entertainment,” obviously the fruits of decades of scrupulous note-taking—if memory serves, it even touches on the Astor Place Riots! Today the book occupies a privileged cardboard box populated with doom-and-gloom titles like The Twilight of American Culture and Allan Bloom’s literally incomprehensible The Closing of the American Mind, the sort of books that were sent-up in Adam Brooks’ Definitely, Maybe in the tome authored by Kevin Kline’s magnificently-monikered academic Hampton Roth: The Decline of Almost Everything.
Any old how, Gabler’s latest emission shows that he hasn’t lost the ability to urgently identify the continuing operation of long-standing universal truths and see in them disturbing new developments. His argument, a series of slashing generalizations largely based on the testimony of friends teaching in university film programs, goes like this:
“Young people, so-called millennials, don’t seem to think of movies as art the way so many boomers did. They think of them as fashion, and like fashion, movies have to be new and cool to warrant attention. Living in a world of the here-and-now, obsessed with whatever is current, kids seem no more interested in seeing their parents’ movies than they are in wearing their parents’ clothes… movies may have become a kind of ‘MacGuffin’—an excuse for communication along with music, social updates, friends’ romantic complications and the other things young people use to stoke interaction and provide proof that they are in the loop. A film’s intrinsic value may matter less than its ability to be talked about.”
Note, just for starters, that the two generations whose film-watching habits are deemed worthy of discussion are the boomers (b. 1946 to 1964) and millenials (b. 1982/83 to 2004). This leaves a good two-decade gap during which there were, apparently, no changes in viewing habits worth noting—or, more likely, whatever changes there were fell outside of Gabler’s sample group of himself, his kids, and his tenured colleagues. In contrast to the narcissism of millenials, who are too busy YouTubing and attending rainbow parties to lock themselves in with Leslie Howard night on TCM, “boomer audiences didn’t necessarily believe their aesthetics were an advance over those that had preceded them”—the bold claim Gabler makes for his “Never trust anyone over 30” coevals, before proceeding to cite the example of venerable proto-boomer Andrew Sarris (b. 1928).
What is not considered is the possibility that the millenials in those classrooms may be too busy thinking about what they’re going to do to address their rapidly accruing academic debt while silently steaming at their smug graybeard professors who went to college for free, those very same lovable boomers who handed off a shit-sandwich of a country to their children and children’s children, who now pay off their vacation by writing condescending editorials that aggrandize their own generation’s role in preserving film history, which is rather difficult to whole-heartedly care about when you’ve got no future.
The worst part is that Gabler, as in the retreating chapter of Life: The Movie, is too honest a writer to ignore how unseaworthy his thesis is: “One has to acknowledge that part of this cinematic ageism is the natural cycle of culture…” Indeed one must. Even accepting that Gabler may somewhere have a point, however badly he has expressed it here, even as critics are pilloried for voicing conscientious objections to the preordained Movie Mass Culture Event of the Year, it is a sucker’s game to bear one’s self ceaselessly into the past. So I cede the floor to André Gide, whose Pretexts have been my recent bedside reading:
“I demand the right to love my age just as Barrès loves Lorraine, his fatherland, and to defend my love by as specious a chain of reasoning as his. I can’t do a thing about it: here and now is when I am alive. I belong to my time and I am the child of my country; not being able to avoid that, I am not so foolish as not to know how to love and admire them both.”
So, with earnest hopes for the post-Batman future, and for more naked butts of men, I remain yours very truly.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.