It’s now just over a week since James Eagan Holmes opened fire at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and time enough has passed to collate the reactions.
For starters, there has been the usual chorus of calls for stricter gun control laws, a rather trickier issue than it seems on the face to be, as illustrated in an illuminating post in Ezra Klein’s Washington Post Wonkblog. Over at Movieline.com, S.T. VanAirsdale wasted no time in calling for the “Cinemark theater chain, the National Association of Theater Owners and the Motion Picture Association of America” to unite their lobbying power towards this end, and against the NRA’s pro-gun advocacy.
In my week’s moviegoing, although subjected to a halfhearted tote bag search at a Friday afternoon day-of screening, I detected no such concerted plan of action by the abovementioned entities, whose most pressing concern before last Friday was rallying against New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed soda size cap. Witness, to this end, a new series of pre-movie spots that seek to stir up New Yorkers’ dudgeon, compelling theatergoers to join an AstroTurf grassroots movement defending their God-given right to pay an obscene amount of money in order to swill huge promotional cups of hissing phosphoric acid while watching The Bourne Legacy. Who says there are no great causes left?
My first words after viewing this absurd new campaign: “First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew…”
America, meanwhile, showed itself to be commercially defiant in the face of tragedy, unwilling to let the terrorists (or whatever) win by showing up in numbers sufficient to grant The Dark Knight Rises a reported opening weekend take of $160.9 million domestic, respectably boffo B.O.
In the groping-for-explanations phase, which we as a nation officially entered on the morning of July 20th, there is always a heightened scrutiny over the purported cultural intake of the perpetrators. I have often entertained a paranoiac fantasy in which, through some Hitchcockian set of circumstances, I stand falsely accused of some horrifying act and my own bookshelves are consequently parsed for damning evidence, of which there is, God knows, a lot. We may all remember the linkages made, in the immediate aftermath of 1999’s Columbine shootings, to DOOM, Marilyn Manson, Natural Born Killers, and even the trenchcoated shootouts in The Matrix, until the latter film’s value as art was upheld by no less an authority than Al Gore, presidential-hopeful, future Academy Award winner, and then-husband of PMRC scold Tipper. And of course there was Richard McBeef playwright Seung-Hui Choi’s snarling self-portrait, allegedly inspired by Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, in which the Virginia Tech butcher posed with a ball-peen hammer while failing entirely to look potent or menacing, which is really rather sad considering that he actually did manage to murder 32 people.
Knowing from these precedents the attention that was forthcoming, TDKR director Christopher Nolan last weekend released his own statement on the events in Aurora:
“I would not presume to know anything about the victims of the shooting but that they were there last night to watch a movie. I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.”
James Eagan Holmes’ actions could not exactly have been inspired by The Dark Knight Rises, because he did not see The Dark Knight Rises—although after a fashion he did, since the blockbuster culture of which it’s the apotheosis is so hysterically redundant. Regardless, it has certainly been noted in the last week that Mr. Nolan’s rather savage film contains a scene in which a crowd is gathered for an important and joyful pastime, the shared experience of watching a “Gotham Rogues” football game, which is interrupted when every member of the team, save the one played by former Pittsburgh Steelers wideout and serial shit-eating-grinner Hines Ward, is killed in an act of terrorism engineered by Tom Hardy’s Bane.
This is shortly before Bane announces himself as the savior of Gotham City, posturing as a sans culotte who will deliver control of the city to its underclass. Why precisely Bane considers it good PR to publicly slaughter both the Gotham Rogues and Rapid City Monuments—football players traditionally being heroes of the very lower-and-working class whose contrivance Bane is presumably courting—is not addressed, any more than was the matter of what the Joker does when left to himself at Bruce Wayne’s penthouse fundraiser for Harvey Dent, once Batman and Maggie Gyllenhall go out the window together in The Dark Knight.
This is because Mr. Nolan is a careless, not to say callous, director, who cannot be bothered with such practical considerations when there are epic slaughters to stage and big themes to brood over. Can a direct line be drawn between Mr. Nolan’s Irwin Allen-like pleasure in death seen in extreme long-shot and the actions of James Eagan Holmes, who according to some sources was imitating Heath Ledger’s fidgety and very bad performance of madness-as-avatar-of-anarchy The Joker in The Dark Knight (“Some just want to watch the world burn”), and who was apparently stupid enough to think he could get laid using Adult FriendFinder? Was the crowd at Gotham’s Heinz stadium so inured to the spectacle of violence—watching as they were a game that leaves its gridiron heroes with lifelong physical and mental trauma by the time of their mid-30s retirements—that they barely took note when twenty-three human lives were snuffed out before their very eyes?
Perhaps the most eloquent advancement of the blame-the-movies position came in an essay that does not address the Aurora killings at all. In the latest edition of tony triannual n+1, Christopher Glazek ties together Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here, the premature deaths of several scions of Hollywood, and the author’s schizophrenic older brother’s imitation of material from big-budget thrillers—including the Bourne films—to arrive at a damning J’accuse. “I will never exact revenge on Hollywood for determining the architecture of my brother’s madness,” Glazek fumes, after having pilloried the movie men for peddling cheap and faulty identikits:
“When art fails to imitate life, even the unafflicted are driven to make their lives somehow imitate art. Building an inner world is exhausting: we look to film and television to show us versions of ourselves, to allow us to process our lives, to excuse them, and maybe to ennoble them. And yet, at this task, Hollywood is notoriously deficient. Some stories do not get told. Some identities are never offered up for examination.”
I have yet to make sense of the “When art fails to imitate life…” bit, but throughout can detect the old censorious logic that evaluates works on the basis of how they may act upon the most susceptible and feeble-minded among us. Can we suppose, though, that even were there never such things as movies, the most powerless among us—those unable to exercise control over even their own turbulent minds—would not still take refuge in the images of power, as with the old stereotype of the madman dressing up as Napoleon? (Whose capacity for organizing spectacular slaughter, it should be said, put even Christopher Nolan to shame.)
Taking for granted—and I certainly do—that a culture that bows and scrapes before a quarter-million dollar rehashing of an intellectual property designed to entertain WWII-era pre-adolescents is not necessarily a healthy one, it needs be admitted that the overwhelming majority of people exposed to it do not seem to become dangerous psychopaths as a result. As to if they may become emotionally-and-intellectually stunted on a steady diet of superheroics is another point entirely, but we should not call for intervention when education should suffice. Why, that would be like… telling people what size soda to drink!
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.