If you've delved a little into director Christopher
Nolan's oeuvre, you know that it is dark, morally ambiguous fare—with lots
of guns. Psychological thriller about a man with no memory? Guns. Crime drama
about a potentially rotten cop? Guns, obviously. Superhero origin story? Guns. Puzzle
movie about entering people's dreams? More guns than ever.
So when a troubled
young man opened fire at a Colorado theater, during the first gunfire scene of
the blockbuster trilogy-ending "The Dark Knight Rises," I don't think
it can be ascribed to coincidence. In our post-Columbine, terrorist-aware civil
society, it's amazing to me that (a) we didn't see an attack like this coming soon
and (b) we didn't see TDKR as the perfect opportunity. But the director Nolan,
in an otherwise kind and appropriate public statement, doesn’t acknowledge any
connection between his subject matter and this tragedy:
“Speaking on behalf of the cast and
crew of The Dark Knight Rises, I would like to express our profound
sorrow at the senseless tragedy that has befallen the entire Aurora community.
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. Nothing any of us can
say could ever adequately express our feelings for the innocent victims of this
appalling crime, but our thoughts are with them and their families.”
Perhaps the
brilliant director was concerned that drawing any connection between his not-so-innocent,
not-so-joyful work and the shooting was to invite questions about his own
culpability. I am not suggesting that Nolan deserves blame for anyone’s death;
if he were so charged, all of us who love his work and Heath Ledger’s performance
as the Joker would be just as complicit. Nor am I suggesting boycotting the
movie: I'll be buying a super-IMAX ticket as soon as I can find a good day to
go.
Rather, it does
suggest that Nolan and other filmmakers and us, their audience, all should ask
ourselves: is there some responsibility, which is clearer now in
hindsight, not to provide such an attractive opportunity for terror? Was the
Joker simply too good, or as they say in Boston, too *wicked* a villain? Too
weirdly omnipotent, too undefeated even when he is caught at the end of The
Dark Knight, laughing that it is only a temporary setback? I understand from
reviews that Nolan brings more clarity in TDKR to the moral issues left hanging
with the Joker at the end of the previous movie, but is it adequate to bring
that clarity only four years later, after Heath Ledger's Joker had permeated
the culture?
I know there are
much more sadistic movies than the thoughtful Nolan trilogy (Saw, and some even
worse). And movie villains threatening the city or the world with annihilation
are a dime a dozen in superhero fare. But that's actually the problem. In other
superhero movies, even interesting villains (like Loki in the Avengers) are
a little hokey, not readily inspiring of real-life imitators. I can't imagine a
street gang drawing a graffiti version of Loki's face, or Lex Luthor, or even
the Liam Neeson villain from Batman Begins.
But there *is* a
graffiti version of the Joker on my local subway system. That was Nolan's (and
Ledger's) genius. They convinced me in TDKR that this weird guy wearing clown
paint was really capable of walking into a gathering of genuine drug lords/gang
leaders and twisting them to do his own bidding. Apparently the movie convinced
real gang members, too, that a comic book super villain could be, for lack of a
better term, a bad ass.
I don't know if
the shooter in Colorado really declared, "I am the Joker." It doesn’t
matter. What this troubled individual did was a strong thematic match with the
movie series that he chose as the context for his assault. What Nolan supplied
as the Joker’s motivations—hunger for power while remaining beholden to no one,
infamy, showing everyone that their assumptions are false—are enough to explain
the shooter’s actions. And that's the problem with just viewing this as a
senseless act, a paroxysm of mental illness that could have happened anywhere.
A mass shooting at the premiere of a Twilight, Harry Potter, or Hobbit movie would
have been every bit as tragic for the victims and as chilling for movie
theaters, but it would not have made *sense*, thematically.
A movie that would make sense, thematically, is We Have to Talk
about Kevin, a film based on a fictional memoir that centers on a school
shooter. But you probably haven’t seen or even heard of We Have to Talk about
Kevin. And that’s the point—it wasn’t just the themes of TDKR that drew in the shooter,
it was how BIG an event it was.
And that's really
my point. Serious, thoughtful explorations of the depths of evil belong in
culture, they belong in cinema. What all impressed us so much about Batman was
that Nolan was able to embed these themes in a blockbuster franchise movie, to
bring his interesting brand of moral provocation to the masses.
And maybe he shouldn't have.
We were probably naive to think that Heath Ledger's Joker would
remain just a great performance, just a Hollywood popcorn image of evil with no
real world impact. It was too awe-inspiring--to use a traditional term, too
glamorous.
So what can
Christopher Nolan do now? He could state, unequivocally, that his movies
attempt not to inspire or justify the kind of evil they depict, but to show the
defeat of the very brand of evil that this shooter embraced. To show that, even
in the face of the darkest evil, we can and must mourn our victims and honor
them by living responsibly and uprightly. Terrorists can win a day, they can
take lives, but we will and we must continue to work to build a just and
livable society.
But perhaps any
such statement would be hollow, sounding too much like the moralistic narrator
in the musical Assassins, and belied by the ambiguities in Nolan's own work.
What he, and the rest of Hollywood, *can* do is consider whether in the future
they can still tell great stories on the blockbuster scale without incarnating
evil that seems believable but is also artificially glamorous, without
lionizing murderers and making Hannibal Lecter and his ilk the (anti-)heroes of
movies. I’m not suggesting they adopt a convention that the hero always wins—they
have that convention anyway.
I’m simply suggesting that Hollywood shows the reality that Hannah
Arendt observes—that evil is often petty, and even banal. Even if the darkest
men manage to blow up a tower or shoot up a movie theater, they often end up
cowering to hide from Navy Seals or just giving themselves up meekly. And in
the cases that they are not humbled through death or capture, there is
nevertheless an emptiness in them that makes them pitiable and ugly, not
exciting and glamorous.
The invincible villain, laughing in the face of goodness without
screwing up or suffering himself, is mostly or wholly a fiction.
But all of us, myself included, love a “good villain,” often preferring
the spectacle to goodness, and our culture will surely validate this
observation again by focusing far more attention on the shooter than, say, the
men who gave their lives to protect their dates in Aurora.
On my part, I often try to say that I appreciate superhero movies
because they serve as parables or myths that show us the moral drama lurking
beneath our respectable social facades and complex personalities and choices. These
tales draw us into the deeper level of our desire—we long for One who can save us
from seeming inescapable evil, who can show us that goodness exists and that it
does have the last word.
But in the run-up to the Dark Knight Rises, I’ve been more focused
on its box office success, whether it will “beat the Avengers—not whether it
can show me something about my humanity. Once this shooting happened, my fever
to see the movie as early as possible vanished. This tragedy reminds me that, thanks
to Nolan, at the heart of the Hollywood money-making attraction is a human story
about terror and hope, one that resonates with the sacrifice of those men in
the movie theater.
In other words, I still want to see The Dark Night Rises (in
IMAX), but I think will be looking at it differently.
