by Rick Weiss (c) 2012 Trident Productions
As horrific as it is, the “The Dark Knight Rises” premiere massacre in Colorado is already fading from our “news-stream” mentality. Before it completely washes downstream, let’s throw a little keylight on two troubling, if related connections and see what we can learn from them, if anything.
We know from “Inception” that Chris Nolan can bend space and time and keep 4 or 5 different realities going simultaneously, but “The Dark Knight Rises” is even more ponderous, a kinda a big goofy allegorical soufflé. It rises, but falls flat soon after leaving the oven. Good girls and bad girls trade places with reality-defying aplomb. Batman is masked. Unmasked. Masked again. He needs to conquer his fear. He needs to learn to fear again. He's rich. He's poor. He's rich again. He's dead. Alive. Dead again, then alive again. The Scarecrow sits in judgment on the rich. The film’s best line is left to Catwoman:
Such an enviably well-crafted line! A line for a moment that is meant to cut deep and resonate with our reality. It almost works. There are many moments like it; scenes that almost work. The trouble is that there are too many, they come relentlessly and allow no time to absorb them. Too fast, too heavy, twisty and expository for one movie. Some movies limp along on virtually no plot. This one has plotlines to spare—all deftly and intricately woven, but like all allegories where the characters serve the plot rather than the reverse, this calliope wheezes, lurches, unable to withstand close scrutiny before it collapses under its own ponderous weight.
For me, like most of America, the surrealism of the movie experience is trumped only by the pre-movie experience. The ushers checking women's handbags and knapsacks did slow the line down some. No one was found packing. No masks were allowed in the theater, though a hipster couple carrying matching motorcycle helmets made me do an uneasy double-take. I know I wasn't the only person who did.
Recall a more innocent time (just last month), when movie theaters were places that you didn't think twice about taking your twelve-year old to. Your biggest concerns were the price of popcorn and whether this PG-13 was a light or a “hard” PG-13 and what kind of debrief you’d need to have with your young companion afterwards. That night, I knew I wouldn’t be talking about what was really on my mind. I looked at the anticipation on my son’s face as the lights dimmed and as much as I wanted to, there was no shaking the image of the severely disturbed young man who killed 12 people and wounded 58 in a movie theater. He had no motive that makes any sense in the rational world. He told police that he was The Joker, a character in the previous Batman movie. So much blood; so much innocence lost. I don’t see how we’ll ever unring that bell. But we will sure try.
Clearly rattled, "Dark Knight Rises" director Christopher Nolan said that:
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.
Good and gentle words. Followed by tactful Warner Bros. bosses who cancelled DN's Paris premiere and released a statement offering their sympathy to the families of victims. Execs also scrambled to cut gunplay footage for "Dark Knight Rises" trailers and pulled promotional teasers for upcoming film “Gangster Squad,” which depicts mobsters firing on a movie theatre audience. Movie execs are one group who know how to read the emotional pulse of their audiences. Yet, in answering critics who say that dark movies cause dark acts, industry apologists sound eerily similar to NRA apologists in two ways:
1. When it comes to legislating violence in media, producers default to the First Amendment the way gun advocates default to the Second Amendment.
2. Substitute either of the following—(guns/movies) don’t cause violence. People cause violence.
When it comes to both guns and media violence, at least half of American adults disagree. Fifty-two percent believe "violent movies and television shows lead to more violence in society," according to a post-Aurora Rasmussen poll. Landmark media-watcher George Gerbner showed back in the 1980’s that the more television people watched, the more likely they were to be anxious and over-estimate crime statistics in their regions. The more media people consume, the less safe they feel.
LA Times film critic Kevin Turan suggests: “the deaths in Colorado feel personal for a deeper, more disturbing reason. They bring up the question that not only doesn't go away but comes back stronger each time it's raised: Does violence on-screen encourage violence off it? Are the movies we love poisoning our culture, our society, our very minds?”
The American Psychological Association says there are three major effects of consuming violent media. Children may:
• Become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others,
• Be more fearful of the world around them, and
• Be more likely to behave in aggressive or hurtful ways toward others.
Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has shown in baboon studies, that over time the buildup of stress hormones, (glucocorticoids), can cause serious physiological changes and the development of stress-related illnesses. While I’ve not seen any studies that connect TV, movie and game consumption with glucocorticoid buildup in humans, Gerbner’s seminal research and studies that have followed suggest at least a strong incidental correlation.
George Gerbner again:
Formula-driven violence in entertainment and news is not a reflection of freedom, viewer preference, or even crime statistics. It is the product of a complex manufacturing and marketing machine. Mergers, consolidation, conglomeratization and globalization fuel the machine. … The number of major studios declines while their share of domestic and global markets rises. Channels proliferate while investment in new talent drops, gateways close and creative sources shrink.
Concentration brings streamlining of production … program production is costly, risky and hard-pressed by oligopolistic pricing practices. [P]roducers … are forced to go into syndication and foreign sales to make a profit. They need a dramatic ingredient that requires no translation, "speaks action" in any language and fits any culture. That ingredient is violence. (Explicit sex is a distant second. Ironically, it runs into more inhibitions and restrictions overseas.)
Violence as an international commodity, a universal craving—like caffeine. Yet, whether we embrace or abjure it, it begs a more rigorous understanding of why we crave it so. However unflattering or unfinished the answer, there’s no doubt that it’s better to hold some dramatization of our depravity, the most exploitative view of ourselves in the media, than to hold actual instruments of violence.
Guns do not come with reset buttons, fades to black, credit rolls or even compelling opinion leaders to deconstruct what just happened. Guns shatter worlds and silence critics.
The US holds the dubious distinction as the killing ground of choice—half of the worst mass shootings in the last three decades have been on our soil. We’re averaging 20-some incidents per year,but this commentary is not about the guns. Though, guns are the low-hanging fruit, we’re not ready to deal with them. I get it. Perhaps the more approachable question is whether it is ethical to produce, distribute, watch and allow our children to consume violent programming.
Violence is a ritualized aspect of primate (human) society. Observing violence, whether real or dramatized, can be thrilling, deeply disturbing and provoke discourse or it can be alienating and mind-numbing. Representing violence is a craft and arguably an artform, while creating violence is an act of negation, of nihilism—the destruction of self and society. So when we consume entertainment that troubles and disturbs us rather than happy stories that uplift and appeal to our better angels, do we do ourselves a service or a disservice? Can disruptive entertainment serve a higher purpose? In an unsettled but democratic society, is it better to pacify or provoke?
Two days after “The Dark Knight Rises” my son finished reading the book then watched the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I first saw it when I was ten. I watched him as he watched, his face so enthralled, and I felt I had something to add to his experience of it. I explained that when I saw the film and read the book, that it didn’t seem like fiction. During the turbulent 60’s, “To Kill a Mockingbird” felt ripped from the day’s headlines.
It's uncanny to hold the two movies--"Mockingbird" and "Dark Knight" in your head simultaneously. In "Mockingbird" instruments, incidents and people of violence commute, transmute, to become instruments of peace. Justice is meted out colloquially in both movies. Scales are balanced. Both movies are allegories for their generations. There's a scholarly paper in here somewhere, but let's leave it for now.
My son has to read, watch movies and scan video newsreels to understand just how virulent intolerance was when I was his age. He scarcely believes me. It’s almost as preposterous as me telling him, yes, in my day, cannibalism prevailed but aren't we lucky that we don’t eat human beings anymore. For a twelve year old, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the Birmingham Riots, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcolm X are but dim, hoary pinpricks that have receded into the swirl of history, no more real for him than the signing of the Magna Carta was for me.
It’s damned lucky that he has access to motion and sound media through which he can reconstitute some of the emotional impact of these milestones. I need only to rewatch "To Kill a Mockingbird" to re-experience growing up not-so-long ago in such an alien, distant culture--my culture.
In my son’s world, his school is entirely integrated, interracial couples don’t even get a second glance, there’s a black man with a Muslim-heritage name running things and same sex marriage is on the brink of wide acceptance. My boy will never understand how removed his world is from mine at his age if he doesn’t or can’t “go to the archives.” And if he doesn’t have this historical context, he will be poorly equipped for the archetypal shifts of his generation.
I’m hoping that a future generation not long beyond his will need to watch films and newsreels to unravel the violent impulses that seem so encoded in us now. This future generation will need to figure out why we Americans considered Second Amendment rights as important as our First Amendment rights. They’ll need everything we’ve got and more to suss out the answer that eludes us to this day.
There are those who disagree, but I don’t think we need guns to assure our freedoms remain intact throughout the generations. I’ve given up arguing with these people. Theirs is a paranoid and undemocratic view of the democracy with an outsized view of their own place in its defense. But I’m certain we’ll need our media—unexpurgated—good, bad or indifferent, powerful or insipid, sweet or violent, exploitative or high-minded, all of it reflecting, as through a funhouse mirror, us, as we truly are.
And we need to keep talking. We have no right to hide behind the skirts of what we call basic freedoms, as if these alone are sufficient to forestall all future controversy or conversation. As to our hallowed Founders, as much thought as they put into it, however much they sacrificed for it, and even though they were very much creatures of their far more innocent time, I don’t think they ever intended our Constitution to be the last word on any subject. They meant it to be a foundation for evolving civil discourse. Perhaps if we can get a freewheeling discussion on the limits and responsibilities of the First Amendment off the ground, then maybe that inertia will lift and carry us over to the Second Amendment.
Though long and somewhat winding, this essay is as unfinished as its subject. Whether you, my reader are a media maker or not, gun advocate or not, I'm eager to hear any opinions of these issues.
(c)2012 Trident Productions, all rights reserved
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