Parallels between Batman film and the shooting
By The Associated Press | Associated Press – 10 hrs ago.
In "The Dark Knight Rises," a masked villain leads a murderous crew into a packed football stadium and wages an attack involving guns and explosives. It's just one of the more haunting scenes in what was one of the most anticipated movies in years.
There is no confirmed evidence so far that the motives of the assailant in the Aurora, Colo., killings on Friday had any specific link to "The Dark Knight Rises." New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said he was told the gunman had painted his hair red and called himself the Joker, but Aurora police would not confirm that.
It's not clear why the shooter chose to enter the movie theater at 12:30 a.m., not far into the midnight screening that marked the film's opening day. Several survivors remarked on their initial confusion as the attack unfolded at seeing a masked figure silhouetted in a gaseous haze and the sounds of real gunshots mingling with the film soundtrack.
In superhero movies, violent attacks on the public by villains are key components of many plots, including "The Avengers" and "The Amazing Spider-man," both in theaters now. By Hollywood standards, the Batman movies are more grim than bloody. The Christopher Nolan-directed "Dark Knight" trilogy has been more dark than that of typical superhero films, taking a cue from the comic book series published by DC Comics, including "Detective Comics" and writer Frank Miller's gritty 1986 take on the character, "Batman: The Dark Knight."
There are general parallels to the Colorado shooting, "The Dark Knight" and the comic book character:
— Bruce Wayne's drive to become Batman arose from witnessing the deaths of his parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, at the hands of small-time criminal Joe Chill, who shot and killed them after they had left a theater.
— A part of the Batman video game called "Arkham City" takes place in an abandoned movie theater (The Monarch, outside of which Bruce Wayne's parents were killed).
— In the "Dark Knight" graphic novel by Miller, the Joker slaughters the audience of a television talk show with gas.
— In the same book, a beleaguered man shoots up a porn theater after being fired from his job, killing three people with a handgun.
— "The Dark Knight Rises" features at least two scenes where unsuspecting people are attacked in a public venue: the stock exchange and a football stadium.
Prurient trivia aside, what is equally inevitable as experts and laymen alike fumble in their attempts to piece together the shards of this nightmare, hoping that the resulting mosaic will resemble something even close to decipherable, let alone understandable, is the discussion/debate on the effect that cultural violence has on those who are already predisposed to shatter our reality, be it violence in video games, TV shows, movies or anywhere/everywhere else that violence seems to appear in our lives for no better reason than it simply appears.
Sensitive souls who acutely feel and/or empathize with the loved ones of the victims of this carnage will, understandably, be able to see a cause and effect so obvious it will mystify them that others can't quite picture it.
Others, whose own gimbels work to keep them on an even keel somewhere between moral outrage and personal freedom, will offer that this shooting could have just as easily have happened at, for example, a Linday Lohan, as opposed to Batman, movie. (Although film purists would likely counter that, in that case, the shooter would most likely simply have turned the gun on himself to end the misery.)
And, then, there are the political agendists who will take whatever stand on whatever side of the issue they perceive will bring them the most button pushes, lever flips or chad pops come November.
Discounting the third because it comes saturated in self interest, I honestly find myself walking around in a neutral zone, of sorts, between the first two, my soul sufficiently sensitive and my other senses sufficiently inflamed by this assault on our humanity as to have a very clear picture of two plus two equalling four, while my fair play/not so fast meter clicks as a reminder that two plus two, more often than we would like to accept, does not, in fact, always sum up the same.
As the old saying maddeningly goes, we will, in the end, never really know.
We will never really know what possessed a seemingly bright, seemingly educated human being to cross the line from scholar to sociopath, from son to serpent, from man to monster.
One of the more insidious things about insanity is that, for all the blinding light the fire of mental illness casts on us, it leaves us, at the same time, in the dark as to where it came from, what caused it, what sparked it in the first place.
And while the knee jerk of angrily pointing a finger at the violence so readily available for the witnessing on the street, on the news, on TV, online and on movie screens is tempting, if only to give us the momentary illusion that, at least, there's something we can do about that which we can do nothing about, we know, when the tears end and the bodies are buried and the wheel starts turning again, that we simply will never know what lit the fire that made this man burn so many lives to the ground.
At the same time, along with the horrific images and heartbreaking stories pouring out of Aurora, one thought continues to haunt me this morning.
We know that movies don't cause insanity.
Just as we know that gasoline doesn't cause fires.
But we all know what gasoline does to the slightest hint of a flame already burning.
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