Going to see The Dark Knight Rises

On Saturday Rachelle and I went out to see The Dark Knight Rises. I expected to like the movie, but have to admit that I felt weird about going to see it. It was hard to put my finger on exactly, but obviously my intuition was telling me that there was something “off” about viewing the movie in the wake of the Aurora murders. Still, I felt the need to experience this newly contextualized cinematic event, and so on a perfect summer afternoon Rachelle and I sat in the top row of a packed theatre and watched as the Dark Knight unfolded.

I was unable to suspend my disbelief and enter the world– regardless of how artfully crafted it was– that was unfolding before me on the screen. All I could think about was the shooting rampage in Colorado.

Instead of serving as an escapist summer blockbuster where I got to expunge myself of any violent impulses that might be lurking in my soul, I felt a crushing, depressive realism. The shootings in Aurora were ever-present in my mind and I could not shake them free.

I watched the exit doors, imagining the shooter walking in from one. I tried to figure out at which point in the movie the shootings had started and how confused, surreal and terrifying that must have been. I thought about what I would do to protect Rachelle and myself if it happened here. I wondered what all the other people in the theatre around me were thinking. I was all over the map, quite frankly, and was barely watching the movie at all but more the darkness between the audience and what was taking place in front of us, if that makes any sense.

And when there was actual gun violence or horror on the screen, I found myself shirking away from it, which is something of a first. I’ve grown up in a culture of violent imagery from TV, movies and to some extent video games, and I am just as hardened to it, and appreciative of it, as the next person. There’s an obvious charisma to violence, and watching it manifest can be exhilarating, but now, suddenly, it was ugly and true, like hearing the sound of somebody getting punched in the face in a bar fight.

I imagine I’ll get past it, but I wonder if I’ve come to a kind of tipping point in my life where violence on the screen has stopped being make believe, no longer acting as a therapeutic safety valve for the rages and impulses we would never act on, but rather inspiring us toward them?

No matter, the crowd loved the film, and as we left I noticed that I might just have been the oldest person in the theater. Beside me as we all shuffled to the exit was a meathead kind of teenager. Built like a fridge, he had the dim, slightly sadistic look of any number of high school jocks and in his hands he had a football that he was spinning up in the air and catching. Again and again he did this, easy and superior, and I wondered if he imagined it a weapon, the sort of thing he could have pulled from his utility belt and  thrown at a would-be gunman, saving the day just like Batman.