I really don’t like writing about politics, so I suppose I’ll start by saying that this won’t be a political post at all. Roger Ebert—a much older, wiser man than I—wrote two different pieces about the major political debate stemming from the shootings in Aurora, Colorado; one in the New York Times, and one on his blog. He introduced the blog post on Facebook with the sentence “I won’t change a single mind,” and he’s right. The “debate” about gun control will continue on as a shouting match with little room for reasoned debate, and the events of July 20 will do little to move people on either side of the fence. Few, if any, shootings have.
When I returned from a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises early Friday morning, I immediately knew what’d happened in Colorado: Both President Obama and Mitt Romney were issuing statements of grief to the tragedy-stricken town, and, on Tumblr, I was witness to a deluge of tribute imagery. The next day, articles began popping up on the internet with titles like “Why ‘The Dark Knight Rises?’” There was talk that major theatre chains were going to ban customers from wearing costumes to midnight showings. A Representative from Texas postulated that the shootings may not have happened in a more god-fearing nation, and he wondered why nobody in the theatre had thought to bring their gun along. As the body count was finalized and the composition of the audience in Aurora became known, a legion of internet warriors took to their soap boxes to shame the parents who’d taken their young child to the new Batman movie, insinuating that violent films practically egg on events like this despite the relatively brief history of violence in movie theatres.
Thousands of midnight screenings of hundreds of hugely hyped films have happened for longer than anybody cares to think about, all without a hint of violence. Heck, thousands of screenings of The Dark Knight Rises happened on the same night as the shooting in Aurora. Why does nobody shame the parents of children who saw a midnight screening of Brave? Had the shooting happened during a different movie, would a blog post titled “Why Ice Age 4: Continental Drift?” be bothered with? (A Slate article helpfully pointed out that the gunman didn’t choose a screening of Happy Feet Two.) If something like this took place during one of many packed midnight showings of Magic Mike, would David Simond’s cartoon above instead depict a chaps-clad Channing Tatum kneeling down to place a bouquet of roses down in front of the movie theatre? Not likely, because none of those films involved Batman. (more…)