When terrible things happen, we tend to look for answers
even if they don't exist. After Columbine some tried to
pin the shootings on Marilyn Manson and violent video games.
After the 2002 sniper shootings in the D.C. area some tried
to blame terrorism, when the culprit was a loner with a rifle.
It was a similar situation with 2007's shootings at Virginia
Tech, a terrible tragedy enacted by a man with reasons
we had no way of understanding.
The same process is already underway for understanding
The same process is already underway for understanding
the shootings that took place in Aurora, Colorado,
early into a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.
The connection to the brand-new, hugely anticipated
Batman movie is automatic, of course-- the film
has dominated headlines for weeks and was on everyone's
mind, and somehow the knowledge that this happened
to people seeing the very movie you'll probably
see this weekend makes the tragedy all the sharper.
Early cable news reports searched for a connection
between the gunman's attire-- gas mask, SWAT-style
jacket-- and the character of Bane; multiple eyewitnesses
said they first heard the gunshots and assumed it was
an effect from the movie, which was in the middle of
a scene in which Catwoman is caught in a gunfight
inside a bar.
Undoubtedly, The Dark Knight Rises will forever be associated
Undoubtedly, The Dark Knight Rises will forever be associated
with this tragedy, in a way that its creators could never
have anticipated. It will be hard, for a little while at least,
to think about The Dark Knight Rises on its own terms,
and especially to watch the movie's more violent scenes
and not imagine the very real violence that played out
alongside it in Aurora. But the fact that this shooting
happened during this movie is, in all likelihood, no reflection
on the movie itself; it's a man with a gun and a horrible plan,
picking a location where there would be a lot of people
sitting in the dark, vulnerable and unaware.
The thought process that goes behind an act like this
The thought process that goes behind an act like this
is unknowable, and will probably remain so no matter
how much we learn about the accused shooter James Holmes.
But as the news cycle drones on and people want to know
"why," it's irresistible to connect the gas-mask-wearing
shooter with images from The Dark Knight Rises.
But resist it. People have tried and failed for decades
to claim that violence in the movies, or in video games,
causes these kinds of senseless act, and it's never stuck.
As Anthony Lane put it so eloquently in The New Yorker,
"no film makes you kill." That goes double for what
happened in Aurora. Leave the art out of it, and focus
on the ways to actually prevent something like this
from happening ever again.
1 comment:
Glad you posted that. I was thinking of doing the same on FB but realized it would only meet with hostility...
I am so tired of people blaming the incorrect things when horrific things like this happen. I have already seen dozens of posts about how music and movies lead to violence... never stopping to consider that the person behind the violence usually has massive amounts of problems prior to the act.
I also really dislike seeing the perp being dissected and discussed and everything about him brought into the news and daylight... it almost feels like sensationalizing him instead of dealing with the actual aftermath of what happened.
It isn't the movies fault or the musics fault - there are underlying causes but people don't seem to want to see that
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