Photo courtesy of www.nj.com
By BEHROUZ SABA, New America Media
In what has become
an annual rite, I do my best to ignore the summer deluge of “superhero movies”
and all the attendant hype. As someone who has dedicated his life to the love
and study of cinema, I find it offensive to inflate comic book character to
pseudo-mythical proportions with “brand identities” that have no other purpose
than to separate bored and gullible moviegoers from their money.
Yet a strange sense
of foreboding came over me some days ago when I noticed a billboard for
“The Dark Knight Rises.” The advertisement loomed black and grim,
with a suggestion of the Batman figure. I remembered the summer of 1966 when I
first arrived in America as a foreign student from Iran while the original
“Batman” series was all the rage. I reveled in the craze as I anointed myself
with samplings of Coke and hamburgers on what would turn into my long journey
to becoming an American.
Seeing a stupid
teenage craze of the 1960s pose so self-importantly on a billboard nearly a half-century
later was eerie to me.
A few days later I
had to clench my teeth as I heard on NPR a fawning interview with the movie’s
director, Christopher Nolan. Guy Raz of “All Things Considered” put to shame
any paid propagandist while he hyped the glorified comic strip as “the most
anticipated movie of the summer” and went on to heap praise on the director and
just how “dark” and “disturbing” his vision was.
I earnestly
wondered why Raz was doing so.
On Friday morning
of the film’s opening, as at least 12 people were left dead and scores wounded
during the premier of the movie at a multiplex in the Denver suburb of Aurora,
Colo., I have the answer to my question at an unspeakable price.
Raz was jumping on
the bandwagon as any other fan would, trying to make it clear that he “got it,”
that he “belonged.”
This urge comes
from a desire to find with others a common denominator in an increasingly
fragmented America. Americans no longer read the same books, magazines and
newspapers, watch the same TV shows or even shop for the same food brands. As
they leave high school behind to learn a profession and earn a living, they
find themselves steeped in proliferating, ever narrower areas of
specialization. Moreover, the real world and cyberspace offer the possibility
of experiences that are progressively specific to the person.
Yet the human urge
to connect with others, share experiences and have common points of understanding
persist. Such experiences, as they must satisfy all, cannot be either
meaningful or challenging. They range from “viral videos” on tiny mobile devices
to “The Dark Knight Rises” on the big screen with its haunted house
pretentions of concern for social disintegration and nuclear annihilation.
Some of the
attendants at the tragic screening were in costume. Witness after witness told
reporters that when the heavily armed, masked gunman fired a gas canister and
began to shoot at random, many believed that it was a part of the
entertainment, an “extra added attraction” in the best tradition of American
hucksterism.
The need for the
unifying fantasy is now so great that it overshadows a fragmented, increasingly
alienating and dangerous reality.
James Holmes, the
alleged gunman, is in his mid-20s. Should he be found guilty, he will endure as
yet another cyberspace icon long after the bodies are buried, the tears are
shed and an essentially rudderless America has gone back to business as usual
without quite comprehending just what happened.
For a gunman in
such a situation, riding the coattail of global movie hype by taking of human
life in the glare of the big screen during a few terrifying minutes is his way
of focusing attention on himself and sharing a single “real” experience amid
the indulgence in an empty fantasy.
