Darkness Rises From Colorado

The movie theater shooting at the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, cast a sick and twisted reflection of what we have become as a country. We've become strangers to each other, and we live vicariously through entertainment. There's nothing wrong with film director Christopher Nolan's Batman movies. Movie sophisticates may sneer at any film drawing inspiration from a comic books, though I'm not here to suggest that we shouldn't produce such movies.  But what is it about this culture that encourages people like this killer to take out a Joker-inspired fantasy on an unsuspecting movie audience?

I'm also disturbed about the circumstances of this massacre.  Was The Dark Knight Rises so important - as a movie or as a cultural event - that people had to see a midnight screening of it? The theater itself - a sixteen-screen multiplex on the edge of a shopping mall off an interstate highway - exists in as much isolation as we do.  Yet movie theaters like this one provide a scrap of a public gathering space literally on the edge of consumerism, at a time when the public realm is almost non-existent  . . . and even if Nolan's final Batman movie can be appreciated as art, you can bet that most of the movies shown at a multiplex so big it has sixteen screening rooms are movies that are nothing but consumer products, designed to sell other consumer products (tie-in paraphernalia to the movies) long after the movie is over.  

No one respects or appreciates what little public space we have left.  Why should they?  People go out to the edge of town from their housing developments to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster, congregate with each other mostly as total strangers, and passively take in lightweight show business aimed at the lowest common denominator.  Then they go home, or they get a bite to eat at a chain restaurant or coffeehouse - again, with total strangers they never met before and will never see again.  

And this is fine with us.  We don't want to interact with anyone.  It's too dangerous.  Not everyone is a psychotic killer like the person who shot up the Aurora Century 16, of course - this person represents a fraction of a fraction of a percent of Americans - but the scary environment we live in makes us too cautious and too afraid to interact with others, and there are enough psychopaths bred by our frightening, cartoonish shopping mall-freeway-big box living pattern to justify being suspicious of anyone, no matter how sane they are.  

James Howard Kunstler likes to say that when we built this horrific realm of tract housing, shopping malls, and office parks, we created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.   Maybe we're not a nation of scary people - not yet - but we sure are a nation of scared people. :-(