On the Colorado Tragedy

Some of you are likely wondering where my review of The Dark Knight Rises is.  I attended a midnight premiere and enjoyed the movie, but I want to see it again before making a final judgment.  After one pass, I easily like it the least of the trilogy, but I want to see if the epic superhero finale holds up better on a second viewing, when all the cogs and threads can more visibly fit into a larger thematic and narrative context.  So expect a review sometime in the coming week, hopefully.

For now, I want to comment on the tragedy at the midnight showing in Colorado, where 12 were killed and dozens more were injured.  It's a deeply disturbing story, and my heart goes out to the victims and their loved ones.  Any loss of life is a tragedy, and the precise timing of this one called to mind thoughts I've had when considering death in the light of tentpole pop culture events.

I remember when I was waiting for the last Harry Potter book to release, passing the days wondering what would happen, where Harry would find the last Horcruxes, if our hero would live to see the end of the series.  It was a popular obsession, one that I shared with many friends and saw tossed around and hotly debated on the internet.  I also remember thinking how desperately I wanted to live to read Deathly Hallows.  I had no reason to doubt that I would.  I'm young, relatively healthy, and I've lived most of my life in safe areas.  But the thought of not getting to see how something I deeply loved, something I was invested in, something that mattered to me, was a terrifying one.

In the hours before The Dark Knight Rises, as I sat with my friends in the semi-darkness of the filling theater, some joke came up about dying the next day or the world ending with the morning or something akin to that (I got a chill when I learned about the tragedy that occurred just hours afterward the next morning).  I said that, if I knew the next day was my last, I would still have been sitting in that theater.  My friends laughed, maybe thinking it an offhand joke, maybe in half-hearted agreement.  Regardless of how they heard it, I meant it.  I wanted to be in that theater.  It was important to me.  I wanted to see how Christopher Nolan brought his beautiful trilogy to an end.

Which is what adds even more to the tragedy in my mind.  These were people who were so excited to see what Nolan had made that they went to a midnight show, despite what responsibilities they might have to face in the morning.  These were fans, squirming in their seats as the trailers ended, perhaps gripping their armrests, wide-eyed and necks craning to take in the grandiose action.  How tragic for life to be cut short, and even more so while in the rapturous throes of watching a movie you love, or were going to love.  The shooter violated a sort of sanctuary, a holy space where one can go to escape the horrors of the world, the violence that is all around, and enjoy a stunning vision of someplace else.  It's truly disgusting.

I think Christopher Nolan spoke beautifully in his reaction to the tragedy: "The movie theater is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me."  He's far from the only one.