A Dark Night

This time yesterday night, moviegoers across the country stood in line for the midnight premiere of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the capstone to a trilogy that reached its pop culture zenith amidst Heath Ledger’s tragic death in 2008. When a gunman opened fire on a packed auditorium early this morning, murdering 12 and injuring 58 others, I was left wondering how the rest of us—especially those of us anxiously awaiting the film—are supposed to appropriately mourn the victims.

Four years ago, I eagerly awaited the 12:01 showing of The Dark Knight at a multiplex in Iowa City, and if it weren’t for a more demanding work schedule today, I would have joined thousands of others at one of Marcus Cinema’s theaters in my native Milwaukee to experience the trilogy’s final chapter at midnight. Most diehards measure commitment based on time—the truly devoted will wander into work bleary-eyed, only a few hours after the closing credits, as if to show the world how much they care.

In Aurora, Colorado—one of those nameless towns that only ever reaches notoriety when tragedy strikes—at least a dozen moviegoers just like me didn’t wander into work at all. In fact, when I arrived for an afternoon showing of The Dark Knight Rises today, some of those moviegoers—their lifeless bodies left behind at the crime scene—hadn’t even left the theater.

I’ve never felt so uncomfortable in a cinema auditorium. It’s not that I worried about a copycat storming into my matinee and spraying the mostly-empty seats with semiautomatic gunfire. The discomfort was rooted in watching the same scenes as those victims in an auditorium resembling every generic multiplex in this country—including the Century 16 in Aurora. 

Not Columbine, not Virginia Tech, not even Nine-Eleven has ever left me feeling as close to the victims as those in Aurora this morning.

The beauty of cinema is the shared experience it offers us. When my fiancée and I were living in different cities for a time in 2010, we went to the same movies at approximately the same time so that we could call each other afterward and pretend we’d been in the auditorium together. 

But this afternoon, as I instinctively glanced at my watch around the twenty minute mark—when most reports are indicating the attack in Aurora began—Ann Hathaway’s character dodged gunfire by using another character as a human shield: the same gunfire, the media has reported, that confused moviegoers in Aurora when real gunfire erupted at the front of their auditorium. 

There was no beauty in that.

And so I’m left debating whether I acted insensitively by watching The Dark Knight Rises today. Had I, out of respect for the victims still lying to be claimed in an auditorium just like mine, imposed a one-day moratorium on seeing the film, perhaps I would have felt differently.

I witnessed a change in atmosphere in my middle school after Columbine. Our teachers were more vigilant, our security more invasive. 

Candlelight vigils marked the eve of the Virginia Tech massacre on my similarly-sized college campus in spring 2007, and we debated the issue in our classrooms for weeks afterward.

But cinema’s flaw is that it’s static. It can’t change, can’t learn, can’t adapt. The movie, after all, is just a series of images on film. And so to watch The Dark Knight Rises and see everything the victims saw as they saw is to, for a moment, become part of the tragedy.

And I didn’t like what I saw.