Taxes & Tomatoes

Since its launch almost twelve years ago, RottenTomatoes.com has never disabled comments on the movie reviews it compiles—until today. Reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises have started trickling in, and, as is always inevitable, a handful of critics have already voiced their disappointment in the trilogy’s hugely-anticipated finale.  

  

Never mind that, officially, The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t open until midnight tomorrow. Some fans, most of whom we can assume haven’t seen the film, have responded to the tepid reviews by, you know, threatening to murder those critics who panned it. 

The outcry happened so swiftly, in fact, that RottenTomatoes.com experienced a server crash, and, as a result, decided that disabling comments on the film might temper the anger and dissuade more traffic from overwhelming their site.

What’s fascinating, though, is the unbridled support for a film that no one—except a lucky few—has even seen yet. Anyone old enough to remember The Phantom Menace debacle of 1999 should know better than to defend a movie before having seen it themselves. I mean, how silly would you feel threatening death—not that I condone that sort of thing—before witnessing the disaster that was Jar Jar Binks?

And, with that, enter Mitt Romney.

Because this is a political website, I have to, at some point, pivot away from Hollywood blockbusters, and here, five paragraphs in, comes the turn:

If Batman fans are so dedicated as to be convinced of The Dark Knight Rise’s genius before its opening, how does Mitt Romney, embroiled in this tax return fiasco Team Obama has sprung, ever stand a chance?

Consider, for a moment, that a variety of well-respected film critics are currently defending their opinions to a collection of readers who haven’t witnessed Christopher Nolan’s finished product. Some fans of the franchise have, apparently, already made up their minds about The Dark Knight Rises, and no amount of discussion is going to change that.

Mitt Romney and the Republican Party can spend the rest of the summer attempting to convince voters that he has nothing to hide by, well, hiding his tax returns from the public. And that might be good enough for most of the country. But some voters are already convinced of the worst: tax evasion, tax sheltering, overseas investments against the U.S. dollar. The longer Romney waits to release those documents, the more vocal his opposition will become. 

Sure, some people—most people—will assume that Romney is simply withholding the information because they'll offer President Obama a stronger opportunity to frame Romney as a big-business elitist whose wealth allowed him benefits not shared with middle class, independent voters.  But others will be crying for more, and their shouts of tax evasion and tax fraud will, like The Dark Knight Rises diehards, rise high above the rest.

Unlike RottenTomatoes.com, however, Romney can’t disable the comments.