I’m sitting in the airport waiting to hop a plane to Los Angeles, and Twitter’s exploded with the news that, in the wake of this morning’s terrible shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, some folks on Fox have suggested banning costumes at movie screenings. AMC has already moved to do so:

AMC Theatres said it will not let any guests in costumes or face-covering masks into the theaters, and issued a ban on fake weapons. The company added that anyone wanting a refund in light of this new policy will be granted one. “We are taking necessary precautions to ensure our guests who wish to enjoy a movie this weekend can do so with as much peace of mind as possible in these circumstances,” AMC Theatres said in a news release.

I get this as a matter of company practice, and the ban on fake weapons may even be sensible, both from the perspective of preventing people from walking in the door with the real things disguised as fakes (although as Aurora tells us, that’s hardly the only way to get guns and gas into a theater) and from the question of where they put them once the screening starts. But it does make me pretty sad to think that theaters would start banning costumes altogether. Whatever a lone murderer does, the impulse to play, and dress up, and pay creative homage to culture you love is not the problem here.

The excellent Emily Hauser was kind enough to invite me on Bloggingheads with her to talk about pop culture. We taped this before Rotten Tomatoes shut down their comments section in reaction to commenters threatening critics who didn’t like reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, but we ended up talking about fandom as identity and the need to move towards an ethic that values discussion and critique in fan communities rather than fealty or affirmation:

There is no one unified fandom, which is why it’s both lame for critics like Anthony Lane to paint all people who like superhero movies as mouthbreathing basement dwellers, and for fans to turn on people, within their community and outside it, who want to analyze material rather than bow down to it. More genuinely self-confident, self-critical fandoms will be healthier fandoms in the long run, and more respected ones, too.

I woke up to the news this morning than 50 people had been shot by a young man at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado, and at least twelve are dead.

Sean Collins is right that, to a certain extent, Batman is a fantasy about turning violence that is random, or in this case, unpredictable, into something that can be predicted and contained by the great efforts of a single man. Anthony Lane is correct that movies and murder have been linked before and will be linked again, though I think he is in more tenuous territory in discussing ugly threats against critics who did not like The Dark Knight Rises, which are themselves symbols of a brokenness I think fan culture has to deeply reckon with, and this act of violence. If you think The Dark Knight Rises is the greatest expression of cinema of all time, your next step is unlikely to be to kill people who, by their decision to show up for the first possible screening of the movie, give some semblance of agreeing with you.

Mostly what I feel is this: Midnight screenings are big, hyped, advertiser-driven events that have become a source of new information to feed the Hollywood data beast, by indicating how motivated audiences are to see a movie. But they’re also a product of genuine enthusiasm and an expression of collective joy. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has meant a lot to an enormous number of filmgoers. And as someone who writes about movies, and who cares about the big, flawed thing we call fandom, I’m saddened by someone turning that shared enthusiasm into a weapon. And even if this tragedy hadn’t happened at the premiere of one of a dwindling number of genuinely mass cultural events, I hate the idea of using an audience’s suspension of disbelief, their openness to and absorption in the spectacle unfolding before them, as cover—the gunman reportedly started shooting during a sequence involving gunfire, meaning the audience was slower to react. We are vulnerable when we go to the movies, open to fear, and love, and disgust, and rapture, surrendering our brains and hearts to someone else’s vision of the world. We don’t expect to surrender our bodies, too.

This consideration of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy contains mild spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises.

Halfway through Batman Begins, Alfred (Michael Caine), the Wayne family’s loyal butler, points out to Bruce (Christian Bale) that his anti-social behavior and strange injuries will invite comment, and suggests that he find a way to live a public life to minimize prying. “What does someone like me do?” Bruce asks him. “Drive sports cars. Date movie stars. Buy things that are not for sale. Who knows, Master Wayne?” Alfred tells him. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, complete this weekend with the release of The Dark Knight Rises, has been an extended meditation on the power of symbols, the juxtaposition between fascism and anarchy, and recovery from trauma. But it’s also intermittently a story about what billionaires are for and what they do, a question The Dark Knight Rises seems to want some credit for posing, but not responsibility for actually answering.

Nolan’s vision of Gotham has always been sharply divided: we see billionaires and the very poor, but with the exception of the prisoners on the Joker’s barges or the ticketholders to the football game that Bane bombs, and the police themselves, there is no visible middle class in the city. The poor and the criminals who prey on them are often literally an underclass. In Batman Begins, district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) drives Bruce below an underpass to confront crime boss Carmine Falcone, telling him “They talk about the depression as if it’s over, and it’s not.” Poverty goes unseen because it is physically subterranean. In The Dark Knight Rises, an orphan who lives at the same boys home where Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young police officer who maintains his faith in Batman even as Gotham has reviled the vigilante as a criminal, grew up tells Blake that the boys who age out of the program, which has cut back on services because the Wayne Foundation’s funding has dried up, are disappearing into the sewers because “they say there’s work down there.”

While the trilogy is clear that threats to Gotham rise from that underworld, Nolan also appears significantly pessimistic about the ability of charity to permanently ameliorate the conditions that contribute to crime. “Gotham’s been good to our family. But people less fortunate than us are suffering,” Bruce’s father tells him as the family rides the monorail to their fateful night at the opera. “So we built a new, cheap public transportation system to unite the city.” That same monorail becomes the delivery weapon for Ra’s al Ghul’s weapons later in Batman Begins. In that same movie, Alfred reflects on the elder Wayne’s strategy after Bruce decides to return to Gotham, noting that “In the depression, your father nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises combatting poverty. He believed that his example could inspire the wealthy of Gotham to save their city.” When Bruce wants to know if the strategy worked, Alfred tells him “In a way. Their murder shocked the wealthy and the powerful into action.” When Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent have dinner during The Dark Knight, Bruce promises Dent that “you’ll never need another cent,” after Wayne throws Dent a fundraiser. But it’s not enough to secure the fortunes of a promising politician if he goes bad. Reform is a process, not a dinner party. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce is bitterly critical of the approaches of those who emulated his father, complaining that the proceeds of a charity function sponsored by the investor Miranda Tate will only go to pay for a lavish spread, rather than reaching their intended recipients. “It’s about feeding the ego of whatever society hag put it on,” he tells her.
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The dialogue looks great and quippy. Mark Ruffalo may prove to be the first plausible on-screen Hulk. We’ve got a fun look at Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, though every time I see her on-screen I keep expecting the next scene to be set in MacLaren’s Pub:

But Peter Suderman notes something that’s got me anxious: The Avengers doesn’t have a rating or a run time yet, which means with a May 4 opening date, it’s not actually done (by contrast, The Dark Knight Rises, which isn’t out until late July, has its PG-13). Do we think there’s last-minute studio agita at work here?

The bridge is yours.

-FX is restarting its efforts to make a Powers show from scratch, which hopefully will mean some better casting.

-The Dark Knight Rises is going to have “sensuality.”

-After they make Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, someone should adapt Nothing Ever Happens on My Street.

-Is the Katniss Everdeen Barbie skinny enough for Manohla Dargis?

-This diss track doesn’t exactly elevate the conversation around Odd Future, though I do like the Hunger Games reference. Some other rapper should run with that:

The bridge is yours.

-It makes a lot of sense that in our multi-threat environment, American talent agencies would be going after Bollywood stars.

-The weird rationales foreign countries give for banning American movies.

-Even if La Scala’s gotten better about anorexia treatment, firing someone for blowing the whistle about what the environment used to be like there seems a tad defensive.

-Lifetime takes on the Columbine massacre. I doubt this will be as scary was We Need to Talk About Kevin.

-If Wes Anderson made Batman.

Taylor Marvin, Erik Kain, and Jamelle Bouie are in the midst of a fascinating conversation about Batman, the legitimacy of the state, and the state monopoly on violence. The part of it I’m most interested, and what I want to use to pivot to a slightly different point, comes at the end of Jamelle’s post, when he writes:

Thomas Wayne was a philanthropist who sought to improve Gotham and the lives of its most vulnerable citizens. This, more than anything else, is why Bruce Wayne donned the mantle of Batman. It’s not that he’s “incapable of dealing with loss and forming real relationships,” it’s that he wants to build a Gotham where his childhood loss is never felt by anyone, ever again. Put another way—as we see with Ducard in the first film—vengence will only take you so far. You need a positive goal to keep striving. Bruce wants a better Gotham, which is why he’s willing to endure the hatred of his home if that’s what it takes to build the city into something durable.

I think it’s in part because I’m watching Downton Abbey right now, but I’m very interested in the question of when members of economically elite classes become radicalized, and what happens when they tip over. There’s a world in which Bruce Wayne could have continued his father’s tradition of philanthropy, responding to Thomas’ death by giving away even more of the Wayne family fortune and giving it even more aggressively (I would be fascinated to know if there’s any textual evidence for what Thomas’ charitable priorities are) on anti-poverty, education, or gang prevention programs. Instead, he’s going out and fighting crime, an approach that may be geared at making a better Gotham, and that may give him a direct rather than delegated hand in that process, but that also lets him physicalize his emotional pain, and dish some out himself. The approach is more radical in terms of how Wayne comports himself during the process, but not necessarily more radical in terms of what the Wayne family’s desired outcomes are.

Reader and novelist pal Max Gladstone continues our conversation from Monday about Batman and the 99 percent by passing along the likely results of a confrontation between Bruce Wayne and the 1 percent:

I’m only surprised the Bat doesn’t insist talk about how his war on crime and role as an innovator makes him a job creator.

I’m no badass Milton scholar like John Rogers (whose lectures on his poetry are free, and awesome). But the things he taught me while I was in college have left me with a permanent interest in what it means when artists put compelling words in their villains’ mouths. And goodness is Christopher Nolan doing a lot of that in the first full-length trailer for The Dark Knight Rises:

I’m most interested in Selina Kyle’s dancefloor warning to Bruce Wayne that “You think you can last. There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you could ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” This is what’s at the heart of the most convincing critique of Batman, isn’t it? The idea that he needs Gotham’s corruption for self-gratification more than he needs to eliminate it in the name of justice, that he’s used his wealth to purchase the capacity to engage successfully in endless conflict. But are we supposed to believe her?

If there’s a hallmark of Nolan’s exploration of the Batman legend it’s this: Bruce Wayne squares off with an intelligent foe who articulates an opposing worldview so Batman can vanquish them both philosophically and physically. In Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul is repeatedly shown to be wrong that crisis will deliver a cathartic shock to Gotham, leading people to support a revolutionary upheaval of society. And he dies in a train crash, an act that both obscures his own death among a larger tragedy, and that fails to achieve the kind of effect he’d hoped for. In The Dark Knight, Gotham City’s convicts prove the Joker wrong more than Batman does, actually. But even though it’s at great cost, Wayne and Commissioner Gordon manage to create a set of perceptions that keep the city’s residents faith with the government. Here, I’ll be curious to see if Bruce Wayne proves his genuine fidelity to Gotham City’s 99 percent.

And I’m intrigued by Bane launching his campaign on the city with an attack of the closest thing America has to a national church, professional football. (And please tell me the Wayne family owns the team and the movie riffs on bad owners. Please, Santa, I have been SO GOOD.) Of all years, coming after the Penn State scandals, the Times’ move from reporting on football and concussions to the role of enforcers in hockey, to the allegations that the NBA fired a male employee who spoke up for his female colleagues who were being sexually harassed, this would be an interesting time to rigorously interrogate sport’s role in our national life. Of course we won’t, and the attack on the stadium will just be proof that Bane is another combination of brain and brawn with a strong sense of symbolism. But it would be interesting to see Bruce Wayne acknowledge that one of his opponents is a little bit right. God may have blown off Satan’s critique once his former antagonist was in the pit. And look where that got him.