Karl Klockars

Now that everyone and their mom and their dog has seen Batman Does Dark Things with The Joker (Who Is Dead Now, Don’t You Know?), it seems time for everyone and their mom and their dog to write about it. So why not one more?

Here’s what I took away from the 2.5 hours I spent in a darkened room with dozens of strangers last Sunday, and soon to be an upcoming afternoon in the presence of IMAX: This is what Art can do.

$155 million dollars worth of people who were motivated to get off their asses and leave the house in the span of 3 days. Divided by about 8 bucks per ticket, that’s around 20 million people who literally left home to go view the artistic work of a few dedicated, talented individuals – and a lot of spearcarriers and lighting techs. Not that they’re not terribly talented at lighting – but it’s really just a few people responsible for this one.

This is the power that Art can have over people. I think about what it must have been like at the release of a new play in the 1600s. I think about what might have occured among the few literates when a brand new novel was released in the 1700s. I try to think about what it was like when Charles Dickens put out another episode in his serialized pieces of fiction, which ended up being some of the most celebrated novels in history. Was it like this?

I think it might have been. And when you stop to consider the fact that we have so many other options, so many other alternatives to explore as far as entertainment is concerned, it’s an even more astounding accomplishment. To get so many people to part with their hard-earned cash and valuable time in this day and age – at once – is incredible. In some way, it almost doesn’t matter if the film was even that good. And it’s a good thing it was a pretty solid film.

I’m trying to come up with some other comparable media events that might be as big. All I’m coming up with is the Superbowl. And the thing is, the Superbowl is an almost completely passive event. You don’t have to leave home to watch the Superbowl. You don’t have to spend money – aside from maybe the rental of that gargantuan flat-panel TV you picked up for the party. It’s already piped into your home. It’s already there. Most of us happen to watch it just because it happens to be on the television and we know everyone else is going to bullshit about the commercials tomorrow at work.

What else is there? The Oscars? No one talks about the Oscars. No one anticipates the Oscars. There’s no sellouts of midnight screenings of the Oscars. Nor the Grammys, or the Golden Globes. If they never showed them again, would there be a cadre of protesters outside the Academy of Film? Well, a couple. Not that we ever need worry about the insecure, look-at-me film industry to not celebrate themselves endlessly. Whew.

What else is left? The music industry couldn’t organize a frat party at a brewery, let alone motivate millions of people to leave the house over 72 hours and drop coin on the same product all at once. If they could, you wouldn’t see so many ads about digital rights management. The movie studios may have people trying to sell shitty bootlegs outside of El stops across the south side, but it didn’t do jack crap to stop people from getting the full experience. Books? Maybe we’ll have another Harry Potter franchise three generations from now, but I think that magical ship has sailed. Theater? Opera? I don’t think they make concert halls to seat in the millions. Performance art? Mime? Am I missing anything? YouTube files, downloaded and watched en masse?

Oh, there were some minor complaints. What was with [name deleted for spoiler purposes but you can probably guess]‘s suit at the end? He got out of the hospital and all of a sudden he’s got a new and interesting tailor? Not buyin’ it. And the whole “cape not getting caught in the back tire of the Bat-Pod” – question of physics, or just plain luck? I’m willing to overlook a couple things with the excuse of “oh for the love of god, it’s just a movie.” Nothing major, really.

The point of all of this is: See what stories can do to people? How a good story can motivate a person? And the promise of a good story can get people moving, like all our neanderthal relatives hunkering around a campfire so many tens of thousands of years ago. Now we all gather around the warming hearth of a super-powered lightbulb showing moving pictures on a flat wall, but end result is the same. All we want is to be told a tale.

Movies may be a form of tale-telling only about a hundred years old at this point, relatively new to the history of art, but overwhelming in its scope and power. It’s the marriage of story to picture, and when story comes first but picture doesn’t lag far behind, this is what you get. Imagination + vision = a lot of money to be made. Perhaps it was the perfect storm of death-publicized voyeurism, darkness, impressive displays of skill in the artform of acting and character, and so on, but mostly this: The world wanted to be yarned to a little bit. We were sold on the idea, and then the transaction went through. And very few left thinking they got suckered into anything less than what they paid for.