Hollywood’s dark vision triggers real-life horror
JAMES Holmes’s rampage was itself like a scene from a Batman film, witnesses claimed.
He wore a gas mask and bullet-proof vest like Bane – the main foe in The Dark Knight Rises – while his hair was wild and dyed like that of the Joker, the arch-villain in the previous film.
The gunman’s black outfit also mimicked Batman’s famous costume. The resemblance to imagery from the films was, it seems, entirely intentional.
British director Christopher Nolan has brought a relentlessly dark vision to his trilogy of Batman films, which began in 2005. The movies, starring his fellow Briton Christian Bale in the title role, are intense and sometimes amoral in tone, with a deliberate blurring of boundaries between the mindsets of the heroes and the villains.
They are about as far removed as is possible from the garish and lighthearted Batman TV series of the 1960s, instead harking back to the original comics, where Batman is motivated by a thirst for vengeance for the death of his parents.
The dark tone of Nolan’s films has been echoed in the lives of some of those associated with them.
After filming the second instalment of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, actor Heath Ledger – who played the Joker – died from an accidental ‘toxic combination of prescription drugs’. The Australian-born star had previously admitted taking sleeping pills to combat insomnia after filming The Dark Knight in 2007.
He had described his character as ‘a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy’.
He died in January 2008 and the film was released nearly six months later, earning him a posthumous Oscar and a Golden Globe award, both for best supporting actor.
The release of the final instalment in the Batman trilogy – which features another British actor, Tom Hardy, as Batman’s murderous enemy Bane, was marred by controversy even before the cinema shooting.
A US film critic who was underwhelmed by the film was inundated with death threats online by irate fans.
The backlash meant reviews website Rotten Tomatoes was forced to close down its comment section for the first time since it launched in 1999.