Aurora, Batman: Witch Hunt, Watch Out!

You’re going to see: they’re not going to cut it. At every tragedy, at every various news item where a killer is feeding on the imagination of film (and there was unfortunately a lot of that — as this double page illustrates), we turn to the artists. We ask them to take responsibility. To explain themselves. To justify how they were complicit, as if they had accompanied the assassin’s hand. In short, they would be ready to lock them in the same cell as the murderers they inspire… quite involuntarily.

This isn’t the first time that the debate about the use of violence in cinema has been put on the table. 40 years ago, the same trial took place against Stanley Kubrick when “A Clockwork Orange” came out, Francis Ford Coppola with “Apocalypse Now,” Roman Polanski with “Rosemary’s Baby,” Martin Scorsese with “Taxi Driver,” David Fincher with “Seven,” Paul Thomas Anderson with “There Will Be Blood,” and they have already borne the brunt of it. Today, barely a few days after the incomprehensible carnage perpetrated by James Holmes in Aurora, who had declared himself the diabolical Joker at the moment of his arrest, it’s Christopher Nolan, director of “The Dark Knight Rises,” who finds himself in the shoes of the assumed guilty party.

We will note that all the film lovers cited here, from Kubrick to Nolan, are very noteworthy servants of the seventh art. From the end of the ‘60s until now, all have dealt with the extreme violence in our society, marked like the start of the Batman trilogy by the attacks of September 11. And all of them have, at heart, explored the demons of the human soul.

The confusion in society provoked by Nolan’s film is a worrying sign. And what is alarming is not the question of artistic liberty, but the state of this society. For the Batman saga is allegorical of the spectacle. It puts up some masks: we see a man disguised as a bat, another made up as a clown or a scarecrow. They recount a story. And what does this story tell us? That the world is a jungle in which we must learn to sort out the temptations of evil from the desire to rise. In short, it is a morality film, in spite of its appearances, like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Taxi Driver” were. Behind the story of Batman, Nolan wanted to point to the confusion of values. In the name of this confusion a man opened fire last week. Christopher Nolan could not have been less well understood.