Darker Than I Like My Knights

Of course it was the Batman movie.

I knew that as soon as I turned on the TV, though it took CBS This Morning another ten minutes to confirm it.

Have you heard?  Christopher Nolan's trilogy is "cursed."  It's a dark story, acted out by troubled celebrities who walk dark paths to portray their dark characters.  Christian Bale went nuts.  Morgan Freeman almost died.  A stuntman on The Dark Knight actually did.

And remember when the Joker killed Heath Ledger?  Heath's among the legends now - those anxious souls whose performances are remembered and revered, though only within the context of the personal demons that wrought them - but the internet wasn't always kind to him.  Not before he died and certainly not after.  Remember how we blamed the Joker?  How we got so sucked into the story and the character that we assumed Heath must have too?  We didn't know where the line was between fantasy and reality, so we blamed a made-up character for destroying a very real person. 

With a little perspective (not to mention countless other distractions in the interim), we don't say that so much anymore; actually we don't say much at all about someone who's been gone for four and a half years.

But to this day no one thinks of The Dark Knight without also thinking for a second about poor, dead Heath Ledger.  And now, before most of us have even seen it, we already have the narrative in place for The Dark Knight Rises.

One of the victims of last night's shooting is getting a lot of attention today.  Funny, talented, self-confident, intelligent...I can say with complete certitude that Jessica Redfield was all of those things, though up until 11:30 this morning, I had no idea who she was.  She's famous now, three hours later.  She was tweeting from the movie theater last night, and now we're all silently in awe of the last thing she ever posted to Twitter:

 

In the hour that has passed since I last checked her Twitter page, she's gained 2,000 more followers.  Two thousand.  There will never be another update from her.  In a month, will these thousands even remember who she was?  Why they followed her?  Why would anyone bother clicking "follow," except to indulge a morbid fascination with death?  It makes it "real" to see a face associated with a tragedy...but it doesn't make it final.  Something of the mystery of death is masked when you're granted the opportunity to click a button and "connect" with a dead person.

She was a blogger, too, in addition to being a compulsive tweeter.  Her last blog entry, once it's read by more people, is destined to become a permanent part of the lore.  Early last month, she narrowly missed a shooting at a mall in Toronto, and her deeply unsettled feelings about how and why she escaped harm make for compelling reading.  The entry is haunting, graphic, and bone-chilling, especially within the context of what happened next.

It fits so well into the story, right?  Part of the curse?  How else could you describe someone who came within minutes of death by a random shooter, and then lived out five restless more weeks before returning to that exact fate, if not "cursed"?  We can read her words with voyeuristic satisfaction because we've been spoiled:  we know how the story ends and she didn't.  

It's almost like a movie.  Something not missed by the first few commenters who read her story on USAToday.com:

No condolences, no comments on her genuinely shitty luck; just a list of trite pop culture references for a girl who could have been any of us, because who among us hasn't been looking forward to the movie that cost her her life?

Warner Brothers is already wringing its hands at what this means for the box office numbers, but I suspect they'll still make their millions.  People like Christopher Nolan's vision of Batman.  They think the world he lives in seems "real."  It's ironic, in a way, that we use "real" to describe our escapism.  We slip into movie theaters for two hours at a time to leave the world behind, but we're never far from the bigger distractions of an online world where dead people live and real life sounds like the movies.  That this happened is a horrific tragedy, and one that will likely have repercussions far beyond the weekend box office.  But do we really understand that?  Collectively?  Do we even want to?

How strange that we live in a time when movies seem more real to us than the world in which we watch them...