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On Labor Day this year, the Marvelous Maria Beatriz and I, using some free tickets for AMC theaters, went to see The Dark Knight Rises. I wanted to see it because I am thinking of writing a new piece with the shooting in Aurora (Colorado) in mind and thought it would be good to see the background image for that event. (Otherwise, I wouldn't bother — Christopher Nolan became a laborious film-maker once he had large budgets in hand: after the sleek Memento and just about the time of The Prestige. But another topic for another time.)
So off we trundle, going to a theater complex we usually don't frequent, at the Newport Mall in Jersey City. We don't go there because, for want of a better term, it's "low-class": place is not as clean as it could be, the smell of melted cheese and nachos wafts through the air, and one can barely hear the movie over the rattling of ice in super-sized drink cups and the crackle of hand after hand digging into the super-sized bags of popcorn.
And mobile phones — lots of glowing screens in the crepuscular dark.
Sigh.
I am sure every reader of this piece has a mobile phone peeve, if not several — for the MMB and I, one of ours is phone use during movies. Being who we are, we don't shy away from asking people to put their phones away, often several times during a showing, but it gets harder and harder to do so when the response is invariably a snarl-back that anyone would infringe upon their sovereign right to act like jerks in a public space.
I don't want to get into any "decline of civilized standards" screeds — that's not the point of this piece, at least directly. The point has more to do with the shooting in Aurora — as shocking as that was, we shouldn't have been surprised at all.
To my left, with one seat between us filled with her shopping bags, sat a young girl, maybe 14 — to her left, as we found out later, sat her father, though at the start of what I am going narrate, he was off buying "supplies" for the movie.
Lights come down for the barrage of pre-feature trailers (a part of movie-going I happen to like — I think trailer-making is its own genre of movie-making), and out comes her phone for the texting. So I lean across the seat and ask her to put the phone away. She said she's texting her mother. I said she should step outside to do that. She said that the movie hasn't started. I said that for some of us it had. She said she would take two seconds. I counted out the two seconds for her (I admit, a bit of jerkish behavior). She turned the phone off. We all go back to watching.
Some minutes later, out comes the phone again for another text. This time, the MMB, sitting to my right, crosses in front of me, and much more forcefully than I did, in a much less requesting tone, asked her to put the phone away. (You must picture Maria Beatriz to imagine this: a four-foot-seven former nun now a social work manager at a major New York hospital, often referred to as "sweet" or "darling" by her co-workers but carrying the nick-name from her childhood of "leche hervida," or boiling milk: she can summon the fierceness when needed.)
The girl, after offering back the snark appropriate to her station in life, puts the phone away. Calm on the Western front for the moment. At some point between this and what I'm about to narrate, the father returns (who, for the record, also pulled out his own phone several times to check, I assume, his stock investments — we said nothing because, well, who wants to spend his or her entire time at the movies not-watching the movie policing phone use?).
There was also some back-and-forth between the daughter and father which I could see out of the left-corner of my left eye, with some finger-pointing and body-language pointing at us. Just about the time Bane, the movie villain, blows up the stadium (and a good chunk of New York City as well), she pulled out the phone again. So, it being my turn, I lean over to her and ask her what is so important that she needs to use the phone now.
The father sprang into action by throwing his super-sized soda in my face and standing up to yell at me not to disrespect his daughter. (Note: Mayor Bloomberg's campaign to restrict sizes of sodas may have a beneficial effect in situations like this.)
Out of the corner of my right eye I see Maria Beatriz book up the aisle in search of a manager — leaving her bag behind. In front of me the father and daughter are gathering up their grub-stake (which included a skateboard — I assume hers but given the adolescence of his response perhaps his) and heading up and out the opposite aisle. I stand drenched, stunned but not particularly frightened, more concerned about Maria Beatriz's whereabouts than anything else — and weirdly, if only briefly, worried about whether anyone else nearby got splashed. So I grab Maria Beatriz's bag and pursue her.
So, here's the choreography in the lobby: Maria Beatriz is gunning for the manager on one side, I'm trailing her on the opposite side (damp and bag-laden), and the father and daughter are behind me, with him barking at me (though all I could really hear through the fog of urgency was "disrespect" and "daughter" — but I got the message).
At this point I was getting really annoyed with the whole situation because, on a lower frequency, I knew what was going to happen: the staff would call security (who would arrive too late) but not restrain the patrons because they're not allowed to; the duo would scuttle away, leaving Maria Beatriz, the staff, and I sort of picking our butts while everything de-pressurized; I would be more busy making sure Maria Beatriz lost her fear and anger than, say, plotting revenge scenarios; and the sugar water would be getting stickier and stiffer as it dried.
And that's pretty much how it worked out.
After I laved off what I could (and finding out, too late, that the bathroom only used these strange hands-insert air dryers, not paper towels, leaving my forearms and face moist, though the hands did get nicely treated), we went home (two free passes in hand, courtesy of the abashed manager) and began the process of understanding (abetted by two lively gin-and-tonics on the back deck).
What did happen?
That depends upon whom the spotlight illuminates.
For Maria Beatriz, her musings focused on how quickly she morphed from the person described above into a seething berserker, rage-filled and battle-primed. In part, yes, because she was protecting a loved one but also as a component of her character, the demon beneath the civilized veneer — and she did not like this one bit since it contravened her preferred notion of herself as Buddhist and compassionate.
In other words (at least to me), it made her more interesting to herself.
For me — when I recalled the sequence of things — I don't remember any moment when I felt scared. There wasn't an instant, say, when it crossed my mind that the man might have a weapon and that I was in danger because, I think, there was a trust underneath that saw the situation as silly and as unnecessary rather than as a prelude to pain. I didn't grow up in violence, I don't engage the world through violence, so I don't expect the world to violence me as a matter of course — which is, I guess, the welcome legacy of a happy childhood.
It also occurred to me, both at the time and later, that codes of courtesy, which are also rules about self-governance, substitute for law enforcement, and when someone doesn't have those codes, or is ruled by more self-centered codes (machismo or paranoia, for instance), then one has to call in the cops. Courtesy is more efficient than policing because policing is always a hammer that sees the world as a nail, but courtesy also requires a commitment to a personal face-to-face — to an intimacy that crosses tribal borders — and it also requires that pleasure be taken in a small degree of self-denial (e.g., it feels good to me that the person goes through my held-open door before I do). This is something that more and more people have lost a knack for, or more likely a taste for, individuated capitalist atoms that we are.
And then, of course, the topic of violence itself, given the movie we were watching and the reason why I went to see it in the first place. I would not say that the movie and the father are linked causally — that the violence on the screen prompted the violence in him. It would be nice if it were that neat, because then we could make reasonable restrictions on the creation of violence as entertainment and keep a great load of crap from being broadcast.
Nor would I say that movies like this and their downstream ilk, like video games, dissolve moral fiber, creating a permissive atmosphere that encourages [enter conservative jeremiad here on the decline of western civilization]. Plenty of other forces with more powerful solvents, such as the capitalist system itself, have done this erosive job. The "circuses" part of "bread and circuses" is just a simple spoor thrown off by these forces, not a generative perennial root of them.
But there is a link somewhere among this father, the Aurora shooter, this movie, and a general sense that American society is, as Yiddish would say, facocked (in any one of its variant spellings), no matter how diffused or vaporous the connections since no society can be so compartmentalized that what happens in the east has no effect on the west. Societies can be, and should be, very leaky.
Perhaps here is a starting point, in a counterfactual. I'm glad the situation had not been reversed, that Maria Beatriz had been the one attacked, because I am quite sure I would've been on top of him in a heartbeat (though I've never been in a fight in my life), feeling both enraged and exhilarated and without a care as I gave or took whatever lumps came my way — in an odd sort of way, liberated. From? From ordinary life, ordinary guilts, the ho-hum terrors of mortality, the grind of responsibility — in other words, the aggravating weight known as maturity, as adulthood.
And maybe that's the starting point of this link: violence, even the vicarious but also certainly the actual, is an effort to feel vitalized, adrenalined and connected, if only briefly. It is also supremely egotistical, mercifully freed from the hectoring of compassion and obligation. What a relief not to have to answer to anyone or anything! And then the next question: what is it that we have done (and not done) in making the structures of how we get our living together as an American "we" that makes such (human) behavior practicable and frequent?
I don't know if I have the powers to tease all of this out — but, perhaps, dear readers, you do, in which case, please offer what you can to all of us.
In the meantime, Maria Beatriz and I will go to another theater as soon as something comes along worth seeing.
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