Down the Sinkhole

"If you haven't heard of it, it doesn't exist."
--Eva, to me, on several occasions

Guilty as charged. But how the hell did I miss Batman becoming a more iconic movie than Star Wars?

Admittedly, I'm so naive about movies, I actually scare people. I saw the first two Star Wars flicks when they came out--which would have made me six and eight years old, or something like that. The first one scared the crap out of me (that trash compactor scene still has the power to chill my dreams); I fell asleep during the second one. I haven't bothered with any of them since.

Star Wars is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my cinematic ignorance. As far as I know, I've seen all of three movies made before I was born (The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and A Christmas Carol (the really old one). I've watched one James Bond movie (Casino Royale, and I did like it), no Dirty Harry flicks, nothing by Tarantino...and so on and so forth.
Part of it is a deeply ingrained hatred of violence. I can tolerate very limited amounts if it's integral to the plot, but I have a marked aversion to plots involving violence, if that makes any sense. And at the first sign of Hostel-style gore, I'm gone.
Part of it is a just-as-deeply ingrained hatred of what tends to pass for comedy these days. Humiliation, in other words. As I'm sure I've mentioned, I don't find pain of any kind funny.
And part of it--might as well admit it--is an inability to follow movies. I miss things, things on which entire plots seem to hinge. Give me a linear plot with adequate character development and I should be okay....provided, of course, there's dialogue in abundance. I just flat-out can't interpret silence. Meaningful looks mean nothing to me. I came away from Lost In Translation sure of two things: one, it was a very good movie; two, I didn't have a freakin' clue what was going on through most of it.

I got dragged into one of the Batman movies, the one with Nicholson in it. Having never read a Batman comic (true that: I was childhoodless by choice), I was lost from the get-go. The noirish atmosphere was entirely too noir for me: half the time I could hardly see what was going on. That was two hours of my life I'll never get back. To be honest, the only reason I remember it at all was Nicholson. Jack Nicholson is for my money the most overrated, undertalented actor ever. He seems to be completely incapable of playing anybody who isn't a lunatic. So that movie went by in fits of puzzlement interspersed with fits of boredom at Jack Nicholson playing Jack Nicholson. Ugh.
And so Batman joined things like the O.J. Simpson trial and, later, the whole of reality television: down the sinkhole it went.
This sinkhole: if there's anything about me that medical science would be interested in, that's it. Once I decide I'm not interested in something, I won't hear about it...and it won't exist. I had no idea somebody remade Batman, because "Batman" is one of a bunch of words that triggers the trapdoor in my head.

I did know Heath Ledger died--I don't live on Mars, just in High Earth Orbit. I can tell you he starred in Brokeback Mountain, but that's it.
No, I haven't seen Brokeback...I tried, but the first ten minutes had like three words of dialogue in them and I just tuned right out.
(You think that's bad? I didn't make it halfway through the opening credits of Gone With The Wind... the dramatis personae scrolled on and on and on and on and on and on and on and holy crap how the hell am I supposed to remember HALF of these characters?)

So now there's this Dark Knight movie. Apparently there was a bigger demand for a Batman sequel (a sequel to a REMAKE, no less) was greater than the fifteen-or-whatever-YEARS worth of pent-up demand for another Star Wars flick, because the midnight showings of Dark Night outgrossed those of Return of the Sith.

That flabbergasts me. I kept turning that over and over in my head, worrying it from all angles. Eva finally looked at me and snapped "why are you making such a big deal out of this?"

Because the sinkhole managed to swallow something huge this time: a pop culture phenomenon bigger than the biggest film of my childhood. (And yet the Batman series, all seven films, only ranks as the tenth-highest-grossing film series, all time..???...) But people are lining up by the hundreds of thousands to see this at midnight the night it opens? The movie was SOLD OUT ACROSS THE COUNTRY on opening night?

Please tell me it isn't because an actor died just after filming the thing. I don't want to have to believe people are that ghoulish. (Then again, everybody slows down to look at the car accident, don't they?)