The Dark Knight’s betrayal in the house of dreams
Stupid parents don’t see the effect the blockbuster will have on their kids
BY Dave Bidini
To the parents who took their young children to see The Dark Knight last Saturday night at the Scotiabank monstroplex in Toronto: Are you fucking stupid? Have you no fucking radar for what is or isn't suitable for a child? Do the words “frightening scenes” and “violence” mean nothing to you? Are you content submitting your child to a lifetime of nightmares, or worse, a desensitization to the horrors of violent crime and cruel death? As I sat there while the screen went black—having weathered an ugly, 20-minute parade of cellphone and compact car ads followed by six trailers for films that preyed on the public’s apocalyptic worries—I could hear the twittering voices of your children, delightfully expectant, thrilled to be sitting in the theatre, safe in its celluloid coccon. Three minutes later, a dozen psychotic clowns stormed onto the screen, killed a few bank tellers, then turned their guns on each other. The Joker plugged an explosive device into the bank manager’s mouth. One vicious conflagration followed another. And so on. You never left. You stayed to the end.
Sweet dreams, my precious.
We’ve been trained to believe that media and popular culture will take care of us, that the music of Celine Dion will see us through emotional defeat, that 60 Minutes will show us the truth about our socio-political world, that newspapers will get to the bottom of the story, and that movies will provide a safe, smart place where we can lose ourselves in a dream. But we should all beware Big Hollywood and its dumb, thuggish agenda, which, in the case of The Dark Knight, was to access a PG-14A rating, making it possible for stupid parents to make mistakes like taking their kids to see the film. At another screening attended by a friend, an eight-year-old was guided by her mother to the cinema’s washrooms, hands over her eyes, where she was heard vomiting from the suspense and sheer horror of the film’s opening. Were this film rated R, these kids and their parents never would have been traumatized in a place that, for pre-teens, should be a house of dreams, not nightmares.
I know a story that, for its time, is ridiculously anomalous in its humour: a friend, desperately in need of childcare so that he and his wife could spend a few hours on the town together, hired on an old friend, Striker the Biker, to babysit. When they arrived home later that night, they discovered that Striker had shown their young children a film: Friday the 13th, Part 1. Sadly, this kind of early exposure is standard in the youth culture of our times. While watching a Leafs game with my kids a few years ago—7 p.m. start time—I was quick to switch channels after noticing that ads for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre were going to appear during every other commercial break. Later that same week, I was asked to explain an enormous city billboard featuring a floor-bound woman with a hand pressing her face to the ground: the ad campaign for the abhorrent film House of Wax, featuring Paris Hilton. Violence, killing, and especially the killing of women is common in youth cinema. Perhaps those parents who subjected their children to The Dark Knight thought they were merely doing what was normal, in the same way that Travis Bickle brought his date to a skin flick because it’s what couples were supposed to do.
It’s enough that kids are taught in school how the world is pissing away its energy resources and ravaging its natural kingdom; they shouldn’t also have their cinematic childhood corrupted by the bad judgment of their parents. After the film, we expressed our concern to management at the Scotiabank theatre, who were empathic, worried, even. They said that they often warn parents about the adult content of 14A and 18A films, but, in the end, it’s up to mom and dad to make the call. Which is as frightening a thought as The Dark Knight itself.
