I don’t know if it’s the apocalypse, but it’s definitely a sign that something is profoundly not right.
A lot of people, espcially young males, seem to have adopted this comic book as a religious text and view Batman as some sort of religious figure, with the evil Joker being his opposite. This is disturbing in itself, but what is worse is the fact that a number of these people actually want to identify with the evil figure in their “religion” rather than with the good one.
For years now, popular entertainment has glamorized and made big money from images of evil and cruelty. From rock bands to fashion, the constant message is that depravity is good, virtue is negative and repressive, that anyone who claims to believe in the existence of goodness and attempt to live according to it is a hypocrite, and that the power to destroy is better than the power to build.
We now have a society saturated with these ideas, and the churches are too timid and too lacking in faith themselves to speak against them. So people go looking for truth in comic books, dreamed up by a bunch of cartoonists in a grubby office in Brooklyn. And because they have been taught that evil is good and good is evil, even in their comic books, they will pick the side of the enemy. In many cases, this will result simply in personal dysfunction and an unhappy life for the individual and anyone around him, but in the case of people who already have some emotional or mental problem, it’s going to mean that evil will take them over and they will attempt to emulate the cruelty and evil of their hero.
I don’t know exactly why the Batman series has brought this out so much. Even before the shootings, a prominent movie critic wrote an article complaining that he was getting death threats from what he referred to as fanboys for having made negative comments about some parts of the movie or its characters. While we might dismiss them as just freaks who take the whole thing way too seriously, I think they are actually just the more extreme and visible expression of a serious moral problem in our society.
Thanks for your post.
I think the philosophical underpinnings, of the movie and the culture, are most accurately described as
“Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.”
http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/