Update on Ground Zero

I wrote a massive email today to a friend in India, catching her up on about a year’s worth of news. I was tapping it out on an iPod touch while doing errands all around town (Russ & Daughters was all out of the super special matzoh), and at one point I walked past the World Trade Center site. I work nearby, but I haven’t actually seen it in a long time.

One World Trade Center has been going up for a while, but it’s massive now! Wow. It must be fifteen, twenty stories tall already, towering over what is now a field of white cranes. They look like a herd of bleached sauropod spines. Bridges that used to look down into the pit are now dwarfed by the red girders; “Yankees #1!” is scrawled across the thickest horizontal.

I share this because after writing for six hours, you want something to show for it, something that can be shared with more than one person. Curse you, intimate details, sprinkled indiscriminately throughout this masterpiece of heartfelt correspondence!

Also: have you seen that building recently? I know it’s been a long time coming, but still. We don’t have a gaping hole in the ground anymore. Quite a feeling.

Head Over Heels

I wanted to be downtown today, this morning, and despite setting out at six with only the vaguest idea of what that would look like, I am now sitting on a park bench, connected to free “downtown alliance” wi-fi, looking out at New York Harbor. In front of me, from left to right: the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, some flashy new office buildings in Jersey City, Hoboken (so that’s that Hoboken looks like!), enormous yachts. The sky still has a band of pink along he horizon, although I took my time getting here and its after eight already; above the pink is whitish blue, above that, a ceiling of white clouds.

This morning started in the Bronx with the discovery that the train runs fuller in the early, early morning than midday. I can’t tell you exactly what made me so happy, running up the stairs, stepping onto the platform. I’m sure I can’t describe it all and do it justice, the orange bucket seats, the ads for technical colleges, This American Life’s most recent podcast (“The Devil In Me”) on my headphones. I was overjoyed to be sitting among my fellow New Yorkers, my fellow humans, getting to watch them enter and leave the car, studying their footwear, their coffee cups, their thinning hair. Sometimes you are handed a great heaping serving of wonder, of gratitude, of joy, something that lets you access precisely how spectacular the world always is. It’s like the spectacle of a sunset or one of those breathless, spent, blessed moments when you look down at the face of the person you love in awe – it’s just given, occasionally, you just recieve it. The 1 train clacked and screeched down the island, gathering more fellow travelers than it let go, until we reached the 50th street station, where nearly everyone up and left.

I stepped off just after that, at 42nd. I wanted to check the map, decide my next move. I saw an underground connection to the A, C, and E traced from my current location, what must be a long white hallway, and immediately skipped up the stairs to the exit, settling on traveling crosstown on foot, above ground. I emerged under one of the flashiest subway station signs in existence, surrounded by the frenzied and glorious celebration of light and garish glamor that is Times Square. I am happy to report that reports of its uselessness have been greatly exaggerated. There are moments when Times Square just works. When you need a private little moment of civilization jingoism. When you’re celebrating the ballsy energy of New York City, remembering it and falling head over heels in love for the first time. When you’re listening to the rousing finale of The Hold Steady’s latest album, grinning and shaking your head in gleeful disbelief at just how fucking incredible this all is. Us. New York. The glorious noise we make.

Hate to admit it, I really do, but I was turned around, and what was supposed to be a quick trot to the next subway ended up taking me past Bryant Park and Grand Central and I kid you not I was nearly to the United Nations when I started putting together that I was headed East. I spent the next five minutes working hard to teach my new orientation to my brain, picturing myself on the subway map, a briskly moving, blinking dot setting out in my true, new direction. So I passed Grand Central Station again, the New York Public Library again. This is New York’s Fashion Week, and Bryant Park is decked out in white tents. The beautiful and the semi-famous are hovering around midtown, attending parties, passing judgements, buying and selling status. I couldn’t help but be tickled and proud. 42nd street is a trip. If you open your eyes and look, there’s this amost unbearable concentration of human achievement, some of the world’s most charismatic displays of human productivity, frivolity, grace, and grandeur there.

There is a tugboat directly in front of my bench now, flanked by a tiny red coast guard vessel. They’re both flying the American flag; the tug is hanging a truly enormous, and seemingly backwards, flag from its raised crane. The sky has brightened, the air is warmer. The unfortunate blank and boringly utopian architecture of the financial center and Battery Park is done no favors by the light, but New Jersey looks impish and impatient, already aping greatness and hungry for more. They should really throw a subway line or two across the river – it’s a really long island, and Jersey’s got a lot of useful land potential minutes away.

Google Maps, through the magic of wireless internet, tells me I’m sitting next to North Cove, which I found by walking through the World Financial Center. I’ve never been here before, out on the towers’ landfill, which considering how cool the view is seems criminally negligent. It makes sense; its because the West Side Highway lies in the way, and only infrequently do I find myself in this neck of the woods at all. I visited the World Trade Center only once that I remember. We took an elevator, and must have looked out at the region (maybe not from the top?), but I don’t remember the view or the observation deck. Not well enough to say with certainty that I’m not making it up. What I do remember is the ground floor lobby, a multi story thing that showed off the ribs that defined the building. I do remember the bare courtyard space, from which one could see those ribs extending straight up and up and up. I remember being excited by it, and a litle distanced by it’s coldness, it’s size.

There, a second smaller tug has joined the first. Also yellow and black. Also flying a big stars and stripes from a crane.

After flipping the map of Manhattan in my head, after the embarrassing realization of exactly how close Times Square is to the A, C, and E if you travel in the correct direction, I descended again and waited for the E. You can tell from the subway map that anything headed south will take you close enough to the World Trade Center site to walk there in a minute or two, but I wanted to be on the train that actually terminated at a station labeled “World Trade Center,” a train with those words lit up in blue in the cars. It was on this subway ride that I saw a beautiful woman who inspired the thought, simple and happy: what a privilege to share a planet with you.

My makeshift ipod programming also reached a crescendo with the utilitarian trio of Daft Punk songs I keep with me at all times: “One More Time,” “Digital Love,” “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” I turned to Daft Punk for the lyric “we’re gonna celebrate,” which I wanted to make my dedication for the day, but ended up most won over by “work it harder, makes us better, do it faster, makes us stronger, more than ever, hour after hour, work is never over.” Which, if you know the song, also becomes “our work is never over.” A fitting eulogy, I think. My dad long ago framed September 11th for me in terms of work. This is a city that each and every minute of the working day generates more value, more wealth, more useful, productive, creative, positive effort than the jealous jihadists have in the totality of their efforts. The work of this city, every minute of every day, shows the attack to have been a failure. I love being here, getting to bear witness to it. There is nothing like midtown at rush hour when you’re not rushing to work; nothing like the morning crowd of downtown brokers when you’ve got the time to just walk and watch; nothing like the adoration of tourists, and the sound of all the languages its expressed in, when you live here.

Speeding downtown, after 14th street, I leaned into the wall size subway map and resumed searching it. I’ll admit that I’m intoxicated by it, and study it every chance I get. I want to fasten each of the neighborhood names onto the map in my head and begin to remember the spatial relationships beween them. I want to discover, like hidden treasure, the nonobvious (underground) connections between the city’s many parts, the nearness of Long Island City to Midtown, the epic journey of the 2 train from Brooklyn College to the edge of Westchester, the L’s neat joining of the East Village and Williamsburg. I want to learn to place Bay Ridge (bulge on the southwest corner of Brooklyn / Verrazano-Narrows / Saurday Night Fever) on the map, detangle lower Manhattan’s ball of string subway lines and their respective far flung destinations, somehow discern what Rockaway people are talking about when they say “Rockaway” (I see a street, a neighborhood, and a few train stations with the name, none of which are in the same place). Nothing in my life is settled, as of today, but I just may be lucky and crazy enough to live in Marble Hill, work on the Upper East Side, intern in Fort Greene, go to school in Northern Manhattan, and try my hardest to meet people to talk and party with all over the city. There are not enough hours in a day to love my city, to learn it the way it should be learned. There are not enough years in a life. To travel these streets, to meet these people, to celebrate all the living that is done, here, is a task I cannot do justice to. I also can’t help but try.

10:28 and all the boats loitering before me on the river (I count 18 or 19) are blowing their horns. Exactly seven years since the North Tower collapsed. Loud as all hell. And now they’re all motoring away.

Ok, now six parachutists are falling out of the sky, towards Jersey. Four of them are dangling American flags. The flags look enormous.

10:34: Who knew he NYC police department had so many boats?

10:38: After lingering, the first, big tugboat finally sets off down river.

The sun is out in force now, beating down on my neck. It is September 11, I am siting downtown on a park bench, and I want to report that I witnessed men collecting garbage this morning, one block from the big empty lot where two towers used to be, executing an absurd many-point turn on one of those tiny, ancient streets. I wish to report that the goings on of the city’s baseball teams is being discussed on the streets of lower Manhattan. Construction workers are working, and buildings are being built. I saw families walking towards gathering sites, holding pictures of their lost loved ones, and television crews milling about, outnumbering everyone, incessantly shuffling the cameras and microphones around, searching for a shot, an interview, and a story. The police and fire departments were out in force, mostly looking bored and making everyday chatter, but every so often an older officer would be looking especially sharp, ceremonial, sad. Many, many Starbucks were open, serving coffee and pastries and sporting brand new signage displaying (to the dismay and annoyance of many customers, I can assure you) the calorie count of each product. Stopped by traffic cops on the side of the West Side Highway, I overheard an incredulous discussion between two police officers about he price of a cup of coffee and the difference between a Starbucks and a licensed Starbucks. “You mean it looked like a Starbucks?” “Yeah, it had the sign all in front, it looks like a Starbucks.” They had apparently charged him twenty-three cents more.

11:37: Germans seem to be overrepresented among the tourists taking pictures down here. Must be the strong Euro.

The site itself is rarely, and then only partially, visible from ground level. Today there was additional distance between a potential viewer and the present, flat World Trade Center, provided by a human wall of police gently cajoling the commuters to change their usual routes and accommodate the memorial service. The only change I noticed was the presence of two large hanging signs hanging from 7 World Trade visualizing Silverstein Properties’ finished product, which the banners seem to promise in 2012. I was also directed to a website.

Trinity Church is still there, as beautiful a thing as that is, the worn stone graves and the easy scale, the building visibly unconcerned about economizing on space and unfazed by the canyons surrounding it. The trains are running. Over two million people work in Manhattan, and I saw thousands of them this morning, face after beautifully distinct face in trains, on buses, and walking down the street. For a moment another subway car was running along next to mine, and then it slipped behind us, revealing in a row of little yellow windows tableaus of commuters that struck me as so wonderful, so beautiful, that I could almost picture it, the whole city humming, above and below ground the millions moving, the gears turning, the cash registers ringing. New York is home to two of the largest three central business districts in the country (Chicago’s is #2), and the experience of wandering around both with wide eyes in a single morning is one I highly recommend. I hope against hope I can do this again next year, collect a few thoughts and blog by the river to remember. The idea and the image of this city is powerful, no doubt, but in its details, in its indescribable and infinite minutiae, it’s beauty can move you to tears, and the only way to experience that is to get out in it, and look.

Oh, and the lights are going back up tonight.

Darkness Revisited

After watching a it a second time, hearing it discussed, and listening to reviews, my feelings on The Dark Knight have mellowed; I’m now both less shocked and less impressed. On the “less impressed” front, issues of pacing came to the foreground on repeat viewing, questions about the wisdom of cramming Two-Face into the fourth act arose (also: is it wise for any film to even have a “fourth act”?), and overall my willing suspension of critical thought is over. I now see choppy storytelling, for example, even in such superficially awesome sequences as the lead-up to Gotham General’s destruction, and the problems with the chaotic final sequence are even more apparent. The admirable attempts to include the behavior of the public in the struggle depicted, and examine the our own temptations to turn on each other in the face of an existential threat, culminate in the ferry sequence, a clumsy and obvious device (who on earth proposed employing a gigantic cartoon of a convict to teach everyone a lesson about humanity?) that falls completely flat.

I’ve also drifted away from the feeling I had that the film was overly dark and needlessly violent. Critical analysis, distance, and some sleep has dispelled the claustrophobic, all too real fear that I had walking out. Telling a tense, grim story makes sense when your building blocks are a sociopath vigilante and a nihilistic terrorist. Specifically evoking the feeling that our lives and institutions are truly threatened by a force that will not listen to reason is fair game while Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Alfred’s overwrought speech about some men wanting to “watch the world burn” finds resonance in the existence of a man who gave up wealth and comfort to live in a cave and lob explosives at the world’s mightiest government. The Dark Knight skillfully parallels our story these past few years. Batman and Gotham city leaders initially discount the importance of the Joker, busying themselves instead with the mob, as our government laughed off Al Qaeda in favor of facing down the better understood Communists. Long after being alerted to the threat, our heroes find themselves unable to prevent death after death, just as we’ve had to watch as Bali, Spain, England, and thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan fall prey to our infuriatingly resilient enemy. (No new attacks, my ass. As far as I can tell, Islamism has been a lot more active and a lot more successful in the seven years since September 11th than in the seven years prior to it.) Even capturing the Joker and torturing him doesn’t offer any relief from the attacks or provide any measure of control, as killing Al Qaeda “number twos” left and right and torturing those leaders we’ve taken alive has failed to provide any relief or resolution. Our heroes feel embarassed, impotent, angry, at a loss. Prepared for foes who play by the rules (as the mob are so proud of doing), we lose our cool and step onto the dark side when confronted with the Joker and his lack of regard for rules in general. I respect that story being told. It’s worth telling.

My mom is always telling me to watch for the themes of a movie to be revealed in the first ten minutes. It’s no accident that our opening scene pits not heroes against villains but the Joker against mobsters, one of whom actually makes a speech about the ordered and dignified nature of organized crime’s criminality. The Joker responds, you’ll remember, by putting a bomb in his mouth. It’s also no accident that Bruce Wayne, recovering after a routine night of crime fighting, trades quips about the limits of the superhero with Alfred. We’re watching Batman’s limits tested by terrorism, and his devolution into a scared, prideful, frustrated thug, just as we have, cringing, been watching American honor and lawfulness torn up and cast aside in our panicked response to September 11th.

Finallly, we come to this silly sonar surveillance machine. The movie’s shortcomings make this episode feel tacked on and tacky, but as it’s intended it sits right at the heart of the story. Batman prides himself on being “the world’s greatest detective,” and for two hours we’ve watched as his detective skills – interrogation, forensics, deductive reasoning, traditional surveillance – have utterly failed to stop the deaths piling up on his conscience. Bitter and embarrassed, just like our national security community in 2001, he turns to warrantless wiretapping writ large (and we’ve twice already seen him resort to torture).

Making a summer blockbuster out of the pathetic and disgraceful response of the American government to the 2001 attacks is an odd choice, but a worthy one, and I think it is pulled off quite well, for all my criticisms of this movie’s execution. It’s dangerous casting a beloved superhero in the role of Cheney and Gonzalez, but isn’t that precisely the point? Unspeakable acts have been carried out by those we entrusted to defend us and to defend our ideals, our laws, our values, just as we trust in the unshakable justice of superheroes. The limits and flaws of the humans at the heart of our national security bureaucracy mirror the limits and flaws of the human at the center of the Batman myth. When our hero starts brutalizing the Joker in the holding cell, Gordon tries to assure the audience, and himself, that Batman is in control. He is not. That, more than the Joker’s bombs, is what is scary here. It should go without saying that Batman, and Harvey Dent, and President Bush, and the United States Army and Justice Department, are more powerful by several orders of magnitude than the Joker, and Osama, and any conceivable exterior threat (although for dramatic purposes, the Joker is painted as more of an effective, nightmarish supervillain than Al Qaeda ever has been). The real danger here is not from the terrorists but from the terrified and cowardly response of our leaders, who actually do wield power capable of royally fucking shit up.

The film deviates in the last five minutes from our real world script, because, let’s face it, the real world has not yet provided a resolution fitting for a summer superhero epic. The downfall of Harvey Dent, kept by a wise protector from the citizens of Gotham so they won’t lose heart, is very public (and very disheartening) knowledge in our version of events. If there is anyone sacrificing their reputation, as Batman chooses to do, within the Bush administration, it is in service not of the public good but of some higher up, and even more disgraceful, public servant. Still, at the close of this film Batman is chastised, shamed, and frantically trying to salvage some shred of his good intentions instead of actually fighting evil or furthering good. Running and hiding is about where we find the legal team in Washington, worrying over their accountability for war crimes and retroactively making legal all the disgusting things they’ve been up to. It’s a grim story, capably told, and ultimately a wise decision to use well-worn American myths to dramatize our current moral crisis. I’d chose this frightening tragedy over pure escapism any day.

Batman stories have usually found ways to have some fun watching the struggle between criminality and righteous vigilantism, and should continue to. Batman Begins featured a ridiculous, exhilarating Batmobile chase across rooftops and along a highway, and Bruce Wayne stands in for the audience when he shrugs off criticism of these theatrics and calls them “damn good television.” The Dark Knight’s visual centerpiece is a tractor trailer being flipped upside down, which is thrilling to watch, but never quite achieves “fun” because of that sense that for all his gadgets and cool, Batman is still not in control, and the Joker just won’t be stopped by a mere car crash. The bleakness of The Dark Knight is appropriate only once in Batman storytelling, and a sequel will have to back off the moral realism a little in order to keep Batman a character worth watching stories about. There are so many readily available ways to do this. A Batcave would be welcome. The revision of the now destroyed Batmobile should be fun, and its design should express Bruce Wayne’s competence and confidence instead of a war zone mentality.

Something that struck me as I turned over the parallels between the character of the Joker and modern terrorists was his use of video threats. We’ve seen so many videos since 2001, of threats, declarations, hostages and beheadings, that those that Heath Ledger’s Joker employs seem almost obscene, and are without question the most terrifying moments in the film. This is not an invention by Christopher Nolan, however. I’m not an expert on the history of Batman’s villains, but I know of at least two instances – Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and Burton’s “Batman” – at least twenty years old that feature the Joker’s use of video technology to terrorize. I’d be interested to learn when the character was first depicted doing this, and how closely that paralleled real world terrorists using videotaped threats. Terrorists of the seventies certainly used this tactic – how quickly was it echoed in the comics? Or, unlikely as this seems, did the Joker’s behavior actually predate that of actual terrorists?

Darkness

Every time I leave a movie about super powered, larger than life, mythic men careening around the world (smashing things humans cannot feasibly smash, picking up things we humans absolutely cannot), my muscles are tense, my back is straight, I feel filled with deep strength. Forget the movies. This storytelling – tales of gods and heroes – can move me in this way without a big budget and a thousand-strong special effects team. Each story has its own weight, smell, texture. I sharply remember leaving the first Spiderman movie knowing I could climb walls. I was as light, excitable, joyous and wild eyed as I’d been since careening around trees as a kid – and for a moment I could remember no good reason, beyond a regrettable failure of imagination, for the absence of playful, epic wall scaling from our lives. This summer I’ve had the pleasure of walking out of both The Incredible Hulk and Hellboy II with the knowledge that, were the power in my shoulders and chest set free, were I able to manifest that coiled energy I can picture inside of me, cars would be mere playthings, my city a playground, and I would dance with the world of heavy, serious objects like a wrestler, like a god.

I just walked out of The Dark Knight, and my chest is tight, and I feel the isolation that is the sensation of being super powered in a world of the normally powered, and I don’t walk to speak to anyone, and my face is set in determination. Tonight I am determined to make it across the parking lot. I have resolved to not hit anyone on the way home. I will bring my iron will to bear on figuring out what the fuck just happened to me.

I am, as are many of my fellow humans, effortlessly familiar with violence, destruction, and mayhem conjured up in vivid detail for my entertainment. I like to see the world of the dangerous and the scary captured by a screen, and I like paying money to see it, exercising control over it, consuming it. The great things of this world, be they cities, vehicles, buildings or people, make fantastically exciting toys in the world of make believe. I have never seen a car chase or fist fight or a depiction of a vast metropolis swallowed by tsunami that I didn’t enjoy; I have never seen an action set piece I found disturbing, or excessive, or distasteful. If a movie fails to hold my attention, I turn away. If it is shoddily made, I laugh at it. If it requests all sorts of suspensions of me – ethical, narrative, logical – I go along with it, because why not? What’s the harm in a movie? Why not flex our incredible ability to manifest our wild imaginings on a huge wall?

I am still astonished by this, and I’m not sure I trust or understand the feeling, but I may have just seen a movie that was too violent. I mean this like people mean it when they wander into a shoot-em-up after a life of crocheting, when they feel unexpectedly assaulted, shaken to the core. The Dark Knight felt like the weight of millions upon millions of dollars, and decades upon decades of mythology, and two and a half hours of rumbling bass speakers, being brought to bear like a sledgehammer on my chest. In a bad way. Specific choices that were made, especially in the screenplay and the location work, felt aggressively hostile towards me – me! the guy in the cushioned seat who pays for this sort of thing routinely! – and around the two hour mark, I began to seriously question the wisdom of releasing such oppressively bleak spectacle on the public.

First and foremost, the city The Joker assaults in this film is my city. This is not Gotham at all. This city is aggressively bright, violently realistic. Gone is the over the top, comic book grime and darkness we saw in Batman Begins (and every other Batman iteration). Gone is the clever and impossible monorail system, which definitively distinguished our fictionalized New York from the real one, gone is Wayne Tower and its embodiment of an alternative, abridged, and toothless version of city history, gone is “the narrows” with its endless and eternal yellow steam. The first shot of the movie shocked me: I could not believe I was looking at this bright business-like city in a Batman movie. Right away I was reeling, having lost all my comforting gothic footing. This is bright white stone and glass towers, not an ounce of exaggeration in sight. When our hope falters and our protagonists do such a poor job of setting things right, as police officers die in the line of duty, residents are tense, scared, and angry, and the city slips away from those who would order it, protect it – this feels like an assault. This is the most brilliantly plotted, meticulously planned, well financed assault on my emotional security I ever hope to endure. We are bereft, the poor audience, of Wayne Manor, and the Batcave, and any ounce of fun or irony or innocence, and instead we have lower Manhattan, or some city dolled up to look just like it, subjected to full on attack by the most evil, frightening, and powerful villain I have ever seen depicted on film.

Forget Max Shreck and Penguin, Cruella deVille, and the idiotic, self-parodying megalomania of Lex Luthor. All are laughable, amusing, and insignificant. Heath Ledger’s Joker wants your city torn to pieces. He wants to torture you and hear you beg for mercy. Most devilishly of all, he has no motivation for any of this except his own amusement and a desire to cut those of us who believe in symbols, structure, and goodness down to size. Why such a creature was projected on 3,000 screens for two and a half hours at the stroke of midnight tonight I may never understand. Our eventual victory is slight and gut wrenching in the face of such capable chaos. The movie lets us escape with our city intact and Batman alive, but just barely, and at the cost of all the grand feeling that comes with a protector, a superman, a hero. We are left spent and dirtied, relieved to crawl away with one or two decent men left breathing, while the monster has come within inches of tearing apart everything we love. If this hyperbolic, cartoonish language seems unlikely to be a sincere description of the events in a Batman movie, you haven’t seen how bright Gotham’s gotten since we last saw her. You aren’t aware of how well lit and familiar these places are this time around, and you may not have heard that full daylight is now fair game for supervillian activity, you may not have gotten the memo that real hospitals where our vulnerable loved ones are lying now threatened by escaped Arkham’s inmates, you may not realize that the nightmares we’ve been writing about tormenting fictionalized caricatures of ourselves for years, well, they’re knocking at the door, your actual front door, and they’re about to make you wish you never imagined them.

It almost makes you sorry to see those mid-nineties Batman films that were such a failure on every level recede into the past. What I wouldn’t give for a bright bauble of a failure, with happymeal-ready villains and sets that evoke Disneyland and Hell and every fantasy in between, anything but the real world, and anything but a real city where you might conceivably live. Instead, tonight I had to sit through a masterpiece, a brilliant and masterfully executed film depicting the death of heroism and myth and grandeur, telling of the triumph of an insane disregard for human life and the frightful power of violence and fear, all played out in front of my astonished eyes, eleven dollars, thank you very much, have a safe trip home, please come back at Thanksgiving for Bolt!

I will be waiting in line for the next one. I have respect and awe for the people who put this film together, every step, every nut and bolt, every second. I can’t help but second guess them, however, remembering that Alan Moore eventually disavowed his The Killing Joke as being too dark, and excessively so. That character – that Joker – may have no place in polite society, and make no mistake, comic books may have a self selected and savvy readership but this wide release blockbuster is going to make itself felt all over and through polite society. I can only hope that others let this wash over them and distance themselves, as I could not, from these city streets and these legends that maybe they don’t love so dearly or take so seriously. I hope it doesn’t get to them, this darkness masquerading as entertainment in their multiplexes.