DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

THE MEDIA JURY IS STILL out on the issue of what “happened”, or what “went wrong” in the extremely sad case of what will apparently now forever be known as the “Batman Shootings” in Denver, Colorado earlier today. The miserable ramblings of guest “experts” today on all of the rolling news channels, with their potted theories about “what could have made anyone do this” and other such banalities ignore the simple fact that Batman himself, or rather “The Dark Knight” is really the one to blame.

WARNER BROS IS SO POWERFUL that last week it shut down negative comments about the latest film in its Dark Knight franchise on www.rottentomatoes.com  (which it also owns) because of negative comments about the movie and death threats to critics who denied the film its (apparent) status as a classic.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY my friends and I used to play out in the street, with toy guns, and we used to go “bang bang” when we were supposedly firing them. Some of the more, I suppose, “sensitive” among us would pretend we had been shot and fall down and play dead, but most of us would say “you missed” and then there would be an argument, which usually led to no conclusion, and then we would go off to play something else.

IN THOSE DAYS BATMAN was on TV and everyone of my age used to watch it on Sunday afternoons, with Adam West and Burt Ward. The whole thing was camp, colourful and delightfully over the top. And no one ever got killed.

WHEN WE COMPARE THIS WITH THE WAY BATMAN movies have gone nowadays, with more killings than a video game, we have a ready-made answer as to “what could have made anyone do this”. But I have to confess that I suspect that this is a phenomenon confined to the United States of America, Finland, Norway and the two Germanies, where even people who have not finished their PhD can buy firearms. When this type of violence takes place at the Odeon in Oxford, where indeed a large number of undergraduates wear black capes already, then I will believe that the end of civilization is in sight.