AUGUST 1, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 19

It’s been two weeks and I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been meaning to, I’ve been planning on it, but it just hasn’t happened. The Dark Knight, the long-awaited, much-anticipated, and most-hoped-for movie of the year is out, and I’m hiding under a desk trying to avoid any bit of information that may taint my upcoming viewing experience.

It’s amazing. It’s too violent. This is Heath Leger’s best role, he should get an Oscar anyway, so what if he’s dead? It’s too dark. The whole terrorism thing makes it relevant. The part where... Enough!

It’s partially my own fault. Sure, I could’ve bought tickets in advance, I could’ve fought the crowds and went opening weekend, but I didn’t. I like hype in movies, especially summer ones. Often, the hype is the only thing that draws me in. For The Dark Knight, it’s different. I enjoyed Batman Begins quite a bit, and aside from the teaser trailer that was released a year ago, I actively avoided any promotional material or news tidbits so I could go in fresh. Avoiding news in the so-called Information Age is not easy. The first-released images of The Joker made headlines. When the full trailer came out, embedded video cropped up on non-movie related sites in my daily perusing of the Internet. And when the film finally exploded in theaters worldwide, NPR dedicated several stories to it, even bringing their resident critic to the microphone from a vacation spot in South America to report on the Nolan Brothers’ work.

I’m not advocating seeing a movie in a vacuum. I want to see it with a full theater, and an excited one at that. I want to have fun, but I do not want my screening tainted by a premature conclusion drawn by a friend or stranger. And sometimes, there is a line that is crossed in promotional material, where its sole purpose is to bombard with you with a trickle of news or screenshots simply to keep the fervor up, to keep us all on a boil. This is the hype, and it becomes self-perpetuating by citizen marketers (i.e. bloggers) and the hype is the story, not the film itself.

This is a strange discussion to be having on a website named for the stated premise of giving away as much information as necessary. Yet it serves to highlight the crucial difference between the marketer and our rationale behind a full-disclosure critical response. Ours is a hidden message, one that must be sought after to possibly understand a movie and not simply to throw coal on an already hot fire. Not only that, ours is one that shouts “spoiler alert” with the title of the magazine. Embedded video, screenshots on Yahoo, behind-the-scenes images in the Chicago Tribune, and stories across media boundaries (if there are any anymore) is presented as news, and has the duel issue of having the potential to taint a viewing experience and promoting something we may be seeing anyway.

I will see The Dark Knight. Soon. The hype got me, but not recently. The Nolans put me on a simmer with the last shot of the first film where Gordon holds up the Joker card. I’ll see it when I’m good and ready, when I’m legitimately at a boil.