I posted a link to this piece at Facebook yesterday, not long after I read the news of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado. I thought, and still think, that it is a thoughtful reaction to a kind of public event with which we are becoming very familiar. I had just learned of the distress of a young woman I love, who exclaimed through her tears as she heard of the shootings that she and her friends go to midnight shows all the time. And I think Alyssa Rosenberg may have anticipated that reaction when she wrote:

We are vulnerable when we go to the movies, open to fear, and love, and disgust, and rapture, surrendering our brains and hearts to someone else’s vision of the world. We don’t expect to surrender our bodies, too.

Rosenberg’s piece has garnered a fairly long comment thread by today, some of it flaming, much of it ideological in one way or other. I found a link to another good piece, more analytical than Rosenberg’s, in that comment thread. It’s by Ty Burr, in The Boston Globe. “Don’t blame the movie,” writes Burr. “Don’t blame director Christopher Nolan or star Christian Bale.”

But maybe it’s worth having a discussion about an entertainment culture that excels at selling violent power fantasies to people who feel powerless.

OK, maybe . . . .

I’m not convinced our American culture of media violence is implicated in this terrible occurrence, except perhaps by way of characterizing it as a media event. Burr’s piece is best towards the middle as he describes what he terms the “entitled fanboy mentality” of the spate of flaming comments at Rotten Tomatoes that caused comments to be closed for reviews of The Dark Knight Rises.

But flaming on a website because you don’t like a negative movie review is not the same as walking into a movie theater with an assault rifle and killing and maiming a large number of people you don’t know. If the killer is the sociopath I expect he is, perhaps he will talk about why he did what he did.

Meanwhile there is the arguing—though media pundits are already predicting that these murders will provoke no real concern for gun control—there are the dead to bury, and there are the grief and the suffering. We now have a therapy industry (I don’t mean to be glib in calling it that) devoted to dealing with the aftermath of mass murders like this one. That enterprise will do its work. There will be healing. There will not be healing.

—until next time.