This piece has been on my mind for the bulk of this week – news.com.au’s article ‘The day I endured The Dark Knight‘, by Alison Stephenson. Here’s the opening salvo:
I don’t like clowns. I don’t like puppets. I don’t even like those talking felt creatures, The Muppets. I still have nightmares about E.T. – and I was seven when I saw it.
My cinematic comfort zone is limited to Pixar movies, comedies and romantic comedies. I am no fun to go to the video store with.
I’ve never seen Spiderman, Batman, Ironman, X-Men or any other movie featuring any sort of men or man in an action.
[...]
Any movie with the word “dark” in the title is something I want to give an automatic miss. Being scared to my wits end for two hours is not my idea of entertainment.
I liken it to going out to dinner and ordering a vile meal you know you’re going to hate. Why would you put yourself through it?
It doesn’t get much better from there (the piece de resistance being Stephenson’s apparent surprise when a mother says her eight-year-old was scared during the film). It’s not a rave – far from it – and although the piece got my hackles up instantly when I first read it, I decided to sit on it for a few days. Was it the rampant gender stereotyping that I was feeling queasy about, or was it my tendency towards knee-jerk reactions when a critic (or, in this case, a “critic”) doesn’t like a film I love? And I do, very, very much, love The Dark Knight.
As the days passed and more reviews emerged, I realised that it wasn’t the latter. Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek, who I love, panned the film, and I didn’t feel the same skin-crawling reaction; neither did I when SMH’s Sandra Hall didn’t think much of it – both are excellent writers and fine critics, and although I didn’t agree with them, I enjoyed reading their arguments against Christopher Nolan’s, as I put it at work, existentially dark megaplex superhero action tragedy epic.
No, the problem that I have with ‘The day I endured The Dark Knight‘ is that I can smell the editorial think tank in every sentence, and it goes a little something like this: “I know, team, let’s get Alison to go see the Batman flick, it’ll be hilarious! Chicks hate action movies, and she’s scared of clowns! Walkleys all ’round!” (etc).
I don’t think the odiousness of the piece is necessarily Stephenson’s fault – from what we can gather from the article she at least has a grasp of that whole post-Bradshaw sass thing, and I doubt she would’ve pitched the piece herself, unless she’s, well, lying about her cinematic phobias – and is instead a shrewd and blatantly sexist ploy on the part of the news.com.au “editorial” team to rev up the commenters and score some tasty page hits.
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