The Dark Night

On September 11th, people repeatedly said that the destruction of the World Trade Center “looked like a movie.” But no one had ever seen a movie before during which an exploding building powerfully, suddenly, ejects thousands of reams of paper with a woeful, confetti-like bloom. That sight was completely unexpected, a detail few would have anticipated, the random visual white noise that reality adds to a disastrous purview.

I thought of 9/11 while scoping this incredible, horizontally-formatted poster for The Dark Knight (double-sided, 40″ x 30″, rolled, $75.00, MoviePoster.com). Of course, that’s director Christopher Nolan’s sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and the late Heath Ledger in his final movie role, opening this Friday, July 18th.

I’m conviced that, especially as we get more and more distance between us and that horrible fall day, imagery straight from the Towers’s deaths will infest our cinematic visions as the only universally credible depictions of apocalypse.

One sees their application, here, in the bat-shaped wound on the building, hell’s maw gaping red-hot, much the way the Towers’s did when struck. Or, in another context, look at Grand Theft Auto IV‘s dark and moody final trailer, “Good Lord, What Are You Doing?” aka “Everyone’s a Rat,” , above, and watch, at the 0:24 mark, the way a devastating detonation, again, whips a maelstrom of paper debris into the air.

Expect to see more of this. The ante on the horrible has been raised. Seven years after that dreadful day, we are still going through it from many diverse angles of approach, a memory whose details weigh like a fever dream. To paraphrase a sweet song from an another fractured time, we’ve only just begun, not to live…but to relive.