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I have to admit that I found The Dark Knight an entertaining movie. However, it is loud and action packed with a lot of shooting, fighting, etc. The following thoughts are from Roger Fransecky in his monthly newsletter. He has done consulting for us in the area of corporate coaching.

DRAWN TO DARKNESS

"In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss."
Salman Rushdie
"Outside the Whale," 1984.

Sometimes the world is too much with us, and we really need to escape. Alex Remington of the WASHINGTON POST reminds us that "people need easy escapism as much as they need high art. There isn't a thing wrong with enjoying having your emotions manipulated, since that's the idea behind every romantic comedy and horror movie, not to mention every grindhouse exploitation or softcore flick that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez idolize. Art moves us, whether it's high or low, no matter how grubby its intentions."

That's what we thought as we slipped into the frigid seats in our favorite multiplex theatre to sample the summer's hottest flick, Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight". The film has broken all box office records pulling in over $300 million of revenue. This latest Batman saga unfolds with a coiled, relentless intensity. Even before the film began we had to endure the assault of eight movie previews, each darker and more hopeless than the feature to follow. Then Batman took over our consciousness. Heath Ledger's portrait of the Joker, a psychopathic combination of violence, madness, and doom rivals the dread of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." One critic noted that the film is "beyond dark. It's as black, teeming and toxic as the mind of the Joker."

Just what we needed for a summer break. Barely seated we were emersed in a frenzied assault of bombs, booms, assaults, maiming body blows and eleven- story falls, all punctuated by persistent, low frequency, spine thumping bass audio and IMAX quality images! This is no simple comic book adventure with moments of comic relief like the other new summer blockbusters, Hellboy, Hancock and Iron Man. Dark Knight is a trip into the dark night of the soul and a character who believes in the dissembling power of chaos.

A sizable span of my career, more than thirty years, was spent working in the media, initially as a researcher examining film and television's influences on child language development and self-esteem. My research into "visual literacy" led to an appointment as CBS's programming consultant, and a decade as a media executive, and later children's television producer.

After twenty years of research, and countless hours with children watching (or as psychologists like to say, "attending to") film and television, I am convinced that the accumulation of an intense assault of images, sound and movement, delivered in well calibrated millisecond bursts, deeply affects thinking and behavior. It also embeds a restlessness and, on occasion, anxiety. Our children still watch and "experience" too many hours of television, ever more realistic, interactive games and the internet which may impair the ability to "attend," to stay focused and present in their own experience.

We do live in McLuhan's sense of a global village, a media rich, Bluetoothed, wide-screen, HD culture where seductive film, television, videogames, and the pervasive internet have become the persistent secret sharers and shapers of our dreams and nightmares. Every day we invite them to steal more and more of our time, our thoughts, our dreams. But, at what cost?

The American Psychological Association reports that "a typical child in the U.S. watches far too many hours of television weekly, seeing as many as 8,000 murders by the time he or she finishes elementary school at age 11, and worse, the killers are depicted as getting away with the murders 75% of the time while showing no remorse or accountability." Such TV violence socialization may make children less sensitive to brutality and aggression, while others become fearful of living in such a dangerous society.

With the research clearly showing that watching violent TV programs can lead to aggressive behavior, The American Psychological Association passed a resolution in 1985 informing broadcasters and the public of the potential dangers that viewing violence on television can have for children. In 1992, the APA's Task Force on Television and Society published a report that further confirmed the link between TV violence and aggression.
• By the time a child is eighteen years old, he or she will witness on television (with average viewing time) 200,000 acts of violence including 40,000 murders (Huston, et al, 1992).
• Children, ages 8 to 18, spend more time (44.5 hours per week- 61/2 hours daily) in front of computer, television, and game screens than any other activity in their lives except sleeping (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005).
• Since the 1950s, more than 1,000 studies have been done on the effects of violence in television and movies. The majority of these studies conclude that: children who watch significant amounts of television and movie violence are more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior, attitudes and values (Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 1999).
Dare we ask how these sensory experiences affect adults? As viewers and consumers, our accelerating appetite for excitement has taken us from the laughable special effects of the earliest "King Kong" movie, to Steve McQueen's 1968 pulse-racing car chase up and down San Francisco hills in "Bullet" to the explicit images of thousands of computer generated soldiers marching to their bloody death in "Lord of the Rings." And now, enter the intense threats of a psychopath in clown make-up filling our retinas across a 200 ft. screen.

I feel compelled to ask why do we seem to need so much violence, even second-hand media depictions of it. We are a story-telling people, and our core beliefs are informed by our shared stories. Are we telling the right stories? Do they encourage us, inspire us, nurture us, and challenge us? And what are these stories telling us about ourselves?

These are good questions to consider.