The Dark Knight of the Moon: An Annoying Phenomenon, or In My Mind Batman and Pink Floyd Are Forever Linked

Yay for MS Paint

Sit back, relax, and cast your mind back… to the eighth grade.

Aaaaaaaaaaah!!

I’m sorry about that, but it’s necessary if you’re going to read this article. I understand if there is too much drama-induced trauma and you need to come back in a while. Seriously.

Anyhow, for most (or all) of us, eighth grade was a time of awkwardness. A time when we had terrible taste in most things, perhaps a set of braces, and even (gasp) curly brown hair. As awful as it is to remember sometimes, eighth grade was (for me at least) a very important time of intellectual development. It was at or around this time that most of us began to think about higher concepts than typical kids’ things - including, but not limited to love, lust, death, and our place in the universe. These “deep teenage thinky-feels” as one of my dear colleagues described them, while important, were in all likelihood simplistic and dramatic. And to push us further along and confirm our rudimentary understandings of such things, a movie came out that summer before eighth grade. A movie that for me casts a shadow over the entire year. That film was The Dark Knight.

No, it's not about a giant Joker destroying the city

It certainly fulfilled all the promises delivered by its title. It was indeed dark and it was a different take on Batman, so different, in fact, that the word “Batman” was not even used. It was gritty. It had a particularly great villain. And best of all it had a message about a dark sort of anti-hero, one of the first that many of us had seen. Prior to watching TDK I had seen my first few R-rated movies, including The Matrix and Terminator 2. Those films taught me not to be scared of guns, and that violence, death, and violent death happened in real life and thus in film. But where those films seemed to exist in a slightly different world than ours, The Dark Knight took Batman and dragged him kicking and screaming into THE REAL WORLD.

Or so we thought. Yes, TDK seems like a plausible movie taking place in the contemporary world. To some that is its greatest strength - to me that is its greatest weakness. But let’s get back to that eighth grade again.

Again, I'm terribly sorry

Another thing that I got into in eighth grade, besides “serious films” was music. Prior to eighth grade I didn’t really care about music. If I didn’t like a song, I didn’t really try to articulate why. The music that I liked was usually pretty vacuous or had been played for me since I was a kid. But that all changed when I hit eighth grade - and an important band for me then was Pink Floyd. So important, in fact, that the third CD I ever bought was The Dark Side of the Moon.

After these two, of course

The Dark Side of the Moon was incredible the first time I heard it. I remember plugging my dad’s old headphones into the 1981 stereo I still proudly use, popping in the CD, and hearing… nothing. What the hell? Was the CD even playing? Wait a second… I could hear something, faintly. It was a heartbeat. Suddenly, tape loops of a cash register! It all built to a crescendo as Clare Torry screamed her damn lungs out and then - breathe. Boy was it exhilarating. I made it through the seven epic tracks and the two incredibly shitty ones and by the end felt my life had been changed.

“All that is now

All that is gone

All that’s to come

And everything under the sun is in tune

But the sun is eclipsed by the moooooooooon!”

Talk about an album as an experience. I had listened to Sgt. Pepper and pretty much the whole Beatles catalog before, but none of their albums flowed together all of the songs!!! Not to mention, the songs themselves were mini epics about love, life, death, and insanity (the very things I was beginning to think about). Plus, what a kickass cover! DSotM left me reeling.

And almost immediately after experiencing both of these masterpieces, I became quite pretentious about both of them. When asked my favorite band or album (which happened nowhere near as often as I wanted it to) I sipped from my tea cup, adjusted my monocle, twirled my mustache, and replied “ah yes, dear old sport, I’d have to say that group Pink Floyd, especially their nineteen-seventy-three L.P. The Dark Side of the Moon. Sink me, that’s some smashing stuff.” Furthermore, I began to question my love of Spider-Man, who was undoubtedly my favorite hero up until that point, no contest. Spider-Man hadn’t really had a gritty movie like that. He was funny and goofy and had villains that weren’t as realistic as the Heath Ledger Joker. How could a serious, refined gentleman of taste have Spider-Man as his favorite hero? It simply would not do. If something did not fall into the categories of Gritty Culturally Relevant Badass Superhero Movie or Concept Album About Life, Death, and Existence with Incredibly Long Trippy Songs, why, they weren’t worth giving the time of day. Spider-Man and the rest of Marvel Comics? The Beach Boys? Bull shit.

Now, as many of you know, Spider-Man is still my favorite hero, and always will be as far as I’m concerned. I love the Beach Boys with all of my heart. I haven’t listened to Pink Floyd in years. And while I like Batman, I rarely read him and certainly haven’t watched TDK in quite a while. Now, where does all of this come from? I can very nearly pinpoint the moment where I started thinking about these all differently. It was one of the first days of English class in 10th grade, when I was talking to my teacher about the music I liked. I brought up Pink Floyd, to which he immediately responded “...I hate Pink Floyd.”

(Yes, Johnny Rotten said it first, but as I established in my other rather lengthy article, I tend to disagree with him on most things and don't listen to his music at all)

Anyhow, my mind couldn’t possibly comprehend this. Why would anyone dislike Pink Floyd? He said “well, I really liked them when I was in eighth grade or so, but pretty soon I found other stuff and kind of outgrew them.” Still appalled, I told myself I’d never think that way.

Here we are, though, some years later, and I couldn’t agree more. To me, Pink Floyd is very much a band one listens to when just discovering music - entry-level stuff, really. I must say, I’m hard-pressed to find a band with bigger egos as well. And yet I find so many people who love Pink Floyd and say that they are their favorite band. To me, loving Pink Floyd to the point of them being your favorite band says that you have not yet ventured beyond them into more interesting stuff that is - gasp - fun.

And this is where, for me, the connection between a specific kind of Batman fans*** and Pink Floyd fans lies. Note the underlined portion; it’s difficult not to, as I did underline it. That specific kind is the guys who immediately respond that Batman is their favorite hero and imply (if not outright say) that to have a different favorite is preposterous and idiotic. They scoff at Spider-Man and the X-Men; those are not “mature, thinking, realistic” heroes. Yet with these specific people, you find that they have really read precious few Batman comics, seen even less Batman media, and are solely going on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. These are the fellows who say Mr. Nolan is their favorite filmmaker, expecting this to lend them any sort of credibility when it just makes them look incredibly uninformed (like saying Pink Floyd is your favorite band). Just because Nolan’s Gotham City is incredibly realistic does not mean the film or hero are at all. Sure, the city looks real (because it usually is) but if you merely poke a character in the films you find that they can easily be reduced to an ideology. I cannot relate to any character in the Dark Knight movies. And while they are comic book characters, some of them could at least be funny. The movies’ themes are the real characters, and while they are substantial, the characters are closer to mythical heroes than to a real person, making their goal of ultra-realism fall flat. The suspension of disbelief in TDK Trilogy arises mostly from the characters themselves and that they could even be real at all. This is not to say that ideology-based characters cannot work well - Heath Ledger’s Joker is perhaps the greatest example of this. But Batman himself? It’s easy to see why no one seems to talk about Christian Bale as “perfect” or “amazing” in the movies, because he really doesn’t have much to work with and does the best he can with the rather flat dialogue. And these are not bad actors by any means; Christian Bale is fantastically awesome in American Psycho besides being Shakespearean-trained.

Pictured: acting

Now, to many people, the Marvel films are seen as inferior as far as Great Filmmaking. I cannot understand this. No, not because I am admittedly a Marvel fanboy, but rather because they are not inferior; rather, they take an entirely different approach to the comic book movie. Rather than focusing on creating a realistic world drowning in theme, they take a more “fun” or ironic approach. Take The Avengers for example. Who the hell are the villains? What are their motivations? What the Sam Hill does the Cosmic Cube even do? None of these questions are really answered, because the film is far more focused on fun. The characters are pretty damn simple, but are all incredibly fun to watch, and to see them interact feels almost like real people at times. Who cares about all the other questions? Have fun, damn it. This is not to say, however, that that is all Marvel movies are good for. One of the most criminally underrated movies of summer 2013 was Iron Man 3. Iron Man 3 really fleshed out the character of Tony Stark, in my opinion making the first two films look sophomoric by comparison. The movie was more about the man behind the Iron Man mask (he doesn’t wear the suit for probably 85% of the film), and hell if it didn’t have some pretty great thematic elements, as well as a ridiculously interesting take on a classic Iron Man villain. Spectacularly, it does all of this while still being a very fun movie. When trailers first came out, I dreaded seeing the movie. Like Skyfall before it, IM3 seemed as though it was ripping off of The Dark Knight.  And that’s certainly what the trailers made it look like, but everyone who went to see it got something completely different. In the immediate aftermath of the movie I felt “oh, that was a fun time” but the more I think about Iron Man 3 the more I think it’s one of the better superhero films of our time.

And so to me, an Iron Man film is like, say, a Beach Boys or Strokes song in that it’s short, simple, fun, unabashed about what it is (namely, pop or pop-influenced rock) and with some of them you can relate to the emotions expressed in them (see: Please Let Me Wonder or Someday). The Dark Knight Trilogy and The Dark Side of the Moon are so caught up in making thematic masterpieces that they lose track of the human element and instead come across as cold and unfeeling.

***The specific kind of Batman fans I detest are the people who say that Batman is their favorite and see no other argument for the best hero. These sorts of people have also read maybe two actual Batman comics and (of course) seen The Dark Knight trilogy. I greatly respect people who have read many comics, seen all of the Batman films, and celebrate everything that is good about Batman, including the campy stuff. I also respect people who say Batman is their favorite hero for more personal reasons; they pick him out of the numerous heroes they have read about. In addition, I don’t hate Chris Nolan - just the people who worship him to the point of ridiculousness purely because he’s the only director they’ve seen more than one film by.