White Knight, Dark Knight & Directorial Defenses

By Lynn Farley

[1] I was casually browsing Yahoo’s home page today and came across this headline: LONDON (AP) â€" Director Christopher Nolan is defending fans irate over negative reviews of "The Dark Knight Rises ." Had I been reading a paper 98 years ago, the only difference in this news might have been a simple substitution of the director’s name and picture’s title with D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation. Something in me “clicked,” and I decided to learn more about director Christopher Nolan’s defense to see if there was a possible link between his troubles and those of his cinematic great-great-director Mr. Griffith. This unplanned diversion into Batman’s world connected the dots for me between Griffith’s Defense of The Birth of a Nation, Fair Play for The Birth, The Motion Picture and the Witch Burner, and Dixon’s The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America. The framework found in these nearly century-old writings is the foundational groundwork for the rights of expression filmmakers, writers, fans, and the masses take for granted today.

[2] The issue Nolan found himself in the middle of as he walked into the London premiere of his film is relatively small in comparison to the major, national, constitutional-bearing debates Griffith and Dixon were embroiled in to defend The Birth of a Nation. Apparently, a few critics, not the majority, panned The Dark Knight Rises prior to its nation-wide release. Those negative reviews evoked an immense outpouring of fan comments on RottenTomatoes.com, an aggregator of all things cinemaâ€"reviews, releases, box office grosses, director interviews, fan forums, etc . However, some of the comments were so vicious and aggressive towards the reviewer that the website decided to remove the posts and, in essence, censor free speech. The editor-in-chief of RottenTomatoes was compelled to defend the site for removing posts: “We saw a mountain of comments come in about his review, and we're policing them to make sure they're in line with our TOS. Broadly speaking, threats and hate speech will get your commenting privileges revoked. But Marshall has the right to not like the movie, and people have the right to express their disagreement with him.” The editor makes cogent points -- threats and hate speech are intolerable, and the minority, as well as the majority, has a right to their opinion.

[3] According to the AP story “Nolan was quick to defend fans' heated response to the reviews. ‘I think the fans are very passionate about these characters the way a lot of people are very passionate. Batman's been around for over 70 years and there's a reason for that. He has a huge appeal, so I think you know people certainly respond to the character.’" It is conceivable that this particular motion picture current event, in a small way, could be considered a contemporary cousin of the stir D.W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon created not only with their picture but also with their essays defending The Birth of a Nation.

[4] Flashback to a Boston Journal article published in 1915, in which author Thomas Dixon, voiced his opinion just as passionately in response to the characters he created. The following passage from Fair Play argues against the Sullivan Bill’s criminalization of entertainment that breaches public peace, specifically race or religious disturbances. Everyone would have agreed with Dixon’s point if only two words had been omittedâ€"white and negro. Read over those words, and I doubt there’s a 21st century counterpart that would have disagreed with the statement: “It [the Sullivan Bill] is the violation of every principle of freedom and democracy for which the grand old Commonwealth has stood for 200 years. I cannot believe that the supreme lawmaking assembly of the state will deliberately deny to a Southern white man freedom of speech on Boston Common merely because a few negro agitators differ from his historical conclusions. Still more dangerous than any play would be the establishment of such tyranny in censorship of opinion.”

[5] No one can argue that the war of words that occurred in 1915 to defend their picture from censorship was based on sound principles. Griffith made an especially lucid comparison between print and pictures: “Every American citizen has a constitutional right to publish anything he pleases, either by speech, or in writing, or in print, or in pictures, subject to his personal liability after publication . . . but the distinction between this theory and a censorship is that a censorship passes upon and forbids printing a picture before publication, and so directly controverts the most valuable of all our liberties under the Constitution.”

[6] Griffith and Dixon eloquently argued for the right to respond to their characters, and to defend the opinions of people who related to them, and to show that any attempt to censor the work or the masses response to it would result in the demise of freedom of speech. Unfortunately, they also happened to be racists. What do you do when your intellect is right, but your heart is wrong? My thought is that when that question is unanswerable, we need to appreciate the process and not take for granted our right to it.
[7] Nolan and the fans of his picture probably haven’t thought much about The Birth of a Nation during their week-long foray into the free-speech trenches. Who knew so many people looked out for Batman? What’s ironic is that in taking care of their hero, Batman’s fans inadvertently exercised their right to free speechâ€"whereas Griffith and Dixon had to deliberately argue for the right. The only problem is that their hero was a villain. And like a villain, the two lacked a moral compass. Which is the immensely shameful veil worn by The Birth of a Nation that has created a 100-year-old (and counting) controversy. The Dark Knight debate will most likely amount to a short spike in Google analytics for RottenTomatoes and make fans see the movie twice just to spite the bad reviews. And that’s the one thing any director can relate to without hesitation, there’s nothing like good box office returns to show ‘em.