Amos Posner at 2012-07-20 13:36:02:

A couple years ago, I took my nephew to his first movie in-theater. He was four. The movie was Toy Story 3. Some time in the movie's third act--which was pretty rough, you may recall--he started leaning in really close to me while holding my hand. I asked him quietly if he wanted to sit on my lap. He nodded, clearly scared. From then on, I could physically feel every time he shuddered or laughed. I could actually feel when his heart beat faster. It reminded me of the power of movies and the effect they can have on people. It also reminded me that for all people bemoan violence or horror in movies, one of the beautiful things about moviegoing is that it's a safe place to experience un-safe things. No matter how much peril my nephew viscerally experienced, he was going to be OK no matter what. That's a precious thing at any age. That's what makes an already unspeakable act even more heartbreaking to me. Anyone who reads this blog, or even sits through the commercials while eating over-priced snacks before a bloated blockbuster, knows the cynical side of movies. But movies and moviegoing are also still wonderful things. The most important thing here is that people lost their lives--people that "just wanted to see a damn movie" as Morgan Freeman tweeted--and that others lost family and friends. But for it to happen in a place that means safety to me makes it even worse somehow. In my tiny little corner of the world, today was supposed to be a very happy movie day. Today we lock picture on my first feature. We're waiting for last little notes and doing a quick pass on the sound right now. But there's no way for this day to not be a heavy hearted one, and no way for our lighthearted little movie to not feel unbearably insignificant. My thoughts are with all those close to the shooting.

Scott at 2012-07-20 13:41:59:

Here's a thought, a response to this violence: Write a great story. Write something that causes people to experience our shared humanity. Write something that enlivens the spirit. Write something that fires the imagination with the possibility of doing something good. Write something that touches the heart. There seems to be so much in contemporary culture that demonizes people of all stripes, typecasts, categorizes, transforms "you" into "it," a dehumanizing dynamic. But stories can highlight people as individuals, each with their own hopes and dreams, characters as persons, not objects. What can we do? As writers we can write. Why not write stories that make people care... about other people?

Shaula Evans at 2012-07-20 14:46:40:

That's a wonderful response, Scott. I feel like the idea of writers carrying moral responsibility for their work is seen as very old-fashioned...but it's how I feel about writing anyway. We have the power to lift people up or drag people down. That's an easy choice to me. A dear friend of mine used to be pretty big in the Montreal indie rock scene. His music was really dark, with a lot of talk of nihilism, violence, and suicide. His fans ate it up. He told me one day he looked into the audience and saw all these well-fed, future-ahead-of-them, suburban kids dragged down by his lyrics, and had an epiphany: he didn't respect his audience for buying his garbage, he was hurting them, and he didn't want to do it any more. He completely changed his career. He made a conscious choice. Anyone can do it. I'm not talking about only writing "happy stories" or avoiding dark stories or sugar-coating, whitewashing, or romanticizing unpleasant truths. A writer can also choose to write honestly and with compassion about the full range of the human experience (look at Charles Dickens for example). Tell the truth. Better yet, tell truth to power. Tell truth with compassion. Make the fresh choice, the real choice. Listen to and observe the real people around you and tell those stories. Tell stories that aren't being told. Find the heroism in everyday life. Help people see themselves and find their way. Write up to your audience, not down. Think bigger. Aim higher. Writing does influence people. Stories do influence people. Movies do influence people. As writers, we can, at least in a very small way, make things better. If you wrote something that touched just one person, that provided solace or courage or inspiration to that person alone, the world would already be improved.

Jay Finklestein at 2012-07-20 15:13:09:

This didn't happen to me. It's not about me. Our scramble to claim for ourselves some bloodstained scrap of other people's tragedies--of the right kind of tragedy, in which the moral lines are perfectly clear and we're on the side of the angels, no troubling ethical dissonance--strikes me as a more meaningful lesson for writers than 'make us care.' We already care; we particularly care about perfectly innocent victims of perfectly horrific violence. I don't know. There are no lessons here, except the one we always learn: this changes nothing. It will happen again and again, and every time I will do nothing more than pause for a moment of self-righteous, faux-solemn reflection. To the extent that writers traffic in truth, should we be talking about this in a different way?

David Joyner at 2012-07-20 18:31:51:

"We are all called to do good, at least as we see it and understand it. But after that, it is not our job to see where that good goes." - Father Daniel Berrigan (as quoted by Chris Hedges) Writers (including Christoper Nolan and all the other writers associated with the Batman stories) have no control over how a crazy person will interprete their work. Of course, the lives of the 12 lost is extremely sad, but sometimes I wonder if the media's attention to crazy people is overblown, and indeed what feeds some of the very disturbed individuals that exist in society.

A2Jason at 2012-07-20 19:18:20:

We already live in a world becoming increasingly more anti-social. We all text, tweet, IM, DM, email and post pics more than we...talk. And thats even with the people we actually know personally. Restaurants and movie theaters are becoming the last options for all ages to have shared public experiences without a computer screen between us. My first fear is that anti-human acts like the mass murder that happened in that Aurora, CO movie theater will make us crawl even deeper into our self-imposed digital cocoons. There is no home theater TV screen, cell phone or computer monitor that can ever simulate the life-changing communal experience of watching a movie in public - in the dark -with complete strangers better than a cinema. We can throw all of our ethnic, gender, religious, political, cultural, economic and age differences aside and laugh, get startled or wipe tears away - together - as one collective human family. Movie theaters are like the worlds last undivided campfire to hear great stories about human nature. My second fear is that the media may immortalize the killer (notice I didn't mention him by name) and make him just as famous as other killers who get books written about them, movies, websites and documentaries in their "honor". For the sake of the deceased, the injured and for all of their loved ones, let's not continue creating unnecessary "role models" for other anti-human members of our human family by making these killers famous. Why should killer's names become house-hold names by taking away innocent people's lives? Their victims could have one day become famous themselves - by doing something that was actually positive in the world.

Scott at 2012-07-20 20:45:30:

Christopher Nolan releases this statement. Nolan expresses part of what I'm feeling: The movie theater is really a key part of what I consider to be home. Being an Air Force brat, the movie theater was one consistent place I could go, no matter where we were transferred, to feel a sense of familiarity. I can't even begin to count the thousands of days and nights I have spent in the dark sharing celluloid stories with a congregation of strangers who can become over the course of two hours somehow a 'family'. For lifelong lovers of movies and their transformational power, this type of violence occurring in that type of environment just makes this senseless act that much more heinous.

theurbanhobo at 2012-07-20 23:30:52:

I don't remember who said it but I've always remembered "It's okay to mourn for the lives of those you never knew". I just watched a documentary by director Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura, Bruce Almighty etc) called I AM. The great takeaway for me was that we are all connected. Today we reflect and we mourn. As artists, we are wired to be empathetic. It is that empathy that helps us to tell stories that are nothing like our own lives and make them resonate with an audience. That same empathy, at least for me, is something I have to monitor when events such as this occur so that I don't let the sadness consume me. In Good Will Hunting Matt Damon's character talked about the nobility of working with your hands, blue collar work. I've always felt storytelling involved a great deal of heavy lifting. There is a nobility in telling a story that will bring people who, at the end of a long day, in the middle of the night, will pay for their ticket and enter a theater with a couple of hundred strangers to share an experience like those people in Aurora who went to see The Dark Knight Rises last night. In a cynical world that seems to become more disconnected as we get more technologically connected, movies are one of the few things that unite us and bring us together for a shared experience aimed mostly to entertain. As Nolan already said "the movie theater is my home". I think most of us feel the same way and that is why this hits so close. For all the victims, survivors and loved ones associated with this tragedy - love, love, love to each of you.