Last night, succumbing to pressure from my grown kids, I finally sat down with my husband and watched the latest Batman movie, "The Dark Knight."

I'd been putting it off because I knew it would make me sad.  A longtime fan of charismatic young star Heath Ledger, I believed that the extraordinarily difficult nature of the part and the physical demands of incessant night-shoots had caused the habitual sleeplessness that led to his accidental death from a mix-up of perscription drugs.  That we will be denied his considerable gifts in future performances is tragic not just for his fans, but for all lovers of good movies.

Full disclosure: I've long been a movie-junkie, but it is our daughter who has taught me so much about the craft of acting, ever since I first saw her perform in a high school play when she was fifteen.  Since that time, she's done summer theater-camps, gotten a degree in performance art, studied theater for a year in London, acted in New York off-off Broadway for three years, and is now in Los Angeles, pursuing The Dream in film. 

Watching Jessica's hard work and sacrifice and spending time with her bright, beautiful, talented, funny actor-friends has given me a respect for the profession that most people don't share because they have no idea just how hard it really is, not just to DO it, but to succeed at it.

Recently, David Letterman pointed out to 15-Oscar-nominations Meryl Streep that two of her daughters have followed her into the profession.  He asked her if she'd wanted her kids to pursue acting, and she replied, "God no!  I'd rather they be nuclear physicists!  Anything!  It's just so hard."

Needless to say, there are a sufficient number of no-talent airheads who get cast in big parts that it undermines the efforts of those who are more deserving, but don't blame the whole profession on bottom-line studio heads and casting directors.  Those who want to ACT, and not just be movie stars, throw everything they've got into every performance, even if they have to do it five nights a week and twice on Saturdays.

Heath Ledger was one of those actors; he was never comfortable with the movie-star shtick.  My comic-book nerd kids say that his rendition of The Joker is actually true to the intention of the original comic character, not the clownishness of previous movie Jokers like Jim Carrey.  Ledger's Joker is sinister, quite mentally disturbed, and sadistic--which makes the freakish smile painted on his face that much more menacing.

Ledger "disappeared into the part," said my son, which explains his Oscar nomination.  Though some would say he does not deserve an Oscar for that particular performance, I do believe he should have won for "Brokeback Mountain," and it's not as if he'll ever get another chance.  I hope the Academy recognizes his gifts on Oscar night.

But "The Dark Knight" didn't just make me sad because of the death of its young star.  The entire movie was grim, from start to finish, and even darker than most Gotham City movies.  By "darker," I don't just mean the subject matter and mood--I mean the lighting, as well.  It takes place almost entirely at night, and almost every setting is shadowy and murky.

There is very little humor, save between the Bruce Wayne character, played by Christian Bale, and his faithful butler, Alfred, played by Michael Caine.  Nor are there very many redeeming characteristics for many of the characters, including the populace of Gotham City.

This version of Batman explores the theme that the public, weary of and disgruntled by the high body-count of Batman's rescues, reject him as a hero and can only approve of him if he is a villain.  This is not peculiar to Batman alone.  A similar theme was explored in "Hellboy II" this past year, and by the Will Smith anti-superhero flick, "Hancock."

These movies put me in mind of the "Terminator" series and other apocolyptic stories, in which there seem to be no redeeming characteristics of the human condition.  Take away our cushy lives, it seems to say, and we will turn on one another in an orgy of crime, terror, and lawlessness.  There will be no kindness, no neighbors helping neighbors, no Doctors Without Borders or Red Cross, if you get my meaning.

But these themes have been resonating in Hollywood for several years now, and not just in comic book movies.  Dan Zak explores this in a recent piece in the Washington Post called, "No Country for Upbeat Films":


In February, the Oscar for Best Picture went to "No Country for Old Men," a highbrow slasher movie, the bleakest contender to take the top prize since -- well, since the year before, when "The Departed" won. Further cementing the notion that bleak movies get made in order to strike gold, three out of four acting Oscars were given to people who played villains: Daniel Day-Lewis as the monstrous oilman in the nihilistic "There Will Be Blood"; Tilda Swinton as the sniveling attorney in "Michael Clayton," a movie in which every person has mortgaged his soul; and Javier Bardem as the dead-eyed killer Anton Chigurh, who cattle-gunned the entire cast of "No Country" save for Tommy Lee Jones, whose character ended the movie on a note of despair, not death.

Permit me to posit an answer to Zak's question.

Hollywood responds to the mood of the country.  After years and years of the abuses of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove and Iraq/Katrina/9-11/Guantanamo, the nation's collective psyche has been beaten down into a mass sense of helplessness, powerlessness, and hopelessness.

I have long maintained that the only reason Bush actually won re-election was because the whole country was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder following 9-11.  Rove and his minions completely comprehended this, which explains why they kept up a hysterical FOX-fueled frenzy of fear-mongering, color threat-alerts, and attacks on opponents who "didn't seem to understand" all those threats the way our Fearless Leader did, who, after all, Kept Us Safe all these years, if, of course, you don't count 2001.

But Hollywood has reflected sense that with such previously unthinkable trends as the one in which all the lead characters are destroyed at the end of the movie, as in "Cloverfield," and the complete destruction of most of the planet in "War of the Worlds" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and (though I haven't seen it; I'm guessing), millions of people die, as in "The Happening."

To my way of thinking, the recurrent theme of populace-turning-on-superhero reflects recent political battles, in which, say, a bright young charismatic man who talks about "hope" is attacked as a closet Muslim terrorist bent on the destruction of the United States.  Or, say, a brilliant, hard-working female candidate is attacked as a ball-cutting shrew harridan who only wants to punish the rest of us because her husband fooled around.

But something happened on the way to all of our mutual self-destruction: Real-Life Catastrophe--in the form of an economic and social meltdown--and yanked the world's attention to the common business of plain, raw survival.

Suddenly, nobody has time anymore for such empty triteness as fire-breathing preachers and flag lapel-pin bullshit.

We had to turn our attention to REAL WORLD, REAL PROBLEMS.

And it was in that moment that the Emperor Who Had No Clothes was seen in all his naked un-glory at last, and all his enablers exposed as equally nude.

Oh, most of us already knew, of course, but the media, responding to what it perceived as What the Public Wanted, had remained obsessed on minutia such as preacher-gaffes and candidate's wardrobes long past the actual satiation of that interest.

The joyful global celebrations that occurred on election night with the election of Barack Obama, and the unprecedented outpouring of the same thing on Inauguration Day, is not really about just the man.  It's about a basic human reaction to a cultural sickness--a national depression, if you will--that has been dragging on now for more than seven or eight years. 

It's about a hunger, a real desire to feel hope again.

And it's not just HOPE.  What Obama tapped into was this sense of powerlessness, and what he offered voters was empowerment, a chance to take hold of the controls of one's own destiny.  Getting involved in a grass-roots campaign was part of it, but the chance to actually be HEARD by one's government now through inter-active websites, to have a voice, and to sense that somebody somewhere is actually LISTENING, has contributed to the euphoria we've witnessed this past week.

It's not just about American voters, either.  Worldwide, this phenomenon has been repeated.  In one piece I read recently, Muslims the world over have literally dissected every word of the Inaugural address, searching for hope that, at last, they will no longer be treated as across-the-board enemies, but will be afforded a certain measure of respect.

Hollywood--and the box office receipts--have caught the first breeze of those changing winds.  For example, in spite of all the dreary Oscar contenders released in the past few months, two of the biggest box-office hits was a kid movie with the improbable title, "Beverly Hills Chihuahuas," and a musical based on a band from the 80's called "Mama Mia!"

And even though more than a few depressing movies made it to Academy Award nominations, two of the biggest hits remain "Slum-Dog Millionaire" and "Happy-Go-Lucky," which are both upbeat, inspiring, feel-good movies.

People are tired of what "Happy-Go-Lucky" director, Mike Leigh, referred to as "miserablism."

The thing is, when your own life is fairly miserable, you don't want to scrounge up a chunk of money to go to the movies and watch the story's hero die of cancer or get rejected by a hostile unbelieving populace or get killed by the bad guys or lose out to a triumphant evil. 

After eight solid years of real-life war, you don't want to watch movie-soldiers you admire commit atrocities, or characters you've come to love wind up crushed by the Holocaust or some other evil or a monster.  You don't want the good guy you've become invested in turn out to be the serial killer. 

In short, you don't want to come out of the movies more depressed than you were going in.

And when you, yourself, have witnessed--in real life--incredible acts of kindness and generosity (such as what we saw with the recent near-tragic crash of the U.S. Airways jet into the Hudson River)--you don't want to pay good money to watch a movie in which every single human being on-screen is reprehensible and depraved.

While there is certainly evil in the world, it is not all there is.  All humans have the capacity for evil but they also have the capacity for great good.  Some choose to be bad, but many choose to be good.  It's only fair that both be represented on-screen.

What we witnessed, collectively, on our TV screens this past week reflects a true hunger within our national psyche to feel GOOD again, good about our country, good about ourselves, and good about our leaders.

We still love a good thriller and we know not all endings come out happy, but times are tough and many of us are struggling, and we want to walk into a darkened theater and lose ourselves in the sheer exhuberance of being human. 

And we want to come out feeling uplifted, like maybe--just maybe--we can win one once in a while, too.

Watch movies from the depths of the Great Depression and you'll see a similar trend--romantic comedies, musicals, adventures with rugged heroes who could be admired.

Because movies, like books, go into production a year or two before they are released, there will be a line-up of depressing downer-movies that will come out during this year and part of the next, I predict, but I also think we will see a much more upbeat trend at the cinema in coming years.

I'm no Pollyanna, but I think powerful stories can be told that can thrill us but still manage to uplift, inspire, educate, and entertain as well--with profit-margin to spare.

I'd like to see Batman have a little fun once in a while.  (Robert Downy Jr.'s Iron Man had his problems too, but he managed to have a good time nonetheless.)

As the Hollywood mood ring catches on to this and begins to change color, I hope that all of us can relax a little, joke around, have a little fun now and then--especially at the movies.

Real life is tough enough, after all.