You Know You've Been Researching Too Long When...

You 1) can't find any secondary articles and criticism on the text you're evaluating, and 2) find secondary reading entitled 'American Heroes: On Frivolity and Horror in 2008's Summer Superhero Movies: "The Dark Knight, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man"'. The abstract reads

An analysis of 2008 Hollywood superhero blockbusters. Iron Mon and The Incredible Hulk are humorous and often light-hearted; but the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, which reinvents The Joker in Heath Ledger's performance, is much more grim and morally complex—a dark entertainment for pessimistic times.

I'm torn when I see an article entitled thus. It means that popular culture is coming under scrutiny, which is good - but as I sit typing here it's only two years after these films came out. The article was published in the Spring of 2009. I think there needs to be a bit more time before we start examining our current culture. If we immediately start dissecting cultural indicators like films, then it takes away some of the creative potential for further movement and posits one reading of the meaning of said film. It's like Justin Bieber writing a memoir of his life when he's sixteen years old, or tweens updating their Twitter every half hour, or - heaven forbid - a twentysomething woman who just happens to blog about life abroad.

I am aware that finding alternative meanings is the work for subsequent critics, and that merely because all three of these films were major blockbusters they do not lack valid artistic and political statements and reflections of contemporary society. Indeed, 'The Dark Knight' was pretty incredible, and one o' my dear brothers said it was 'almost a perfect film.' But these movies still seem so fresh on the cultural stage. I remember watching 'The Dark Knight' and 'Iron Man' in theaters (I never saw 'The Incredible Hulk'), and perhaps my reaction against the article comes because I feel co-opted into criticism that tries to analyse and impose a reading on me, as a participant in the blockbustering films of that summer.

We all remember these films, don't we?

On further reflection, with the rate that movies are churned out of Hollywood, 'The Dark Knight' does feel like it has come out long ago. When I compare it to other films, though, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 'The Dark Knight' seems to follow right on its heels. (I have to keep reminding myself that Lord of the Rings came out in 2001, 2002, and 2003). Maybe in cultural history, there is only 'the past,' which can be subdivided into 'the recent past' which includes things that happened in one's lifetime and then 'the distant past' which happened before one was born or memory formed. That is overly simplistic, and a cultural historian would probably go at me with one of Gimli's war axes.