4 & 3. Argo and The Dark Knight Rises
The two films Argo and The Dark Knight Rises rank amongst the most disturbing films of the year not so much for the political distress in the former or the villain-fighting violence in the latter, but instead for the one inconvenience that unifies them both: circumstance, or put otherwise, bad timing. Though I have my qualms about The Dark Knight Rises, I think both are high-quality films and applaud Ben Affleck on his recent Golden Globes win for Argo. However, each was unfortunate enough to be associated with a current event that plagued the film, and these unfortunate relations between a movie and its respective current event are what give each film its disturbing factor. Of course, The Dark Knight's related event that added an even thicker cloud of disturbance over Gotham was the Aurora, Colorado, theatre shooting on the highly anticipated, highly attended night of the movie's wide-release premiere. Though the film still garnered much success at the box office, the positioning of police officers in and around theatres for a long while thereafter is enough to distract us now and then from the bad guys on screen to look around all too vividly at what villains our own real world is smattered with. Though the public reaction to the theatre shooting has since died down some, The Dark Knight Rises is unlikely to successfully disaffiliate itself from this tragedy and will presumably carry the baggage with it all the way through to the marked-down DVD bins in the years ahead. The Argo controversy is not as obvious, nor as talked about, as the disturbance regarding The Dark Knight Rises. The release date for Argo was October 12 of last year. That date was only one month after the U.S. ambassador to Libya was murdered in a terror strike by armed militants on the U.S. consulate during the September 11th anniversary. The reason the film release's proximity to this event in Libya is disturbing is because of the event's relation to the film's content. The film, based on real historic events, begins with enraged militants in 1979 besieging the U.S. embassy in Tehran as they take hostages and wreak havoc. Therefore, the unfortunate similarity between Argo and the recent Libya upset is that both matters face the issue of harm to U.S. officials positioned abroad. Argo, having been released not long after the Libya event, thereby comes off as even eerier, darker, and, all in all, more disturbing than it otherwise may have seemed. The circumstances of the Aurora shooting and the Libya ambassador assassination tinge both The Dark Knight Rises and Argo, respectively, with the tension brought on by the weight of heavy hearts. There results a disturbing aura that goes beyond film, beyond art, beyond the screen, but rather into the emotions we saddened sympathizers inject into the films themselves. The burden is not one the best actors can show us, the best directors can construct, the best cinematographer can capture, nor the best screenwriter can describe, but one that we as touched humans must see for ourselves.