I suppose something like this was bound to happen eventually...

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/form ... 80586.html

Hahah, nice. But the guy dressed up as the Joker stealing TDK movie memorabilia was the best.

chee wrote:Hahah, nice. But the guy dressed up as the Joker stealing TDK movie memorabilia was the best.

Didn't hear about that! Link?

Houdini's Brother wrote:

chee wrote:Hahah, nice. But the guy dressed up as the Joker stealing TDK movie memorabilia was the best.

Didn't hear about that! Link?

It happened in July of 2008. I don't wanna go digging through news that long ago. D:

But it did happen.

I'll take your word for it.

On a more disturbing note, does anyone remember this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... guilt.html

On Wikipedia it claims "De Gelder reportedly watched The Dark Knight a unusually high number of times ("film obsession"),[30] appears to have quoted the character Harvey Dent at the start of the attack, and committed the attacks on the one-year anniversary of Heath Ledger's death".

Links to Ledger's Joker are most likely exaggerated by the tabloids but still, pretty f*cked up.

Also Gelder is an anagram of Ledger

I wonder if Nolan or Warner Bros. (or Ledger even) ever worried about things like this happening. The performance was an extremely powerful one, and it's not difficult to see how a person in a certain frame of mind wouldn't be able to see things the way The Joker sees them. Interesting.

chee wrote:Hahah, nice. But the guy dressed up as the Joker stealing TDK movie memorabilia was the best.

Haha, now that is funny.

Houdini's Brother wrote:I'll take your word for it.

On a more disturbing note, does anyone remember this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... guilt.html

On Wikipedia it claims "De Gelder reportedly watched The Dark Knight a unusually high number of times ("film obsession"),[30] appears to have quoted the character Harvey Dent at the start of the attack, and committed the attacks on the one-year anniversary of Heath Ledger's death".

Links to Ledger's Joker are most likely exaggerated by the tabloids but still, pretty f*cked up.

Also Gelder is an anagram of Ledger

Yeah, this was a big thing here in Belgium. This happened pretty close to where I live. The links to the Joker and the Dark Knight, however, were all a hoax. It simply wasn't true. I don't know how people made the connection between what he did and The Joker (I believe the killings where a year and one day after Ledger's death, and that's how the rumor spread... Quite vague, if you ask me) but the thing is he got some pretty fucked up reason to slaughter those women and those babies, but he wasn't dressed as the Joker, neither did he watch TDK an unusual amount of times. In the press here it all has cleared up, abroad, however, apparantly not.

transcendence of Mr. Nolan's films...

Celestin wrote:Yeah, this was a big thing here in Belgium. This happened pretty close to where I live. The links to the Joker and the Dark Knight, however, were all a hoax. It simply wasn't true. I don't know how people made the connection between what he did and The Joker (I believe the killings where a year and one day after Ledger's death, and that's how the rumor spread... Quite vague, if you ask me) but the thing is he got some pretty fucked up reason to slaughter those women and those babies, but he wasn't dressed as the Joker, neither did he watch TDK an unusual amount of times. In the press here it all has cleared up, abroad, however, apparantly not.

Thanks for clearing that up.

I expect the press to exaggerate these things, but to completely fabricate the whole story is absolutely outrageous. There really is no level to which those tabloid scumbags would stoop in order to 'create' a story and sell papers.

This is exactly what happened with A Clockwork Orange in the 70s, but in that case unfortunately the idea that the movie had directly inspired a real life rape was generally believed. This quickly snowballed and soon led to death threats against Kubrick and his family which in turn led to the director personally banning the film in the UK.

It looks like the gutter press saw an opportunity to start a similar sensation against Nolan and The Dark Knight. Thankfully they failed and the story fizzled out. I think the theory that movies and other narrative media cause real-life violence has pretty much been discredited. I think today's audiences are more sophisticated than their 1970s counterparts in that respect.

Maybe there's hope for the human race yet!