Heath Ledger Died for Your Sins: "The Dark Knight" as Autopsy Porn; Film Exploits Anxieties Over End of American Empire

You've been lied to. Like everything else in America.

Despite the hype and the Kremlin Party Line that The Dark Knight has set a box office record in its first weekend of release, it actually fell short of Spider-Man 3's performance in terms of tickets sold. Factoring in higher admission prices, Spider-Man 3 may have sold slightly more tickets in its weekend debut than did The Dark Knight, which sold approximately 21.94 million tickets, 200,000 shy of the 21.96 million tickets hawked by Spidey during Spider-Man 3's May 2007 debut. Due to ticket price inflation, The Dark Knight racked up a bigger box office take in terms of dollars, $155.34 million to $151.1 million for Spider-Man 3, at an average cost of $7.07 per ticket versus the $6.88 a ducat set a movie-goer back in 2007.

The fact that Gone With the Wind sold more tickets than any other movie, and its collective gross over many years, when factored for inflation, outstripped James Cameron's titanic blockbuster Titanic did not prevent the hype-happy media from crowning Titanic the titular box office champ when it made in excess of $600 million in domestic revenues. To a poorly paid movie critic anxious that he has a job next week due to the layoffs being undertaken by the newspaper industry to boost profitability as ad revenue migrates to the Net, there is every reason for critics to read from a prepared script provided by studio P.R. flacks. The movie critic is as much an employee of the Hollywood media octopus as any actor or director. The worth of actors partly is evaluated on their ability to carry water for the studio, i.e, their ability to get out there and sell a film by taking part in the media hype. Why should a critic, a cog in the same machine only a step up from the guy who takes the tickets at the local megaplex be any different? If he had a degree in economics, he wouldn't be a movie critic. A dollar is a dollar, no matter that a dollar just a year ago was worth more, let alone a buck from 1939.