Perfection: How I Got to Go to the World Premiere of The Dark Knight - Page 2

Had this movie been a person, I’d be in jail for a looong time.

It’s been a trying, mouth-watering three years since Batman, um, began. WB has not disappointed the fanboys — from scavenger hunts to poisoned cakes, bowling balls to nearly an hour of newscasts, the immersion into Nolan’s universe surpassed any marketing scheme ever undertaken previously.

As the countdown shrunk and the Fandango purchases littered my inbox, I kept my wits about me. A New York excursion with that certain special someone reaped as many dividends as I could imagine, and, for the first time in a long time, my mind was out of the Gotham gutter. Well, it was, until a phone call from Mom alerted me to the Batpod’s vacation in Rockefeller Center.

By the time we’d arrived at the Rock, the motorcycle-with-monster-truck-wheels had ridden off before we could capture it on camera. I’d missed my chance at something special, something that would have made those hundreds of hours spent lazily online worth it. But I’d been too slow, too late, too undeserving to earn it. A gloomy lunch was followed by an even glummer bus ride back to the apartment, and I readied myself for three more days of patience.

Until I heard these words: “Hey, isn’t that the Batmobile?”

With my heart in my throat and my ass immediately in the air, I leaned over the disjointed passengers to glimpse a black, polygonal thing that, to those unfamiliar with Nolan’s Bat-universe, could have easily been mistaken for a ground-up garbage truck.

My ever-obliging girlfriend, indulging the greatest nerd-gasm ever seen, joined me at the next stop. With a skip in my step and a stilt in my voice, I realized that something special was afoot. The last time I had glimpsed a Batmobile of any kind was when, as seen on my high school senior page, I considered Juicy Juice the high point of creation.

Now, some 17 years later, I would be once again in the presence of the Batmobile, the crashing point where the fictional and the palpable join together to create what could very well be a rip in the time-space continuum. With a couple clicks of the camera, the moment was immortalized. My day was complete, my circular journey between my childhood and adulthood finalized, and whatever feelings of deservedness and entitlement I had washed away with the proximity to this terrifying tank.

And yet it was not over, for this was no ordinary Batmobile outside an ordinary theater. After the scuttlebutt reached my ear and my eyes, it was plain to see: This was the world premiere of The Dark Knight.

Article Author: Casey Michel

Casey Michel is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Kazakhstan.

Visit Casey Michel's author page — Casey Michel's Blog