“One death is a tragedy,” Josef Stalin is reputed to have said. “A million deaths is a statistic.” Psychologists call this phenomenon the “collapse of compassion,” confirming in numerous studies that a person’s capacity to feel for others diminishes as the number of victims increases. Of course the reverse is also true: people respond most strongly to the suffering of a single person, which is why the Muscular Dystrophy Association began using the “poster child” as a fund-raising tool in the 1950s. The phenomenon also explains why thousands of people came together in November 2013 to help five-year-old Miles Scott, who had spent two years battling leukemia, live out his fantasy of being Batman as part of a daylong event staged in San Francisco by the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Dana Nachman’s documentary Batkid Begins presents this massive public response as a triumph of the human spirit and the premier feel-good story of all time. It didn’t make me feel that good, but you probably guessed as much when I opened by quoting Stalin.
Unfortunately Batkid Begins is so rigidly upbeat that it begins to seem like one of those really cheesy Hallmark movies on TV. At the end, when Nachman turns to some of the participants to find out what it all means, one commenter enthuses that people embraced the story because they needed to rediscover their inner child. What country is he living in? Half of the movies to crack the $100 million mark at the box office this year have been children’s fantasies, and whenever Comic-Con arrives in town, the streets are full of grown men and women dressed up as superheroes. You have to wonder how many of the people who turned out for Batkid Day acted out of compassion and how many acted out of simple envy. We have a lot of social problems, but a shortage of childish fantasy isn’t one of them.
Directed by Dana Nachman
