Method Madness

Anne Hathaway felt the room vibrate, as if every seat had been wired directly to her spine.

She sat one row behind the industry block, her dress folded just so across her knees, hands locked on the clutch in her lap. Her face was practiced: neutral, even a little bored.

But inside, her heart hammered, matching the pulse of the Joker's laugh echoing through the sound system.

On screen, Eliza's body took the bullet, shattered the table, bled out on the carpet. She heard the sobbing before she felt her own tears. It came from the front row—somebody's wife or date, shoulders shaking, trying and failing to muffle it.

Anne blinked hard, willed herself to stay present, to study the audience as if this was a rehearsal and not her own undoing.

The critics were easy to spot. They all had the same posture: hunched, tense, shoulders wound like watch springs. Every one of them was scribbling, but not in the lazy shorthand of a filler piece—instead, their pens clawed at the paper, every line desperate to keep up with the carnage unfolding on the screen.

One well-known critic in the third row—gray hair, reputation for wit sharper than his suits—started breathing through his mouth, each inhale ragged. He slumped forward, resting his head on the back of the seat in front of him.

His neighbor, another fixture on the festival circuit, slid a hand onto his shoulder. Anne saw him jerk upright, blink at the screen, and then, to her shock, reach for her own hand. The gesture was childlike, seeking comfort in the dark.

Anne thought, They're reacting even more violently than I felt on set.

A woman two rows ahead pressed both hands to her cheeks, face gone paper-white, but her eyes stayed fixed to the screen. It was as if she believed, on some level, that looking away would make her complicit, that the violence would seek her out and finish what it had started.

Industry insiders, the ones with the best skin and the worst hearts, sat further back. Some clutched at their phones, sneaking shots of the screen in the dark, thumbs flying as they dashed out texts and secret tweets. She could see the glow of the phones under jackets, the strobing notifications as news of the film's impact rippled through the digital world.

One executive, a woman with perfect hair and a blazer that cost more than Anne's car, hissed "Get that shot" at the assistant next to her. The kid nodded, palmed a tiny camera from his inside pocket, and aimed it at the row of critics. Anne watched him zoom in on the fainting one, caught the click of the shutter.

This leak is our biggest scoop, she thought, reading the calculation in their eyes.

On screen, Joker wiped his hands on the character's torn shirt, then hoisted the camera for the final humiliating portrait. The light from the flash painted every face in the theater with the same sickly pallor.

Anne tried to focus on the screen, but her own image kept fracturing: sometimes she was the victim, sometimes the spectator, always both at once.

The critics exchanged glances, a silent conversation passing back and forth. Finally, one of them leaned over and whispered,

"This will rewrite the rules."

Anne swallowed, tasted salt.

She glanced down the row. A cluster of younger actors, all ambition and flawless bone structure, leaned forward with the intensity of children at a magic show. Some had hands over their mouths, others clutched at each other, sharing the terror like a dare.

Behind her, the socialites and "friends of the studio" had stopped pretending to be above it. One man wept openly, shoulders heaving, and the woman beside him—his wife? his mistress?—patted his arm with a hand so rigid Anne wondered if she was made of porcelain.

Anne realized she was shaking. Not her hands, but something deeper, a vibration in her chest and the soles of her feet.

On screen, the violence wound down. The Joker left the apartment, sandals slick with blood, camera bag swinging from his shoulder.

In the dark, Anne could hear the audience begin to breathe again, little by little. Some coughed, some cleared their throats. Nobody spoke.

Anne thought: I survived it once. I can survive it again.

But when she looked up at the screen, she saw the Joker's eyes, cold and fixed, and wondered if anyone would ever recover from this.

Not her.

Not any of them.

Not the world.

.....

It started in the dark: a thrum of bodies shifting, trying to shrink from what the screen was showing, but pinned by their own collective inertia. Even those who had trained their whole lives for shock—critics, studio lifers, the film kids from USC—were clutching the armrests, their hands whitening with every new escalation.

"Oh god," someone whispered, not quite under their breath.

A man three seats down from Anne gasped, "What the fuck—" but didn't finish, his words cut off by a sharp inhale as Joker dragged Gordon through the blood-streaked corridor, every blow amplified by the silence in the theater.

A woman in the row behind Anne started crying, slow at first, then louder, her sobs pulsing in time with the edit. She tried to cover her face, but the fingers parted, always, to let in the next awful frame. Sweat beaded on foreheads. Suits shifted in their seats, pressed ties to lips, wiped eyes. No one looked away for long.

Anne sat perfectly upright, her muscles locked. On screen, her own broken body trembled with the aftershocks of trauma, eyes wide, mouth open, every inch of her painted in terror and defiance.

But the real horror—the thing that turned her own blood to ice—was not the violence, but the way Joker held the camera, as if he knew she was in the audience, as if he had staged the whole thing just for her.

He looked into the lens.

The room went dead still.

It wasn't a glance; it was a gaze, direct and unflinching, the green-black eyes of Marcus Vale as Joker, fixing on the space between projector and audience, drinking in every heartbeat.

Anne felt her throat clench. She wanted to look away, but her body wouldn't let her.

Joker's smile spread, slow and deliberate, until it became something not quite human—a rictus of power and hunger that erased the line between mask and man.

The screen went white with another flash, the last photograph. Anne's tears ran freely now, hot and stinging, but she was silent, the only sound her breathing, shaky and uneven.

"Is he speaking directly to me?" she wondered, then knew, absolutely, that he was.

She looked left, at the critics: most had stopped writing. Some just stared, pens slack in their fingers. She looked right, at the young actors and the old directors, and saw only awe, or something darker.

At the back of the theater, the studio's best fixer had a hand over her mouth. She shook her head, as if unable to process what she'd seen.

On screen, Joker set the camera aside, knelt next to Barbara, and whispered something in her ear—too quiet to catch, but not for Anne, not now. She remembered the day they shot it, how Marcus had improvised the line, how it had made her skin crawl.

"You're not broken," he had said.

"You're just mine now."

Anne felt herself slip. Not in body, but in certainty. She could not recall a time when she'd felt so completely, so nakedly, seen.

The scene faded to black. For a moment, nobody moved.

Then the next reel began.

The violence escalated: Joker's carnival of horror, Gordon dragged through the nightmare, forced to relive his worst failures, every step designed to destroy what remained of him.

The audience squirmed, but still, nobody left. Even the ones who had threatened to run earlier were frozen, transfixed. The room had become a prison of eyes.

On screen, Joker recited his monologue, the "One Bad Day" speech. Marcus's voice was different now: softer, more seductive, a melody of pain and pleasure. The words rippled through the theater, and Anne felt them soak into the audience, each sentence a needle sinking into raw nerve.

From the projection booth, the assistant director leaned against the wall, hand pressed to his heart, as if trying to keep it from bursting.

In the third row, the famous critic who'd almost fainted before now openly wept, scribbling blind on the notepad.

At the front, Nolan still hadn't touched his notebook. He stared straight ahead, lips parted, no longer the master of his own world.

Joker's monologue drew to a close. He looked at the camera again, and this time, the room seemed to tilt toward the screen, as if every living person was being pulled forward.

He curled his lips, a tiny smile. Not for the world, but for the select few who could understand.

"They're all mine to captivate," Marcus thought, and he was right.

Anne wiped her face, but it didn't matter; she was already ruined, along with everyone else in the room.

The screen froze on Joker's eyes. The credits rolled, silent at first, then with a whisper of music that felt more like an elegy than a score.

Nobody clapped. Nobody moved.

In the dark, the audience breathed, all at once, like a choir broken by grief.

Anne closed her eyes. She could still see the smile, the gaze, the way the Joker had made her, and everyone else, his captive.

Marcus sat somewhere in the back, anonymous, soaking it in. He didn't blink, didn't smile. He just let the silence feed him.

....

[Okay we are approaching the final part of this arc. We got there in the end! Let me know what you think worked, what didn't and what could be changed!

Now the next arc is Pirates of the Caribbean - Captain Jack 

If you guys would rather something different you got to let me know in the comments.]