I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Obviously I loved The Dark Knight. I knew I would: everything I saw leading up to the release promised that it would be even better than Batman Begins. So while it's no surprise that I and just about everybody else in America loved it, I would still like to spend a little time elaborating on my specific reasons for loving it so much.

(By the way, I should mention that this blog post is going to be filled with spoilers throughout. If you haven't seen the movie, I suggest you go see it now. I'll still be here when you come back.)

I could go on about the improved bat-suit (I've always hated the cumbersome body armor--the new model is at least a step in the right direction), the excellent story (I started to wonder where the different threads were leading, but then the final two minutes of the film brought it all together perfectly), and of course Heath Ledger's amazing performance (what else needs to be said?).

As great as these things are, I'm not going to talk any more about them. What I really want to discuss are what I see as the major themes the film addresses. Batman has been around for nearly 70 years, and has seen many new interpretations in the comics. Comic books are like any other medium in that most of the output is crap, but there have been a few ideas about Batman in 70 years that are truly inspired. What Christopher Nolan has done in his films is take the best ideas and make them work together.

My favorite thing about Batman Begins was the emphasis on Batman/Bruce Wayne's dual nature. This is something I realized from watching The Animated Series: Billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne is just an act, and Batman is his true personality. It's a revelation the first time you realize this about Batman, and Nolan nailed it. The Dark Knight adds to it no fewer than three of my favorite concepts from the comics.

The film opens with the idea that Batman's very presence inspires a different class of criminal. I'm not sure where I read this first, but I know it's in some of Frank Miller's comics. It's an answer to the question of why Superman's villains go to prison but all of Batman's go to an insane asylum. I love how in The Dark Knight Batman's success in fighting conventional crime leaves the field open for the Joker to exist as a direct reaction to the newly imposed order. What follows is a brilliant interpretation of the Joker as an agent of pure anarchy which, while maybe always existed beneath the surface, has never been as overt as it is in The Dark Knight.

As the Joker becomes a force of pure anarchy, Batman becomes pure authoritarianism, which is the second revolutionary comic-book-derived theme presented in the film. The idea can be traced directly to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which, along with Watchmen, is credited as beginning the deconstruction of the superhero. Before 1986 superhero comics uniformly depicted their protagonists as superior beings who deserved to deal out their own justice by virtue of their special powers and their moral superiority. It was an unrealistically optimistic view. The Dark Knight Returns challenges this basic assumption by depicting a Batman who is very violent, sometimes cruel, and completely outside of the law. For the first time, a Batman comic book raised questions about what moral right a man has to appoint himself a crimefighter. Some of Frank Miller's written and spoken statements since then suggest that his personal opinions about the Batman are more positive than has often been assumed, The Dark Knight Returns can still be read as subverting the superhero archetype. Frank Miller revealed how authoritarian Batman really is, and the reader can judge the morality of it.

This idea is all over the new Dark Knight film, most significantly in the moment that Batman reveals a device that lets him spy on virtually every citizen in Gotham. It's also evident when he asserts that he alone, and nobody else, has the right to be going around in a costume fighting crime. This doesn't mean he's not heroic. Just as with The Dark Knight Returns comic, it's possible to cheer for Batman every step of the way and get thrills from watching him trounce the bad guys, but still recognize the basic moral contradiction behind his actions.

The third thing I was glad to see Nolan incorporate into the new film is not so much a theme as it is a story element or concept. Like I mentioned above, I was wondering for a while how the Joker and Two-Face story threads were going. I thought it was great that the struggle for Harvey Dent's soul also turned into Batman's ultimate fight against Joker's anarchy. The idea that the Joker intentionally took the most good and pure public figure in Gotham and drove him to insanity is lifted directly from The Killing Joke by Alan Moore. It's a pretty simple idea, but greatly executed in both cases. The philosophical struggle between Batman and Joker is far more intriguing than any physical battle could ever be.

So there you have it. These are the ideas that make The Dark Knight not just the best Batman movie, but probably the best superhero film ever made. And I emphasize film, because while people are talking about how this elevates the whole superhero genre, I must point out that all of the moral complexity and philosophical questions it contains were first introduced in the Batman comic books over twenty years ago. In other words, the greatest superhero film of all time has merely caught up to where comics were in 1986.