Morality play

I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight. It wasn't perfect, but I do think it was the best super-hero movie I've ever seen, for a variety of reasons. The most important one, I think, is that the film makers understood that the powerful driver of super-hero stories, the thing that raises them above colourful sound and fury, is morality. They're about people making tough moral distinctions and choices. These people are bigger than us, and the choices are bigger, too, more noble or more evil, but that's so that we can see them better. They're archetypal, mythically resonant: the White Knight, the Dark Knight, but especially the Joker, who here has no real origin story and who wreaks havoc on a scale which is strictly speaking not believable. But that's to be expected, because he's not a human criminal - he's a malign trickster god, a blend of Coyote, Loki and Satan.

But to drive home the point that this is about all of us, not just heroes and their decisions, the key moral victory takes place within groups of ordinary people. The setup leading to their dilemma seemed a bit contrived, but in the context of a superhero story, that's OK too.

The film drew on the insights and highlights of older Batman stories without sticking with any particular version or becoming too cliched. I think I saw elements of The Long Halloween, The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and there were doubtless others. People have been talking about this movie a lot, and I expect it will be continue to be talked about for a long time to come. I have a feeling we'll be seeing lots of essays and theses on this one.