Batman, The Dark Knight, is a morality play told by Nietzsche, wherein the only non-conflicted premier character who manages “moral” clarity is one who would be considered demented and insane in any non-Nietzschean world. When truth is arrived at in Gotham’s little Nietzschean shop of horrors it is truth that is arrived at by a will to power and the only reason that it bears any familiarity to what any non ubermensch being would understand is a sheer “accident” created by Batman’s will to power.

The film is a very good piece of cinema when one considers the art of it. The script is tight. The One hundred and fifty minute length of the film gives plenty of time for character development. The film techniques are varied and are used in a thematic fashion that fit the scenes used for the different techniques. The composition scores draw the viewer in and heightens the drama of the movie. The acting is solid with Christian Bale being quite good and Heath Ledger being brilliant, though personally I didn’t care any more for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s work in this film then I did Katie Holmes’ work in the previous film. In my opinion that role was never cast right. The costumes, colors, and lighting, were muted and dark fitting the theme of the movie. Nolan has created a comic book movie that seeks to leave the “comic” behind and instead seeks to give us a realistic Gotham City and a realistic story line. Nolan’s work is ambitious as movies go. Definitely too ambitious (the problem of evil, the nature of man, chaos vs. order, chance vs. design, the symbiotic relationship between hero and villain, the use of evil to advance good, freedom vs. security, etc.), though the sheer breadth of the subject matter and the quality of the film leaves one forgiving Nolan for biting off to much. We should hasten to add that it is precisely because the film is so ambitious that it is difficult to give a review that captures the whole film.

Nolan’s film finds all of his characters except one conflicted with divided loyalties. Rachel Dawes is conflicted about love with her loyalties divided between Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne. Harvey Dent, an ambitious District Attorney, is conflicted about career as seen by the fact that he was known as “two face” by the police force. His divided loyalties fluctuate between his own personal advance and the means by which that advance is attained. Commissioner Gordon is conflicted by loyalties to family and loyalties to work. Bruce Wayne is conflicted by identity. Only The Joker is unfamiliar with the uncertainty that being deeply internally conflicted brings. Nolan’s characters, excepting one, all seem to be in some existential internal crisis. The entrance of the Joker becomes the meaningful, and sometimes final, experience that resolves this cornucopia of internal existential crises.

Nolan works the film so that his only morally non-conflicted character becomes a kind of anti-god who forces the other characters to operate out of a will to power to rise above the conflict brought about by divided loyalties it their lives. The result is that as the film rolls the main characters become more and more like the anti-God of the film inasmuch as they legislate reality by their fiat word. The consequence of this is that even when the “hero saves the day” the reality that is created out of that deliverance is one based upon a noble lie that is as irrational as the “truth” that the anti-god desired to foster upon Gotham city.

Good wins out in the end but it is a good that has no reason for existence. Nolan’s good is an existential leap in the dark night.

As we explore the movie we begin to see that Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent become symbols for Gotham, and by extension, humanity as it wrestles with the world left to us by the death of God and the presence of the anti-God. Dent and Wayne come to us as a set of covenant heads for humanity. Harvey Dent is labeled as the White Knight who is portrayed to Gotham as a man of virtue and justice and symbolically he is set up as the man who can bring a sense of meaning and order to Gotham. As the film unravels though Dent’s virtue is destroyed by the anti-god God and Dent comes to “see the light” to the point that he Himself takes on the scarred image of the anti-god and becomes a being that differentiates himself from the rest of the herd by sheer will as directed by chance. Dent’s covenant headship fails. There is no justice and virtue that can withstand the anti-god. Batman, on the other hand, is the Dark Knight and so is Dent’s reverse mirror image. While Dent, as District Attorney, uses the Law to pursue the end of criminality, Batman is a criminal turned inside out. He uses the vices of criminals to destroy criminals. Batman is The Joker with a deeply misplaced and irrational sense of morality. Nolan seems to be saying whereas the Dent character captures the idealistic for fallen man, the Batman character captures the sordid reality, and in a narrative twist the sordid reality is used to prop up the existence of the idealistic for those of the Gotham herd, who, because they do not have it in them to rise above the herd and become ubermensch, need the idealistic myth reinforced in order to function. The Dark Knight, uses the powers of the anti-god (the constructed noble lie spoken out of creaturely fiat) to create order for the herd.

Batman, as the Dark Knight covenant head, by means of substitution, takes on the sins of the White Knight and so brings order to Gotham. The White Knight remains the hero but for all who can see behind the veil we know that any order or justice is based on the noble lie. The Joker has won even if only a handful of people in Gotham know it.

In this sense, Batman is a deeply cynical movie. In a culture where God is dead an optimistic cynicism used to prop up the myths that make society governable is perhaps the best we can hope for.

This movie is not for children, or the feeble minded.