Objection # 1: Batman is too visible, too often in the light: "It's like a return to the old TV show where he's standing around Commissioner Gordon's office planning strategy."

While "Batman in offices" may not suit my friend's taste, it seemed appropriate in that the main theme of the film seems to be the anarchy underlying order. That Batman (Christian Bale, best Batman ever!) could walk unnoticed into a brightly lit crime scene and disappear when everyone else turns his back only underscores Nolan's point—the seamier elements of human nature and urban life live in the corners of our eye, and we carefully avoid looking at them, leaving that job to the professionals. More importantly, though, it demonstrates how quickly those seams can be absorbed into the status quo. For though Batman is officially a vigilante to be apprehended on sight, he is unofficially protected by the police force, the Commissioner, the Mayor, and apparently everyone in power except for new D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who does not take long to step in line as well. While the TV news shows one story—Batman is a dangerous vigilante—we, the audience who knows what citizens cannot, see another story—Batman is a black ops agent, an implicitly condoned menace who menaces those we fear.

Objection #2: "Did it seem like Heath Ledger was doing a Paul Giamatti impression?"

Heath Ledger's performance has been praised beyond plausible belief, but make no mistake—this is an icon-making role. If nothing else, it means posters of Ledger in clown makeup will adorn college dorm walls for generations. But more interesting is how perfectly The Dark Knight captures the Joker's archetypal possibilities. This Joker is no Clown Prince, no cartoon: he is Mephistopheles offering moral choices in which every choice is corrupt; he is the god Pan presiding over a festival of anarchy; he is the malevolent spirit of Carnival overturning all established order. Ledger plays the Joker as the Joker should be played—as a brilliant schizophrenic, insanity crawling beneath a film of composure thin as his dripping greasepaint. He is a self-created malevolence, tailoring his own origin story to whatever the occasion makes most frightening. The Joker makes himself a figure of terror as consciously as does Batman; the choice of clown may be less visceral than bat, but a Dark Knight/It double feature would make me sick for days. But The Dark Knight takes the character past psychological plausibility and into another realm, the realm of nightmare. He can be anywhere at any time. His most terrifying crimes occur when he is incarcerated, or against people being carried to safety in armored cars and ferry boats. And always, he offers a choice that will damn the chooser no matter what. He is the Id run amuck, the lizard brain turned genius, the Hobbesian life, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," and he glories in it. It's no wonder Ledger needed therapy while playing this part.

Objection #3: It's no Heat.

And Heat is no Chinatown, and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns is no Crime and Punishment, but it may be the best Batman gets in the comic books. We have to be realistic about medium and marketplace: I'm not saying that superhero comic books or superhero movies cannot consider significant themes or that the authors thereof cannot lift those works into the realm of art, only that there is a vast difference between the expectations placed on a 1000 page Russian novel and a 200 page comic book. Dostoevsky's audience wants metaphysical dread and material squalor, and Miller's audience wants Neo-Nazi villainesses with inflated breasts and Batman in a robotic suit beating up Superman. If Miller can make sophisticated statements about fascism and terrorism between the boobs and BOOMS, then he is elevating the material within his capacity to do so. And if Nolan can make statements about the nature of evil with the pressure of fast-food tie-ins, action figure sales, and sequels, God bless him. But don't forget stuff needs to blow up.

Fortunately, Nolan does make some sophisticated statements on multiple levels, understandable both to the 13 year-olds and to the middle-aged and elderly (all of whom I saw in the theater). Your average 13 year old will get the no-win nature of the Joker's jokes on humanity, while no adult familiar with current events could miss The Dark Knight's contemporary political implications, particularly when Batman begins spying on literally every person in Gotham City. Frank Miller's Batman stories, on which Nolan's films heavily lean, tend to emphasize the fascistic Batman, from his spiffy rubber and leather wardrobe to his assertions that his mission overrides all other concerns. Nolan's Batman likewise will terrorize and torture the "bad guys" without compunction, and his actions constantly endanger the lives of police, emergency workers, and civilians. He spends inconceivable amounts of money fighting crime, yet when he throws a gala fundraiser for Harvey Dent it seems like the most mature and responsible possible use of his fortune—and, though no one mentions it, the use his sainted father would have approved.

The Dark Knight teaches a valuable lesson about the dangers of escalation and justice by violence. At one point, locked up in an interrogation room with Batman (the ultimate "bad cop," acting within social limits though under the cover of "renegade"), the Joker tallies the number of people killed between the two of them and Batman responds, characteristically, with frustrated violence. Joker only laughs with glee at his power over Batman—his insensibility to pain and violence means that Batman's methods have no authority over him. Batman's method, so effective against both gangsters and common thugs, is simply useless outside of the conventional society that condones it. As the Joker recognizes, Batman and Joker are unstoppable force and immoveable object; or, to put it differently, they are a moral perpetual motion machine, each the other's cause and effect in turn, ad infinitum. Yet the Joker also realizes what Batman refuses to accept—that he is a pawn in the status quo, and that when the establishment is done with him he will be thrown away. Hopefully we will not do the same with such a grand piece of "disposable" summer entertainment.