Mindblowing. In an almost frustrating kind of way.

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2008)

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." Friedrich Nietzche.
Perhaps it was the midnight opening's fault. I was very tired. I knew something spectacular, awe-inspiring, and vast was passing in front of my eyes, but it was all so very fast. It was like passing a beautiful landscape in a minute. A two-and-a-half-hour-long minute. I felt aggravated that Christopher Nolan had not given his public more time for the (no doubt) wonderful movie to sink in. I felt genuinely angry.
Dare I say disappointed? But this morning, getting up for work, the wretched movie would not get off my mind. Everything came back in pieces, Gordon's teary-eyed pleas, Lucius' righteous resignation, Alfred's military past, Rachel's goodbye, Dent's near-unshatterable idealism and the Joker's manic genius, twitchy words, his unbelievable coherence and the fact I found I could quote almost everything he had said, notwithstanding the fact that it was impossible to understand the first time through. And Batman was everything. He was the glue attempting to hold a crumbling world together.
And suddenly another annoyingly memorable Nolan film came to mind: Memento. I thought the movie to be completely unbearable at first. Now, after over 20 views, I daresay it is my absolute favourite.
The Dark Knight is of the same substance: a torturing, hard-to-digest plot, which serves to distracts you from Nolan's point. The plot is amazing, but focus on it too hard, and you will miss the golden thread beneath the surface, the soul of his story: the strife within his characters, the strife within society, within existence. The anguish of believing in the ultimate goodness of man in a city as rotten as Gotham, goodness taught through an example killed in an alley so long ago, anchors the very motivation of Batman, the source of all his strength and his greatest weakness. The faith in a condemned humankind as opposed to himself alone, is the Batman's ultimate paradox. A paradox that is clenched, twisted, and crushed by the prodigious Joker, gradually destroying all that Bruce Wayne cares for in the world, leaving him with nothing but his pain, his solitude, and his excruciating hope.
The Joker, devastatingly, makes more sense and coherence than all of Gotham's desperate society and leaders put together. With every brush of genius he paints the gruesome portrait that shows the world: "Your system is broken. Your rules are farce. Nothing can come from your mediocre selfishness, your inescapably flawed human nature." It seems strange, but someone said that before.
It was Bruce, the day he set out to achieve the vengeance that would have quelled the storm inside him. The day the Batman might have never been.