Oh boy. Get comfortable kids, because this one's gonna take a while…

Seriously, have you ever seen an ending as bleak as this one? Some exist, to be sure, but they usually involve subtitles or deep ideas, and they play only in those wee little theaters in the weird part of town. This movie was a monster hit. Everybody saw it. And yet despite the fact that it involves characters once closely associated with the words "Biff!" and "Pow!" it ends with the good guys making a horrible, awful compromise to keep the bad guys from winning. That gives it some depth that takes some serious unraveling to figure out.

In the first place, it demonstrates just how implacable an enemy the Joker is. He pushes the good guys so far—he commits so much mayhem in the name of making his demented point—that the only way to salvage a win is to lie. Or, to paraphrase Harvey, to live long enough to see themselves become the villains. That's a bad guy worth reckoning with, and in a genre that usually ends with the villains being carted safely off to jail, the messy, ugly means by which the heroes achieve their victory speaks volumes about how scary this guy is.

There's also the question of whether they actually achieve anything at all by their compromise, and in order to speak to that, we have to jump ahead to The Dark Knight Rises. The ending here basically constitutes a cliffhanger, and while we see the decision that Batman and Commissioner Gordon make, we don't really see the fallout. As it turns out, their actions work…on the surface. The mobsters stay in jail, Harvey's work doesn't get undone and for the next few years, Gotham enjoys a little peace and prosperity. But there's a bill come due for that, which the third movie covers in detail, and even without peeking ahead, we suspect that Batman might have to pay a heavy price if he wants to cover all of this up with a lie.

And that, in turn, comes back to the central question: is this a happy ending or a sad one? It's probably a little of both, with Gotham saved, but its white knight dead and the darker model on the run for a series of crimes he didn't commit. The Joker lost, but only just, and in the process he made his point clear. Sooner or later everyone breaks… everyone but one. And if he wants to keep his city safe, he's going to have to embrace the horrors of that so that the rest of Gotham doesn't have to.

The term for that is "pyrrhic victory," a victory that comes at so great a cost that the rewards might not even be worth it: like a football team that wins the big game only to lose their star quarterback and six or seven other guys to injury. That's the best that Batman can do here. The worst part is, he really has to make this bargain. As bad as it is, it still keeps Gotham safe, and the alternative was to let the Joker be proven right. As flawed and compromised as it is, it's still a victory: one that Gotham needs far more than Batman's reputation does.