Adventure, Horror, Mystery, Philosophical Literature

We're going with "adventure" because technically we don't consider "comic book movie" its own genre quite yet, and adventure still pretty much fits the bill. It's got exotic locales, a swashbuckling hero, a city in dire need of saving, and even a few damsels in distress who could use rescuing when psychotic clowns toss them out windows. Comic books always thrived on that Boys' Own sense of adventure, and while The Dark Knight has a lot of grown-up things to say, anytime you have a good guy dressing up in cape and a mask, you're evoking the ten-year-old in all of us. And ten-year-olds love adventure.

Having said that, there's a lot of darkness here too, and the deeper you delve into it the scarier it gets. I think we can all agree that clowns are pretty terrifying, and when this particular clown carries knives in his pockets and blows up ferries full of people, things are apt to get very scary very quickly. The more you think about the Joker, the more frightening he gets. He basically wants to drive an entire city crazy, and show everyone how awful and evil they really can be. What's the odd chainsaw massacre or machete-wielding hockey goalie compared to that?

The irony is, Nolan's used classic horror tropes earlier in the series to help show us how scary Batman can be. Look at him here in Batman Begins, stalking the bad guys like Freddy Freaking Krueger. He's supposed to be the scary guy. But the Joker's garish clothes and smeary make-up end up trumping all that, with a little help from Harvey, whose handsome face ends up looking like the most grotesque Halloween mask ever.

As scary as he is (and as even scarier as his foes are), Batman still follows the tropes of a much simpler archetype: the detective. In fact, one of his arch-nemeses Ra's al Ghul actually refers to him as The Detective in the comics, and as far as mysteries go, he's pretty darn good at solving him. Watch him go all CSI in that apartment with the two bodies the Joker killed, taking the chunk of wall with the bullet casing in it and performing some forensic voodoo that coughs up a fingerprint. Or the way he ferrets out the cop whose wife is in the hospital, and who might actually murder a material witness just to keep her safe. This man was born to solve mysteries, and with a gaggle of evildoers thrown in his way, he's got plenty of culprits to track down footprint by footprint.

But underneath all of those genres, and in some cases helping to show us why those genres are so cool, is a strange and rather intense discussion of philosophy. The Joker doesn't just want a big pile of money. Heck, he even sets a mountain of it on fire at one point. No, he wants to destroy the basic notion of law and order: the sense that we can all live together like civilized people in a society that stresses the common good over individual desires.

You can see evidence of that all over. "Some men aren't looking for anything logical like money," Alfred explains about the Joker at one point. "They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." And later the Joker himself discusses his philosophy with Harvey, right before Harvey abandons his own principles and lets the coin decide who lives and who dies. "You know the thing about chaos?" he says. "It's fair." We disagree, but it's pretty clear that the Joker's actions are governed by a very scary philosophy.

Batman stands against him, of course, pushing the notion that people are inherently decent if you only give them hope. Ironically, he does that by breaking the law, but he's very clear about his one rule, and indeed he kind of wants to hang the whole thing up assuming that Harvey has what it takes to close the mob down for good.

The movie thus becomes a discussion about these warring philosophies: a battle between different ways of living, and what it takes for one or the other to emerge triumphant. We're not certain in the end which side wins, but you have to admit, it's a heck of a lot more interesting than some dusty philosophy debate in some university somewhere.