THE DARK KNIGHT
(Various cinemas)

A year from his seventieth birthday, Batman appears to be perennial – potent, resilient, tirelessly protean. Dreamed up in the Depression by a gang of scribblers and cartoonists led by Bob Kane (who had a germ of an idea about a cloaked avenger and a sketch of a winged man borrowed from Leonardo Da Vinci), Bill Finger (the writer who honed and perfected the concept) and Jerry Robinson (who devised the look of the new hero’s nemesis, the Joker), the character has shifted constantly with the times, regularly transmogrifying to fit the climate of the age.

A violent vigilante from his earliest appearances in May 1939, he subsequently softened with the introduction of a teenaged sidekick, battled against the Axis powers in the comics and in a pair of big-screen serials, became a jovial post-war father figure at the head of an extended family that included a Bat-Woman and a Bat-Hound, encountered primary-coloured robots and aliens at a time when flying saucers were de rigeur at the (B-)movies, and acted as a ninnyishly lantern-jawed straight man to a succession of bad puns and pratfalls in the television series of 1966–68. In the 1970s, under the stewardship of Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, the comics jettisoned the sidekicks and turned their protagonist into a suave, James Bondian globetrotter, while the 1980s and 90s saw the character diversify into a plethora of different versions – the mouthpiece for Frank Miller’s cranky, Reagan-era satire in The Dark Knight Returns, a dreamer lost in a maze of sign and symbol in Grant Morrison’s densely allusive Arkham Asylum and a diminutive yuppie continually overshadowed by the theatrics of his enemies in two successful films by Tim Burton, in which their director perfected his distinctive strain of fairy-tale gothic. Far more versatile than any of his pop-cultural peers – Superman, say, or Wonder Woman, or Captain America – the character is a barometer of his times, a reflection of what any given age expects of its heroes.

His latest incarnation in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his Batman Begins (2005), presents us with a grim and desperate mirror image of the twenty-first century. Never can a movie of such size and ambition, released by a major Hollywood studio and intended for a mainstream audience of global proportions, have deliberately inculcated so minatory and oppressive an atmosphere of pessimism and despair. That the film is also so recklessly exhilarating, with its giddily kinetic narrative, overwhelming martial soundtrack and ceaseless barrage of gunplay, pursuits and explosions, makes it one of the most interesting (yet troubling) interpretations of the myth to date.

Times Archive, 1966: In defence of Batman

Not a word of complaint was received from the police

• Batman sticks to letter of the law

• Batman's £3m. U.S. success, 1966

Nolan, the thoughtful stylist behind Memento, Insomnia and The Prestige, has done well to remember the one fact about the character which has remained constant throughout all those alterations, embroiderings, remodellings, distortions and outright manglings – that, unlike other superheroes, there is nothing at all “super” about Batman. Having no special powers or science-fictional abilities beyond his deductive skills and phenomenal physical prowess, he represents a peak of human perfectibility – and Nolan has, in consequence, made plausibility his watchword. Every aspect of the crime-fighter’s milieu has been granted as believable and realistic an explanation as possible (the hero’s cape becomes a glider, his car an urban tank appropriated from the US military and his arch-enemy the Joker’s horrifically distinctive features the result of scars and make-up, “war-paint” designed to intimidate). The world of the film is necessarily fantastic but it feels closer to ours – uncomfortably, distressingly closer – than any previous version.

The screenplay (co-written by Nolan with his brother Jonathan, a regular collaborator whose original idea provided the inspiration for Memento) is able to dispense with the slow-burning set-up of the first film and, opening with a bank heist characterized by exponential bloodshed, dramatize a dual assault on society – initially by a recognizable menace, the embittered remnants of the Mob, and then by something quite unprecedented, the indiscriminate, homicidal fury of a man whose existence was only hinted at in Batman Begins, a killer who dresses as a clown. The plot is unforgivingly intricate, but it is the film’s vision of a world beset by irreversible decay which remains its most resonant quality.

In Nolan’s Gotham City, madness, terror and brutality bubble constantly beneath the crust of society, always threatening to gush into the world and engulf it. Criminality is omnipresent, good people are corrupted with appalling ease and even our putative heroes end the film mired in moral compromise, given no choice by the forces that oppose them but to adopt some of their methods. The most powerful of these forces is the impulse towards pure anarchy personified by the Joker, in a justly lauded performance by the late Heath Ledger. The film never tells us exactly who this murderer without a motive is, or where he comes from (“nothing in his pockets but knives and lint” comments the policeman who arrests him), although the character himself provides several different accounts of how he came to be, each contradicting the other, while offering up precisely the kind of glib explanation for evil to which we have grown wearily accustomed at the pictures, before laughing, tugging it away and challenging us to recalibrate our expectations.

Whether setting fire to a vault piled high with laundered money, messing about in a nurse’s uniform as a grotesque transvestite or giggling in the grime of a police cell floor in order to provoke a beating, Ledger’s Joker invites our complicity. He expects the audience to laugh along with him at each new explosion, each car chase packed with bombastic carnage, each fresh outrage, atrocity and orgy of destruction. “Some men just want to watch the world burn”, says Alfred (a droll but weatherbeaten Michael Caine) to his employer as they struggle to understand the psychology of their enemy, and there occurs to the audience the awful suspicion that it might as well be us that he is talking about – for why else have we come to the cinema if not to watch the world burn, however cathartic the experience might appear, safely contained within the screen?

Confronted with such an elemental (and strangely childlike) lust for destruction, Christian Bale’s snarling Batman is left looking almost ineffectual. It will be giving little away to report that he triumphs in the final reel, but the victory is a pyrrhic one and it is difficult not to conclude that the Joker has won the moral argument, at least on points. He might have quoted Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”.

Studded with terrific supporting performances from Gary Oldman as a sombre Jim Gordon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, quietly excellent in what appears to be a standard-issue girlfriend role before the trope is savagely upended, and Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent, the film’s most complicated antihero, The Dark Knight would constitute a considerable achievement even if it were to remain as one half of a diptych alongside Batman Begins. The film’s finale, however, appears to promise not only a further instalment but yet another new persona for the character, as a man hunted and betrayed, haunted by errors of judgement, afflicted by vanity and in the grip of delusion. Seven decades after his creation, Batman continues to evolve – a process to which his audiences will no doubt bear fascinated witness, tinged, just a little, by unease at what he might become.

Jon Barnes’s second novel, The Domino Men, was published earlier this year.

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