One of Best of 2008?

The most interesting piece of filmcraft in The Dark Knight, which I recently saw on DVD, is the final shot of Keith Ledger as The Joker hanging upside; the picture swivels in the frame until he seems to be upright. His hair and other objects in the frame continue to fall "down," which is now "up" to the viewer, but Ledger himself is confident, poised; the Joker is using that poise, that non-chalance to taunt The Batman, because he knows he’s won. If the Batman kills him, he’s broken the Batman. If he doesn’t, this cat and mouse game will go on, which must be what the Batman really wants; the crime fighter shows, through his actions if not his words that he wants the criminal to continue.
It’s a simple trick of deconstruction. When you find a pair of binary oppositions which define themselves against each other (God, Satan; Good, Evil; Democrats, Republicans), you can usually make an interesting claim that A, which tries to crush or at least marginalize B, in fact defines itself by B, and so NEEDS B. (This also works with x and y). It’s a legitimate trick, one that’s been around for a while, but which deconstruction (and feminism and post-colonialism) have used over and over, sometimes more productively than at others. To some extent, a manufactures b; constant dieting leads to being overweight; an obsessive compulsive with neatness creates a chaotic life. In Dark Knight, the world of crime has turned to the Joker to be their hero to counter the heroics of Batman itself.
This convergence of opposites has always been part of the Batman story. However often the story gets rewritten, it always begins with Bruce Wayne as an orphaned rich boy whose parents were killed in a senseless robbery, "good" being birthed as the spawn of "evil." But this champion of capital and the superego has always associated himself with the id, with his underground lair and his horned mask, whose "ears" do not look anything like bat ears. (Why does he fashion himself after the most timid of predators, one known for avoiding trouble by wrapping itself up in its arms and hiding? According to the two page origin story that appeared about 6 months after Batman’s first appearance, Bruce Wayne adopted the bat persona because criminals are superstitious. I always assumed that this 1939 character was inspired by the 1931 adaptation of "Dracula"; according to my crack research team, aka Wikipedia, Batman’s creators say they were inspired by a 1930 haunted house movie called something like "The Bat Whispers." Okay, fine, but why were They inspired by a timid, flying mouse-like creature that eats mosquitoes? If only THEY had had access to Wikipedia, they might have named their movie after something truly scary, like unemployment, or Economic Deflation. "Unemployment Whispers!" "Deflation-Man"! Damn, that’d have been scary).
Back to this movie.
I was not surprised to see this superhero flick turn up on so many best of 2008 lists. Rarely has a movie been so tuned in to the zeitgeist. This Batman is America in the George Bush era. How did we end up creating evil when from the start we were focused on destroying it? To be blunt, The Joker is terrorism, and Batman is the war on terror. In Batman Begins, Chritian Bale’s Batman hung a character upside down to scare a response out of him; torture works (and I don't believed "hanged" would have been the right word, because the man is question is not hanged by the neck, but what do I know?). In The Dark Knight, this certainly works to get a response out of The Joker, but so what? Throughout the movie, The Joker consistently gives different answers to the question of how he got his scars (a question no one asks), but answers, it turns out, are not answers.
Thus the ending, in which Batman riding off on a motorcyle invites the world to blame him for everything that has gone wrong (I’ve skipped over the whole 2-Face / Harvey Dent subplot, so let me simply say that this neatly reflects the moral ambiguity developed elsewhere). Do we see a slight hint of America in Iraq?
I hope this is the end of the Batman film franchise for a few years. It takes a fair amount of showmanship to mix aesthetic figures of the failures of the American war on "terror" with really good motorcyle chases, but its the type 0f thing that can only be done once. After that, what you'll be left with is the motorcycle chase, which will certainly be twice as stimulating, but probably less than half as interesting.