Member-only story
‘The Dark Knight’ Is a Crime Film Disguised as a Superhero Film
Christopher Nolan takes Batman out of conventional superhero cinema and places him inside a gritty urban crime tragedy built around organized crime, terrorism, corruption and moral collapse.
Whenever I return to The Dark Knight, I find it difficult to think of it simply as a superhero film. Of course Batman is a superhero, the Joker comes directly from comic-book mythology, and the film contains gadgets, costumes, chases and enormous action sequences, but the movie itself behaves differently from most films associated with the genre. Christopher Nolan constructs Gotham less like a fantasy playground for superheroes and more like a functioning criminal ecosystem where organized crime, corrupt police officers, prosecutors, politicians, surveillance systems and vigilantes all exist inside the same unstable structure. That is why I have always felt that The Dark Knight shares more DNA with something like Michael Mann’s Heat than with the conventional superhero blockbuster. Nolan does not remove Batman from comic-book mythology; he places that mythology inside the machinery of a modern urban crime epic.
What interests me most about Nolan’s Gotham is that crime already possesses structure…
