by Chris March

What is it about The Dark Knight that has swept the globe up in such a frenetic stir?

You might coin it the "Titanic" of comic book movies. You might tally it up in the record books as the first summer blockbuster to fire on all eight cylinders in a long, long time. You might call it Heath Ledger's brightest (or darkest, if you wish to be literal) hour. You might even call it a bluff of brilliantly orchestrated marketing.

But you know it goes deeper than that. Director Christopher Nolan and his gang have gouged open some deeper wound; woken up some slumbering slobber monster. You need more than a good movie with good actors and good marketing to become such a nuclear bomb. So perhaps to find the answer to "what is it about The Dark Knight," we need to take a look at ourselves before we start talking Oscar nominations, box office records and sequels.

(Oh, and if you're tired of hearing people gush over this movie, or haven't seen it yet and don't want to stumble over any light spoilers, you probably should stop reading. Like, now.)

The Dark Knight. Such could not be a more fitting title. Structurally speaking, yes, it is long, and it is dark. And with every twist, turn and parry through the movie (over 2 and a half hours worth), the film blooms into something too ripe and frightening to take as just a snap of the fingers for entertainment sake. This ain't Spiderman 4, folks. It's a cinematic thunderclap, and it’s made to shake your whole world up.

Nolan has made a few decent films in the past, but never before has he woven such a poem. It flickers and shines, like giving birth to a star in the middle of the darkest reach of outer space. And that's certainly what this movie is. Every shade of light, every script line, every gesture, grimace, smile, and kaboom is part of some sublime equation coercing into this new wild zeitgeist of life in 2008. Even surrounded by such madness, death, and loss (tragically, on screen and off), The Dark Knight is as alive as big screen cinema can get.

While highly entertaining, it's rather uneasy and will likely saw the ends of your nerves off. Referencing the title again, it’s the story’s unseen corners which make it so rattling. Nolan never shows what fills the Joker with such unhinged chaos. You don't see what Rachael Dawes doesn't see in Bruce Wayne. You don't see why Batman refuses to kill The Joker when you think he deserves it. You don't see why justice has to fight 10 times harder than chance does. You don't see why you fall in love with the bad guys, or why the characters you fall in love with have to die. You never see the speeding trains railing towards you, oh, but you hear them coming, like nails on a chalkboard. And that’s how tense you will feel the whole movie through.

The movie is about crooked love crashing around terrible bends. And about politics running full-sprint through a marathon with broken legs. It's the sun and the moon eclipsing, together, and you can't help but look directly into its dark burning center and see for yourself that we all have two sides to us. The light. And the dark.

And that's the beauty of it.

“This is what happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object,” The Joker tells Batman while hanging upside down from a skyscraper.

Truthfully, the movie isn’t about Batman at all. Not really. It’s about us; the world’s superpowers, the world’s outcasts, the vengeful and the avengers. All crusading to stay alive while killing our demons at the same time. And how it’s uglied and scarred the best of us, changed us and criminalized us, made us dark and cornered.

We’ve all become two-faced, equals parts Joker and Batman in one way or another. A comedy and a tragedy. Or maybe that’s just how brilliantly Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, and Christian Bale played their characters respectively, but still…

No words ring louder from the film than Harvey Dent’s press conference. “The night is darkest just before the dawn. But I promise you… The dawn is coming.”

With hospitals blowing up and rescue workers fighting to save every life they can, you can’t help but think about all the wrinkles of now. And the chain reaction of everything that has happened since September 11, 2001. Terror threats, eroded freedoms, war, murder, death, global warming, fear, Paris Hilton, the fall of Britney Spears, super hero movies pwning box office records, declining economy…and the list stretches on.

You can't help from thinking about our government when Batman unveils his new ultimate spying device to Lucius Fox. "I must find The Joker," he scowls, like a hungry wolf. But even at the cost of Gotham's liberty and freedom? In a flash of light, you suddenly see very little separates super heroes from George W. Bush and government policies. Clearly, there is more of us in The Dark Knight's Gotham City than back issues of DC Comics.

We need air. We need light. It’s been so dark for so long now. Hope has all but become a flicker in many parts of the globe. Truth has become a question, not a statement. And where have all the cowboys gone?

But when Dent says the dawn is coming, something eclipses inside of me. It’s not a goofy line in a silly comic book movie. It’s convincing foreshadowing. In real life. In 2008. In America. In Pennsylvania. In Pottstown, Douglassville, Birdsboro, Reading, Philly, wherever I may roam. At that moment, I truly believe in Harvey Dent.

After she saw The Dark Knight, my mom said how depressing of a movie it was. “Too much death.” But I see it differently. That’s what the night is about. It dies every day when the sun breaks through the dawn. Though it’s uneasy and dark, The Dark Knight is the greatest glimmer of hope we’ve gotten for the future in a long time. The night is just a reminder that we’re alive. The light will always be coming back around, no matter how dark it gets.

And it’s hard not to get caught up in the current of hope that seems to be rebuilding an empire right now. Take the most obvious example, Barack Obama. “Change we can believe in.” Whether you like the dude for president or not, you cannot deny that his campaign has stirred up some new wild hope in the people he’s reached.

I can't believe I haven't seen anyone do this on the internets yet.

And as for the movie, when was the last time so many far-reaching people got together behind one common event. Certainly all these people are more than comic nuts. The 21^st century has been all about individualism and struggling to find new ways to define your freedom. For an overwhelming majority of people to be behind this movie says something about us. It says we can still be together, think together, share with one another. It’s been a long time since something like that has happened.

Perhaps we’re ready to rebuild our crumbling castle. We’re ready to believe in each other again. Could it be we are standing at the silver lining of a new golden era?

About death? Ha! Sorry mom, and anyone else who felt that way about The Dark Knight, but it's about coming back to life.

Don’t believe me? Watch the scene again where everything comes to full fruition, when The Joker’s unstoppable force hits Gotham City’s immovable object. Not Batman, but the crowds of scared citizens and crooks held for explosive ransom on their own respective tankers on the river. They turn the Joker’s orchestrated fear away, instead of on each other as so many of us have for a long time now. The tide, it feels, is turning.

“These people just showed you they are ready to believe in good.”

So am I, Batman. So am I.

…

Oh, and want to know how I got these scars?

Let's face it Batman, we make better kid action figures than movies.

Remember the days when George Clooney was Batman? When director Joel Schumacher had actually descended the Batman movie franchise into a campier universe than the 1960s sitcom starring Adam West?

Batman, the most twisted noble hero of comic lore had become a terrible joke (rather ironic considering his arch nemesis, yes?). The franchise was raking in big name stars like the Governator, Val Kilmer, Jim Carrey, Tommy Lee Jones, and so on, but these actors were playing CARTOON characters, not the deeply disturbed personas created in the shadowy comic. Don't even get me started on the dialogue of those movies. Ick.

So many of us utterly lost all faith in the Batman franchise, when it once held so much hope. It almost seems like Alicia Silverstone and Chris O'Donnell were so embarrassed they went into hiding.

But then Batman began, again.

The joke, it seems, was on us. Or atleast, Joel Schumacher's vision of a Gotham City that looked more like it had come from The Matrix.

So here we are, nearly 2 weeks from the release of "The Dark Knight." And we're talking about how Heath Ledger's re-invented Joker is the most brilliant chaos to ever fire a bazooka on a big screen. He's an atomic bomb of a character that quite literally surprised everyone who knew him mostly as "that aussi who played a homosexual in a controversial cowboy movie" (Brokeback Mountain).
There's even Oscar talk.

Suffice it to say, we've come a long, long way from Poison Ivy's cringing persona in Batman & Robin.

There really isn't even a point to this particular blog, other than the fact that July 18 can't come soon enough. And I'm glad the past is behind us.

The report's in. Docs have ruled Heath Ledger's death an accidental overdose, spurred by the mixed effect of various prescription drugs. I think that's what we all saw coming.

But looking at the drugs that were in his system, all I can say is, the dude must have been STRESSED OUT. If someone would have just hugged him and given him some warm milk to sleep easier, he'd still be here. I shake my fist at you non-huggers of stressed out people who have lots of prescription meds waiting in their bathroom medicine cabinet.

But, scope the end of this interview from November to see the sort of mindframe he may have been in since becoming the Joker. Sends a little chill up my spine.

Thank God someone had the good taste to pull the plug on this crap.

I really didn't see the relation of this to his death, at least at this point, before we even know what he really died from. This was more unnecessarily sensational than typical Paris Hilton coverage. I wag my finger at you ET, you bad dog.

I mean, sure, I'm a factory worker in the industry of truth, but we have no solid proof the dude died of a drug overdose, and from the looks of it--it looks like an accidental OD on sleeping pills, as opposed to a death from stuffing his head with coke. And it's a video from 2 years ago? Whoopdee do. Maybe it documents the beginning of the end, but please ET, let dust settle before you start sweeping it out the door.

Heath Ledger died one week ago today, at the age of 28. While he didn't leave a wealth of work behind for us to pour over and help fuel our inevitable "what if.." questions, he left enough greats to get his own Top 5 Tuesday. So here are the five must sees from Ledger's career. (Oh, that's funny, I don't see Brokeback anywhere? Wierd.)

5. Skip Engblom in Lords of Dogtown
Written by Stacey Peralta himself. Ledger leads a pack of youngsters, looking to change the world with their skateboards, one kickflip at a time. It puts the 'roll' in rock and roll, dude.

4. Dan in Candy
So you got this 3-act Australian film about a poet (Ledger) who falls in love with a student, and next thing you know, they're shooting heroine together in the midst of their young wild romance, and it quite easily propels into one of those explosive Sid and Nancy love stories. And then you add Geoffrey Rush to the cast? I'll take this Candy from a stranger any day. (You get indie film cred points for knowing this one too.)

3. Patrick Verona in 10 Things I Hate About You
Every 90's high school dramatic comedy needed house parties (check), kegs (check), bodaciously beautiful babes (Julia Stiles? check!), and ensemble casts packed with rising stars (check). But Ledger made this more than every other 90's high school flick. Right before your eyes, the withdrawn badboy unfolds into an aussi-accented romancing charmer. Girls around the world started eating there hearts out right then, as he sung Franki Valli to Julia Styles from the bleachers at soccer practice.

2. Robbie Clark, the bearded actor side of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There
While Cate Blanchet easily nabbed the spotlight by portraying the most famous Dylan era in the only movie with a lot of Bob Dylans, Ledger got to portray one of the more treasured eras--The whole "finding himself again" era, centered around "Blood on the Tracks" where he struggled with divorce, and himself.

1. The Joker in The Dark Knight trailer
The movie doesn't hit theaters to July, but the tiny bits of Ledger we've seen as the chaotic face-painted bazooka-wielding anarchist have already chalked up as one of the greatest roles we've seen in ages. In other words, this trailer is better than most movies, and Ledger's psychotic turn as one of the most lauded villains of all time is exactly why.

Well, by now we all are well aware of the unfortunate passing of Heath Ledger.

When the news first trickled into The Mercury hours after his body was discovered, I wasn't exactly sure how to react. Our own media-savvy Kim Toth darted out from her desk in ad services to tell everyone. As she said the words, some weird sadness washed over me, and I still can't explain why. I kind of slumped in my chair and thought to myself, "Man, we all just lost something."

I would certainly never compare his passing to the magnitude of watching the Twin Towers collapse on television years ago, but it was that same heavy feeling of WTF! It's that sort of thing that grounds you.

I don't know why this has hit me as it has. Maybe I'm just too stoked over his performance as the new Joker in The Dark Knight trailer. I haven't even seem more than 3 minutes of the film and am convinced he's given an incredible and convincing performance. Plus he ruled as Blood On The Tracks-era Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There."

And of course, "10 Things I Hate About You" was the last great teen movie of the 90's.

He's WAY more than just "that cowboy" from Brokeback Mountain. In fact, that's the last flick I think of when I think of Ledger.

But of all the stories and blogs that tinker with whether his passing was suicide, or accident, or etc, this one (from my hero, Josh Horowitz) is the only thing I've really read that reads like a deserving memorial, instead of a gossip or news piece.

The best part about this weekend's release of "I Am Legend" wasn't the Gollum-meets-Frankenstein zombies. Nor was it Will Smith's graying hair or odd fascination with Shrek. It was the new trailer for Dark Knight featuring lots of tasty footage of the new joker, Heath Ledger.

Doubters, prepare to hate yourself. Ledger masters a wildly manic and deranged villain that is sure to color the revamped Batman film series the way Jack Nicholson colored the first Batman. Dark Knight has become the most anticipated anything for me in 2008. Peep the trailer below, and let me know what you think.

I Am Legend looks awesome enough as is. But if you catch it in theaters (starts Dec 14), you'll be treated to a new trailer for The Dark Knight, featuring some footage of Heath Ledger masquerading around Gotham City as The Joker. Word is he's surpassed all expectations, which says a bit considering he plays the same character that Jack Nicholson nailed in Tim Burton's Batman. And I imagine he won't be prancing around to Prince tunes like Nicholson got to either. So it must have been a totally uphill battle for Ledger. But if director Chris Nolan did even half as good with this sequel as he did with "Batman Begins," we're all in for a treat. PLUS my favorite Hollywood cutie Maggie Gylenhall has taken over for Katie Holmes' role. This movie couldn't bomb if it TRIED to!

Of course, it isn't hard for a Batman movie to be good after that "Batman & Robin" movie with AH-NULD as Mr. Freeze. "MY NAME IS FREEEEZE. Learn it well, for it is the chilling sound of your doom!"