Midway through The Dark Knight, there’s a scene in which Alfred Pennyworth - trusty butler to Bruce Wayne - attempts to analyse the mindset of the Joker. To do this, he regales a tale from his past, a story which gives a rare glimpse into the character's history. It places him in Burma: while attempting to unite certain tribes with bribery of valuable gems, he comes across a bandit who would steal the jewels not, as suspected, for trade but for fun.
His point? That some men - in Wayne’s case, the Joker - are not motivated by greed or anything you can discernibly hold on to. Some simply enjoy causing destruction for shits and giggles. To put an end to the thief's habits, Pennyworth and his associates, he tells Bruce, burn the entire forest down.
It’s perhaps a stretch to suggest this story could be applied to Christopher Nolan. But in an attempt to grasp onto the legacy of his 2008 sequel, the exchange could be of more use than first thought. The Dark Knight was released in cinemas a decade ago on a wave of anticipation for several reasons - some in its control, some wildly out of it - and went on to become a two-time Oscar-winner and highest-grossing film of that year.
Just three years before, Warner Bros had put their hopes on a director whose credits at the time were little-seen DIY indie Following (1998), the acclaimed mind-bender Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2002), a remake of a psychological thriller from Norway. The studio’s decision would change cinema history. In Batman Begins, Nolan handed the Caped Crusader a realism largely absent from previous attempts aided by a screenplay willing to screw with linearity. It consequently proposed a different way to introduce superheroes to the big screen - instead of ditching its comic book roots entirely, Nolan settled for reshaping the rules.
The Dark Knight doused its status as a superhero sequel in petrol, set it alight and ran as fast as it could in the opposite direction. Nolan made it clear that he's on a different battleground entirely from scene one - a twist-laden bank robbery sequence that sees a gang of criminals dispatch of each other until just one remains. It screams Dog Day Afternoon-style heist film than one with a costumed vigilante as its main character.
So, who is Nolan in Alfred's story? Is he the ones attempting to unite disparate societies - in his case: audience members - delivering something a far cry tonally from what expected viewers of such films would have ordinarily been used to? The pitting of established order (Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent) against anarchy (the Joker) as well as its mob warfare theme positioned it as such - and don't forget this is the same film to kill off its female lead (Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes) with a heart-stopping sequence (it's best?) that presents its central hero with a distressing ethical crisis usually reserved for films with a higher age certificate than 12a.
Or is he the jewel thief who married his talent with past success to craft a film he simply desired to make with no presumption it would alter the genre people categorised his film as? The Dark Knight is, before anything, best described as a Christopher Nolan film - a standalone multi-layered tale which, save for a superior car chase (well, Batpod chase), is devoid of action sequences and big-budget pyrotechnics.
It’s an intellectually written, masterfully paced thriller in which it feels absolutely necessary for its hero to wear a bat costume to take out the street's wrong-doers much in the same way Michael Mann would have managed had he forced Al Pacino to don spandex in his hunt for De Niro's McCauley in Heat.
I vote he's both. Nolan reduced the genre to ashes by crafting the apotheosis of superhero films without really meaning to. Did The Dark Knight pave the way for darker adaptations of beloved comic books? Perhaps, but those films will never succeed in quite so grand a manner because essentially, that's all they are: comic book films. Nolan made a crime film that just so happens to be inhabited by costumed heroes and in doing so, crafted something audiences felt happy to flock to eight times over one summer (guilty as charged).
To this day, a new generation is bandying it around in playground conversations in the same way last decade's early teens did with Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction (source: my little brother). The Dark Knight had big shoes to fill but instead cobbled together a whole new pair entirely - and ones whose size cannot be matched.
In Alfred's words, he burnt the forest to the ground.
