The Dark Knight use pop culture iconography to cut out the religious and cultural baggage we have in our society.I've been a fan of Batman since I was five years old and watched the Adam West TV series on WUTV Channel 29 every night at 5. I've collected the comics and watched the cartoons and read the graphic novels and seen the movies. I've owned more action figures than is strictly decent to mention.

One of the great things about Batman is that the basic template"”an unbelievably rich guy becomes a paragon of physical fitness and intelligence to dress up as a bat and fight crime in order to avenge his parents' death"”can be mapped onto virtually any portrayal and any theme. There's the campy, comedic stylings of Adam West. The grim, gritty Clint Eastwood-esque old hero fighting in a Reagan-era satire in the graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. The darkly romantic hero of the 1970s comics and the Tim Burton movies. The day-glo gay icon of Joel Shumacher. The retro adventure hero of the 1990s animated series. They're all Batman in some way, even though they're radically different conceptions of the same character.

This time we have Batman, the grim defender against terrorism.

In The Dark Knight, terror comes not from the skies or from a foreign country but from a guy with a scarred face who wears clown makeup. Portrayed as everything from a foppish clown criminal to a lunatic serial killing psycho in the past, the Joker here is terrorism incarnate. His crime spree in the film is motivated toward invoking terror among the populace of Gotham City. He claims this is to bring down the Batman, but really, when it comes down to it, he has no agenda"”except to create more fear. He's uncontrollable and unreasonable. And deeply scary as a result.

We've seen this marriage of pop culture and contemporary zeitgeist before. The TV series Battlestar Galactica performed a similar trick by combining "˜ripped from the headlines' stories about post 9-11 politics with the iconography of a cheesy 1970s sci-fi series. The Dark Knight performs a similar trick, fusing familiar comic book trappings with this decade's anxieties. The genius of The Dark Knight is that it uses pop culture iconography effectively to cut out the religious and cultural baggage we have in our culture. The Joker's reign of terror is a secular one fuelled by madness. The result a meditation of how we live in the face of terrorism. It's about the what, not the why.

In one scene, we see the Alan Dershowitz scenario writ large: innocent victims facing a literal ticking time bomb and the police let the Batman beat the crap out the Joker. That the torture fails is about as relevant as Judge Scalia saying 24's use of torture works. What's more interesting are the events that follow which raise a much more interesting, if scary, critique: even if we get the information we need, what makes you think madmen and sociopaths are trustworthy in the first place?

Every major character in the film takes a unique position in the face of the possibility of having everything taken away from us. The Batman finds himself paralysed and ineffective. His own methods are through intimidation and fear, but in the face of a villain that does not care about anything, he's ultimately constrained by the rule of law. It's a conflict that reaches its breaking point with his solution that suspends civil liberties to save lives (and some cool special effects). District Attorney Harvey Dent, on the other hand, becomes increasingly strident in his stance until it too reaches its breaking point and he's left terrorizing both innocent and guilty alike. Then there's Commissioner Gordon, the film's everyman, who travels the middle course somewhere between the two.

The film's climax is a surprising, human-scaled event. I don't want to spoil the film for those who haven't seen it yet, but circumstances take place where people are forced to confront the darkness and the terror they face. It's a sequence that totally surprises the viewer because after everything witnessed we are not expecting to see what happens in the midst of such great evil.

I doubt Christopher Nolan set out to make a comprehensive statement on terrorism when he made The Dark Knight. But that the film makes people think about such things is one of the reasons why it's raised considerably above the escapist fare we normally see every summer. And it goes to show how our pop culture can be fashioned into metaphors that say something about the human condition.