There are a lot of windows in the Gotham City of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight . As metaphor, as motif, as symbol, as literal implication. Look how they open up.

Key one-sheets le꧑ading up to the movie’s release saw B💜atman surveying Gotham through one, fist-shattering another, blowing out a whole bunch of them with a flaming Bat-symbol.

The film’s wrong-footing (hang on, it’s broad daylight!) openin♏g shot contains thousands of the glinting things, staring back at you.

“Frankly, there’s a lot of windows up here,” says a cop checking for snipers during Commissioner Loeb’s funeral. Batman crashes ꦰthrough one in Hong Kong and hurls himself out of a two-way to save DA Dawes.

And🍃 as The Joker conducts his final atrocity, Commissioner Gordon quizzically comments: “Why’d he choose a spot with such big windows?” A⭕ll the better to see Gotham with…

The metaphor is clear and eloquent, Christopher Nolan and co-writer/sibling Jonathan framing moral murk with pi🔥ercing clarity.

No matter how posh your 25th-floor penthouse you’re just thin gla🌼ss from the street below and all its mayhem. Gotham is a city of glasshouses and danger could come from any window.

And as The Joker’s pawns abseil out from a skyscraper windꦯow, camera plunging over the edge, your trembling knees and churning stomach posit a question: when 💜you peer through the window and into a void this deep, does it peer into you?

Yes. It’s pretty h෴eavy for a blockbuster. Yes. It sets a high, high bar🍰.

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If you saw The Dark Knight in Imax, you’ll know how thick with palpable vertiginous terrꩵor theও opening shot was.

Comparisons with the city-set intros of Hitchcock’s Vertigo or Psycho spring to mind: big titles to evoke, yes, but Knight ’s no lightweight.

Contras𓄧t it with Transformers, which arrived on Imax in a clutter of incomprehensible junk, a barrier to partඣicipation in the film.

By contrast, as Nolan puts it, his use of Imax created a window that opened Gotham right up: “You can pass through the screen if it has the clarity and depth of Imax photography.”

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If Batman Begins situated one man’s psychodrama against the backdrop of a sickening city, Knight locates his psychodrama within that city, thr♐owꦐing in The Joker to gleefully shatter barriers between Bruce Wayne and all he reviles.

By turn, viౠsuals and subtexts throw that world open to the audience, rendering it relevant through teasing real-world parallels (post-9/11 America, Baghdad, knife crime)🌱 and pulling you in through force of style.

Enough windows shatter and trucks roll to decimate action-movie competition too, exploding CGI’s transparent fakery so as to remove yet another barrier betw🍷een viewer and film.

Add that lot up and you crack the glass between “great superhero movie” and🦋 “great movie, full stop”.

This was a blockbuster that came in regulation black alright, kitted out in capes and splattered screen-wide with de𒅌ep, dark purples.

But clothes don’t make the movie, Nolan instead tailoring his Bat-sequel to the calling of a meticulously constructed crime movie with psychosi🥂s and terror coursing🧜 through it and an awful gash of flaming tragedy at its heart.

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This is operatic storytelling at full tilt, gorging on the cop-criminal complicity underpinning many great crime movies (Michael Mann’s Heat springs to most minds).

Confident enough to trust an audie𝔍nce’s interest in chaps having severe conversations about “revenue streams” and yet wholly, completely and utterly the Batman movie fans craved.

Another Mann movie comes to mind: compare scenes of The Joker tormenting captives on video (“LOOK AT ME!”) to those of Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter , torturing tabloid journalist F🅷reddy Lounds, as an index of how far the Nolans were prepared to nudge the lunacy.

All it✨ took was one little push ෴closer to the early comics, but the distancing effect of arch asides and in-jokes – this Joker don’t know Jack – was another window the Nolans shattered.

As Bale said: “We’re not looking for actors to be giving♏ a nod and a winജk to the audience, showing how much the actor is enjoying portraying this caricature.”

Too often, affective reactions to event movies are short-circuited by self-awareness. Knight delivered characters exactly as you think they should be, but presented them as if for the first time, ground up. Some feat.

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Genius casting was a trump card. Let’s not ignore Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman: yes, his voice i🌠s funny, but there’s control there, tꦗoo.

But Heath Lꦚedger’s deliv⛎ery rules, cunningly cast as a psycho improv artist. No one else would have thought of it but once seen, you knew it was the right choice.

A measure of the gamble’s brilliance? Even Nolan🐼 didn’t quite know what Ledger was cooking.

He says: “He’d call me from time 𓆏to time, just to talk about what he was doing. And frankly, it was pretty hard to r🌊elate to on the other end of the phone – when he’d talk about looking at ventriloquist dummies and the way their mouths moved, the way the voice would sound disembodied.”

But Ledger traded Nolan’s faith with one for the ages, a free-jazz nutjob tightly woun🐟d but ever-ready to screech of🅰f on some fresh, terrible tangent.

The Nolans gave him one hell o🍌f a piece to work wi🌄th. The goth-panto of Tim Burton’s Batman went out the window – Knight is lathered with socio-psychological dynamics.

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Everyﷺbody here𝔍 has their reasons: that’s the tragedy of the tale.

There’s Harvey Dent, the white knight who believes a city beyond repair can be fixed, performed t♋o suave perfection by Aaron Eckhart, whose nascent dark side recalls his two-faced lead from In The Company Of Men.

There’s Rachel, the DA who believes in Harvey. There’s Gordon, the cop struggling to do good work with♓ a corrupt team.

And there’s Bruce, the playboy vigilante wrestling wit♊h Jack Bauer’s conundrum: to fix this world, how low do you need to go🍎?

Come the close, one hero’s a monster, anot🌄her’s an exile, the girl hasn’t been saved and Gotham’s veneer of civilisation is dented.

Gordon was wrong during The Joker’s final stunt: there aren’t any windows on the half-built site Mr J’s hiding in. The dividing glass ain’t there.

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This was the Batman our times called for.

But it’s no wonder Nolan hasn’t yet made a commitment to a threequel (at least not publicly), what with t🌸he expectations being colossal. Glass ceilings have been shattered and the view is giddy.

Will Nolan plunge back into Gotham? Be the hero we nee🃏d him to be? No one knows, but put it like this: we think he can take it.

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1 THE MASTER? “The Joker’s just a mad dog,” said Two-Face. “I want whoever let him off the leash.” Is someone lurking in the wings?

2 The Riddler? Death traps and puzzles? Perhaps Nolan could reclaim Jigsaw’s homicidal hoopla from the Saw cycle&helli🥃p; adding a littl🌠e bit of the Zodiac Killer, too.

Or go the full Manhunter route a😼nd send Bats to consult The Joker (recast – Daniel Day-Lewis?) in Arkham for clues to catch a riddle-some killer.

Riddler has been an investigator, too, so perhaps 𝓀💃the green beanpole could be the secretly sick side of a man hired to help the Batman hunt.

Ditch that Depp rumour, though – dangle for Joseph Gordon-Levitt instead.

3 Black Mask? This time, it’s personal. A rival of Wayne’s from a similar family, Roman Sionis wears a black mask that🌟 melts to his face duri✤ng a nasty accident and fronts a cult of “False Facers”. Two Face meets Scarecrow?

A bit over-familiar but the fit is good, BM being Batman’s warped mirror image. He even kidnaps Lucius Fox at one point – there’s a motive for Bats’ return to Got🔥ha♑m after his enforced exile.

If Day-Lewis doesn’t accept our invite to do The Joker, he’d wear the Mask beautifully… Oh, go on.

4 Hush? A fans’ favourite, Hush/Tommy Elliot has much in common with B♛lack Mask, being a childhood friend of Bruce’s who grew up to r🦩esent the Wayne family… for saving his much-hated mother’s life after he tried to kill his parents.

He trains as a surgeon and at one point joins forces with The Riddler, who’s figured out Wayne is Batman – fits like a jigsaw, right? He’s carried out plastic surgery on himself, so perhaps Mickey Rourke would fit here.

5 Harley Quinn? A criminal psychologist who could be employed to study The Joker. The purple man’s wily charisma gets u🦩nder her skin and she begins to do his dirty work for him, conveying messages to a wacko terrorising Gotham City.

Batman discovers her dirty secrets during a sneaky night-time conflab with The Joker. Because he only comes out at night. Rebecca Hall or Abbie Cornish, please.

6 Catwoman? God knows how she’d f✨it, or be rescued from that choked-up hairball of a Halle Berry 🔯flick, but rumours proliferate.

The casting of Marion Cotillard in Nolan’s Inception has inspired followers to whip up oodle🍌s of pervy fan art in the horny hope t⭕hat puss will purr yet. We’re not so sure.

Don’t miss the new, end-of-decade issue of Total Film Magazine out Thursday 17th December.

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