★ Liked Ten Years Later, The Dark Knight” and Its Vision of Guilt Still Resonate

Ten years after its release, there is somehow too much and not enough left to say about Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Of course, because there was just so many lenses this film can be seen through, so many interpretations for every scene playing out on the screen. So what’s this film about? Every thinking mind has his own answer.

And yet it’s hard to look at this movie, made at a time of violent divisiveness in the country over issues of surveillance, of complicity, of violence born of fear, and not see a snapshot of a society — not Gotham’s fictional one, but our own, real-life one — ready to plunge into the abyss of fragmentation, of self-serving chaos. Maybe that’s why Nolan’s film now feels so poignant. Today, it’s hard not to feel that humanity’s worst impulses have won, that those without conscience or shame were allowed to sow endless dissension, hatred, and cruelty, using our own sense of guilt against us.