'Unhappy the land that needs heroes,' Galileo says in Brecht's play of that name. Galileo wasn't thinking of superheroes, of course, but Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, the writers of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, are certainly thinking along Galileo's lines. What is Gotham City to do without a hero, since organised crime is always, it seems, far too much for the official institutions of law and order to handle? Yet what is it to do with a hero, when his sheer success with the old criminals attracts new ones, drawn to the challenge like gunslingers in the old West who have heard tell of the fastest gun alive?

LRB 14 August 2008 | PDF Download