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I'm sitting in a coffee shop right now, hearing the verbal, impromptu reviews. I saw The Dark Knight at a 6 a.m. IMAX showing this morning. (All other showings for the initial twenty-four hours were sold out four days ago.) As expected, everyone's talking about the Joker. Personally, I'm elated and grieving simultaneously because the film confirmed how great an actor Heath Ledger was.

Director Christopher Nolan's vision for the Joker was the motiveless criminal—or, to use a phrase from Alfred, someone who "wants to watch the world burn." The Joker's only objective seems to be chaos. The filmmakers got an important thread right: they understood that to treat the Joker as Batman's "nemesis" or "arch enemy" is inherently ignorant; the two are doppelgangers for one another. Graphic novels such as The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum brought this idea home when the Joker taunts Batman with the reality that both are obviously insane. The Dark Knight maintains the same dynamic, with Ledger's Joker telling Christian Bale's Batman that both could share the same padded cell.

Maintaining continuity with the conclusion of Batman Begins, Batman's war on crime is intended to inspire ordinary people to combat injustice and evil, but he has equally and inadvertently inspired the criminal element. The Joker is Batman's fault in the sense that the Dark Knight made the criminal "community"desperate enough to follow a maniac. The Joker goes from being a maniac without motive to one whose life now has a greater purpose, confessing to Batman that without the Dark Knight, criminal activity is ordinary and petty. "What would I do without you?" he laments.

Although Ledger's performance is stunning, Nolan has not forgotten the main character of the film is Batman. Batman has always revolved around the theme of maintaining dual realities. We are all familiar with the Superman/Clark Kent dynamic. We generally recognize that Clark Kent is the façade and Superman is the truer picture of Kal El. But Batman is the other way around; Bruce Wayne is the façade and is Batman the truer representation of who this person really is.

The theme of dual realities even spills over into other characters in the film. One could argue that the only character not wrestling with dual realities is the Joker. We want there to be some psychological determinant—a back story that explains the Joker to us. But there isn't one. The Joker has no hidden agenda. He is no hypocrite. The Joker sees his role more as being the one to expose the discrepancy between internal reality and external façade in the other characters. And Harvey Dent becomes the case study, as the story continually hints there is more to Dent than what the public sees.

Jesus issued the same warning to all of us:

You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Gospel of Matthew 23:27b-28)