The film is supposedly dangerous on account of the catharsis this retaliatory explosion offers, to those in the audience who might similarly feel abandoned, trodden on, and inclined to do something gratifyingly violent about it. It violates the taboo which guards the moral incoherence of all American stories about supervillains: the correlate of the villain’s motiveless malignancy is the fundamental innocence of society, its right to continue as it is. Only an evil originating outside of that society can possibly explain the desire to harm it. But this fantasy of innocence is bound to collide with the gothic underpinnings of Batman’s moral universe: Gotham is a city of endemic corruption and decay, and its villains are endogenous, home-grown, expressions of a universal sickness.
