On the way out of the theater on Friday morning, I received a text telling me about the events in Denver. And suddenly talking about Batman didn’t seem fun anymore.

As The Onion immediately pointed out, our responses to tragedies are sadly predictable. Right-wing media sources seek cause-and-effect connections between real life and popular texts, delving back to find a single page in a Batman comic from 1986 that bears tenuous similarities to Friday’s news: ironically, at these times they choose to take popular culture seriously, and dig into its archive as tenaciously as any fan or scholar.

Internet communities also respond according to expected patterns. Batman fans craft posters and sigils with images of fallen Waynes, black cowls and memorial ribbons. 4chan cracks morbid jokes, with the disingenuous tag “too soon?”

Of course, it is “too soon” for those jokes – it will never be time for those jokes. It’s also too soon for those cause-effect conclusions – and again, perhaps they will never be valid. But it’s also too soon for the theories that were emerging before Friday’s events – the quick, pat arguments that Batman is a Conservative Crusader or that Nolan’s movie is an “audaciously capitalist vision” that celebrates the “wish-fulfilment of the wealthy.” It’s too soon, as I announced last Thursday (again, perhaps too soon) to call The Dark Knight Rises for one political side or another, to read it as a clear propaganda message. Four years on, Nolan’s previous instalment, The Dark Knight, still offers no straight answers about the “war on terror.”

So it’s too soon to write anything conclusive about The Dark Knight Rises. Perhaps it’s a cynical film, engaging with topical, real-world issues but side-stepping in the final reel for a story about personal heroics, offering fantastical solutions to a contemporary dilemma; and perhaps the same could be said of its predecessor. Perhaps it’s just a complex film, admirably refusing easy solutions.

If the movie has a key image, it’s not the tattered American flags or the exploding football field. It’s an image that circulated in viral marketing months before the film’s release – Bane’s “strike zones,” circled on a map of Gotham City.

The package, sent out to key websites in December 2011, reappeared in the Dark Knight Rises, as Detective John Blake studied it for clues.

“I don’t know anything about civil engineering,” he protested. His boss, Jim Gordon, reassured him. “But you know about patterns.”

The Dark Knight Rises – in fact, the Dark Knight Trilogy – is about patterns. It’s about networks. It’s about matrices, links, dialogues, nodes on a map. It’s about echoes between those terms, and the way those terms define themselves in relation to each other, and can shift, and change places. It’s not just as a comment on capitalism that Bane’s men raid a stock exchange, and Bruce ponders the trades they were making.

Just as Batman Begins suggested, more modestly, that Scarecrow’s use of fear as a weapon was no different from Batman’s modus operandi, and The Dark Knight ramped up the stakes by asking what, if anything, separated Batman’s counter-terror measures from Joker’s terror, so Dark Knight Rises is about the fragility of definitions, the limits of structures, the illusion of binary oppositions.

Bane, “born and raised in hell on earth,” becomes a general, and is then revealed as a bodyguard. The chant we associate with him becomes Bruce’s, as he rises from the pit. Bruce, born to privilege in the Regency room of Wayne Manor, falls and is free to remake himself as a nomad, a no-man. Selina Kyle, haunted by her history, lives in a “walk-up” in the Old Town and glimpses liberty when Bruce flies her above the city’s highest levels. Blake tosses his police badge. Talia reinvents herself as Miranda Tate; Bruce and Selina seem to earn a clean slate, but the final shots show that no reboot can wipe the slate entirely clean, and that traces of the old life always remain, just as Nolan’s Batman could never repress Burton’s, Schumacher’s, or Adam West’s (but instead, sometimes seems to embrace and incorporate those earlier versions).

The Dark Knight Trilogy is about myth and meaning, and the way an idea can survive beyond an individual; it tells us there are different ways to live on after death. It may still be too soon to find any message for those affected by the Colorado shootings; instead of reaching for conclusions, perhaps now is the time to simply remember those people like us who went to the movies last week.

“you think it all breaks down into symbolism and structures and hints and clues”

“no, batman, that’s just wikipedia“

This exchange seems to sum up the long-running dynamic between Joker and Batman: between queer comedian and straight man, between raw energy and controlling logic, between chaos and reason. ‘Every single time I try to think outside his toybox,’ Joker complains, ‘he builds a new box around me.’

Control, reason, rationality and logic: these are Batman’s strengths, but also his weaknesses. He tries to make sense of the world, to analyse his adversaries, but as Alfred says of Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, ‘some men just want to watch the world burn’; and Joker’s punning, playful mind, skipping down unpredictable tracks and short circuits, sends a flaming fire truck into Batman’s path – literally, a truck on fire. It’s the kind of twist Batman, constrained by his personal rules, could never have seen coming.

Joker is carnival, anarchy, everywhere and nowhere. When we first see him in The Dark Knight he’s one of a gang of clowns, indistinguishable beneath their masks; but when we, and Batman, search for him later, he’s stripped off his mask and make-up and slipped inconspicuously into a parade of policemen. If Batman represents Wikipedia – the drive for continuity, canon and control – Joker is the internet army of Anonymous. When the cops catch him, they find ‘nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. Clothing is custom, no labels.  No name, no other alias.’

Joker, from his first appearance in 1940, through Frank Miller’s Year One and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, has always been associated with poison. The Dark Knight’s promotional campaign picked up on that toxic theme through viral marketing, spreading Joker’s aesthetic through scribbled graffiti over the official posters, sabotaging, subverting and queering the original images. It was a powerful enough viral to cross from fictional politics – the campaign for DA Harvey Dent – into the real world – the Jokerised pictures of Barack Obama. The approach implied a grassroots, amateur army of vandals, a concept amplified and emphasised through the next phase of the ARG, which sent groups of fans on treasure hunts around real-world locations. Crucially, these fans weren’t being recruited into Batman’s personal army, but enlisted as Joker’s accomplices.  The hivemind, the collective intelligence of the internet – the medium that should, in theory, have been ideally suited to the Dark Knight’s detection and logical speculation – was being harnessed in the name of carnival, clowning, anarchy and play.

In May 2011, a similar campaign kicked in for Nolan’s concluding film, The Dark Knight Rises. Fan voices were compiled into a mob chant, which later became the soundtrack to Batman’s newest antagonist, Bane. The chant, run through an audio analyser – again, a typically Batman device, subverted for different ends – revealed a hashtag which, when tweeted, in turn revealed a piece of a mosaic picture. Collectively, they added up into the first image of Bane.

If Batman is Wikipedia and Joker is Anonymous, Bane is Twitter: the voice of the crowd, the voice of the megaphone and mic check, the voice of the people. Unlike Joker, his voice threatens a new form of organisation rather than destructive anarchy. His is the spirit of the Arab Spring and Occupy; not just disorder and disruption, but the drive for a new system. Bane is, like Joker, not so much a person as a movement. His many-voiced chant is the sound of Batman losing Gotham.

One man cannot fight a crowd, any more than traditional encyclopedia pages can definitively contain internet anarchy and collective digital intelligence.

But Batman is not just a man, and Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia seeks to contain, but its definitions are elastic, its edits almost-invisible, its authors collective. Like comic book continuity and canon, it claims to offer authoritative information, but it shifts constantly, always rewriting and hiding the traces of its earlier versions. Batman may present himself as uptight, rule-bound and static, but he is himself dynamic; to keep up with Joker, to keep that anarchic energy controlled, he has to dance, dodge and detour, drawing new boxes around an ever-moving enemy.

And Batman may present himself as the ‘cure’ for crime’s poison, but he’s also a poison. He brought the costumed clowns and grotesque villains to Gotham; in a sense, he created them. He’s an urban legend, a bogeyman, a virus. As Bruce Wayne is constructed through society gossip, Batman is created via street rumour. Batman is discourse. Batman is myth.

That’s what he has to realise, accept and embrace. He defeats Joker only by becoming a form of poison, by fighting fire with fire – by infringing civil liberties, inflicting his own terror on Gotham, and exiling himself as an outcast. In early May 2012, the next stage of the Dark Knight Rises campaign sent fans on another treasure hunt. This time, they weren’t looking for Joker clues, but Bat-symbols: not corporate marques or brand icons, but the kind of quick, roughly-chalked sign a rebel or subversive might scratch up in passing, on the run. This is Batman as graffiti, Batman as people’s champion; Batman as the exile called back to his city by an army of followers.

The Bat-symbols, scattered all over the world, were quickly found and tweeted, and in turn revealed the newest trailer, frame by frame. The collective aesthetic, where thousands of people contribute a single piece that adds up to a complete picture, had finally – after its appropriation by Joker and Bane – been harnessed in Batman’s name.

No movie is ‘about’ one thing, and Nolan’s are no exception. But a clear message, at this stage, rises from the Dark Knight paratexts. Batman cannot survive as a single, fixed figure. Batman is a virus, a folk hero, an icon, an infection. He belongs to the people. He belongs to us. He survives, persists and rises only by remaining flexible and fluid, by embracing his own mosaic complexity, by accepting the fragmentation of his own identity, and allowing himself to split into a multitude of symbols that add up into a complete picture: a man of many parts, a symbol sketched by many hands.

For more on The Dark Knight Rises and ‘Occupy Gotham,’ see my piece on Huffington Post UK here.