“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.

1. This time around, the video game anniversary of note is the Playstation, which has turned 15, and Joystiq celebrates with gifts of not just one but two infographics. This also makes it a good time to ask if classic video games still hold up. We’ll see if Madden on Facebook will hold up. I’m 100% certain The Room Tribute Flash game will; how could it not?

2. The music industry continues to struggle with sales, and while on iTunes music is still central, apps downloads may soon surpass song downloads (though The Oatmeal has a great cartoon about how we really feel when buying apps), and music labels aren’t cooperating with Ping but are cooperating with Google. Maybe Iron Maiden has the solution to the music industry’s problems.

3. Paste Magazine was among the print casualties this fortnight, and Arthur Sulzberger announced the New York Times would be one someday. Right now, newspapers are struggling to maintain their advertising share, and Gawker is beating all newspapers but the New York Times in online hits share, while Vogue is working to make both its print and online sources more advertiser friendly, and Playboy has become more blind-reader friendly.

4. It’s Hollywood summer summary time: summer was slow, attendance was down, ticket price gouging was up, there were summer trends and summer winners and losers, but Kick-Ass wasn’t the loser many first thought.

5. In indie cinema, it’s been a good year for documentaries and a good summer for women in art house seats and behind cameras, but it’s been a tough summer for specialty crossover hits and a tough everything for Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote project. What it’ll be for I’m Still Here is being hotly debated.

6. Redbox hit its one billionth DVD rental, and now it’s looking to a new horizon: streaming. Google wants to compete in that realm too, one that has helped to make Netflix’s CEO a very rich man. Blockbuster actually has an advantage over the others in being able to offering certain rentals earlier, but it might not have the money to market that fact to consumers. iTunes and video-on-demand consumers can see Freakonomics earlier than even theatergoers can, and David Ehrlich believess such a model can actually help theaters in the end.

7. Twitter now touts 145 million registered users worldwide, but still has yet to truly go mainstream. It’s increasingly a key news platform, however (the Ford Explorer verdict story is especially striking), as well as a music industry factor, and for its alchemy with Werner Herzog and Kanye West (or so we presume) alone, we have to be grateful it exists.

8. Jaron Lanier doesn’t like social media forms; Pepsi loves them. Jim Louderback doesn’t like viral videos; Arcade Fire loves them. Nicholas Carr doesn’t like hyperlinks; Scott Rosenberg loves them.

9. The new Digg got criticized by old users and pwned by Reddit users, part of a larger trajectory of decline for Digg, which has responded to its latest problems by firing an engineer and asking users to chill out, while Reddit has responded by preparing for expansion. No matter who claims supremacy, it’s tougher than you might think to measure online traffic. YouTube Instant certainly got a lot of traffic, so much that YouTube’s CEO offered its undergrad student creator a job. Maybe he could help YouTube finally turn a profit.

10. Some good News for TV Majors links from the past two weeks: Bordwell Says Don’t Bother, Univision Wins 18-49, Please Don’t Call It a Recap, State of Network News, Ramadan TV, Too Much TV?, Smaller Channel Squeeze, Comcast Charity, Done Deal, Apple & Amazon News, TV the New Cinema?, Emmy Coverage.