Murder is the opposite of art: destructive, impoverishing, nihilistic. To discuss the act of a killer as if it had some relevance to a work of culture is to usher the age-old enemy of mankind into one of his citadels. So I will pass over the massacre in an Aurora, Colo., theater in a silence respectful toward its victims.

But the film that was playing in that theater—"The Dark Knight Rises"—deserves to be loudly celebrated as a masterful and stunningly honest work of Western popular culture.

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