was certain I'd hate "The Dark Knight." I was certain for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I am a comic book ignoramus who is almost invariably bored during summer blockbuster action movies. I'm talky; I need dialogue. As soon as cars start zooming across grim cityscapes, sparks pinwheeling from squealing tires, my mind meanders: Do I have any laundry to do? Is there a spring loose in this chair?

I was also fairly certain I'd hate it because everyone I knew who had seen it -- people who had been eager to see it, had waited in line for hours on opening night, had read the comic books and cooed about "Batman Begins" -- they seemed altogether mixed. "Too long," I heard. (This is true.) "Totally boring," I heard. (This is not.) Mostly, I thought I would hate it because I checked out of the "Batman" franchise somewhere around the time Seal started crooning "Kiss From a Rose" -- cheesy Val Kilmer era -- and I never looked back. When I asked my friend Bryan which character died at the end of "Dark Knight" (hint: not Batman), he made me assure him five times I had no investment in the movie. Bryan is a true believer in spoiler alerts, one of the many things I appreciate about him.

Anyway, I ended up seeing the film tonight -- kind of a fluke, friend wanted to see it -- and I liked it. Quite a bit. Maybe my expectations were so bottom-scraping that the movie managed to surprise me. Maybe I hadn't seen a movie in so long (it had been months, truly, a drought I hope never to repeat) that the mere excitement of a big-screen spectacle was enough to satisfy me.

But I also think it had to do with something I was reading on my subway ride to the theater. (This may be completely ridiculous, but hear me out.) It was a New York Times magazine article about web trolls -- those antagonists of the internet, the folk who live simply to piss in your punchbowl, especially if your punchbowl happens to be a blog. I've spent a lot of time thinking about web trolls -- way too much time, probably -- and what I can never figure is why. What do you get out of it? What's the gain? Are they just miserable people? Wounded little kids howling their soulsickness into a void? The author of the article, Mattathias Schwartz, interviews the mother of a notorious online prankster, who took out a racy ad on Craigslist claiming he was a sexy female dom looking for a good time only to turn around and post every name of the poor motherfuckers who dared to respond. "Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain," his mother explained. Apparently, he was sexually abused. Well, fair enough.

My mother is a therapist, who believes that violence and antipathy invariably have a source. I remember telling her during my fifth grade year about a bully at our elementary school -- the kid who called me and my friends names, who threw paper wads in our hair -- and I remember being positively baffled when she expressed some sympathy toward him. "Imagine what his home life is like," she said. Over the next few years, her observation would prove prescient; the kid was a mess. And while her enormous capacity for empathy, for the other side of the story has branded me -- I cannot hear about criminals without imagining the crime perpetrated against them -- I sometimes wonder if all cruelty has such a clear-cut epicenter, I wonder if some people aren't just natural-born dicks. (Actually, my mother would probably agree that that some are. She would probably also tell me they were mentally ill.)

Related: My last boyfriend was a homicide detective, who dealt day in-day out with the evildoings of your average sociopathic American male shooting another. (And I'm sorry, but it's almost always male. I'm not being feminist here; I'm just being realistic.) When I wondered aloud about what led to certain criminal behavior -- the man who mugged me in the French Quarter, for instance -- he tended to shrug it off. It's not that he lacked empathy, exactly, but I hope it's not a misrepresentation to say that after witnessing such a parade of misery -- of brains splattered on concrete and guts vomiting from a corpse -- he had let go of a curiosity about the therapeutic whys and the what happeneds and the was-he-abused questions that plague people like me and my mother. (I was fascinated by his job; I still am. To come that close to people who commit such heinous crimes -- well, it would teach you something about life, wouldn't it? And what would your lesson be, exactly?)

But wait: I was talking about internet trolls. And though it may be hyperbolic to try, however tangentially, to equate web trolls to gang members who gun each other down, there also might be some common thread. If you don't agree, I would point you toward the suicides that have resulted from online bullying, the ways that web trolls have pitifully capitalized on public tragedies. As I read the NY Times article, it occurred to me that mocking someone who eventually hangs themself might not be so far removed from an angry, vengeful kid wielding a Glock whose impact he does not fully comprehend. Am I reductive? Probably. Am I naïve? Certainly. Six months dating a homicide detective will teach you that, if nothing more.

And so somehow, all of this leads us back to "The Dark Knight." Right? That is, after all, where we started.

I was fascinated by The Joker character -- not just because he was played by an actor who is dead, who will be remembered for this role, who might even win an Oscar for this role -- but because I actually thought the role itself was fascinating. I don't know the Batman lore. Like I said, I never read the comic books. And what I couldn't figure out about the character is why he craved the destruction that he did. Why lob a bomb into someone else's happy life? Why piss in their punch bowl? Throughout the movie, the Joker offers us a series of simple suggestions, all of them equally valid, equally incomplete: He was brutalized as a child; he is a gadfly gone radioactive; he is a fame-seeking maniac; he is evil personified. He tinkers with the world because -- why? Because he's damaged? Because he seeks revenge? Or simply because, most harrowingly, the world is simply there for the tinkering?

I love that the movie leaves it open-ended for us, that we must wrestle with his purpose, in the way that we are forced to wrestle with the purpose of every other madman who cherrybombs our complacency, those terrifying mugshots on the evening news.

Are they like us? Or are they NOT like us? That's the question. It's one I will never, naivete be damned, stop wondering about.

Ooh oooh, and? Nice set design.