Kids with creepy joker faces painted to look like Heath Ledger brandishing R.I.P. signs, a massive roaring Batmobile zooming up and down the length of Leicester Square, its engine revving like a chainsaw ready for massacre.

I was disturbed to see quite how fanatical people were getting over The Dark Knight, the latest in the new Christian Bale-led franchise. I guess it was inevitable. People love to fetishise the freakish.

The premiere felt tacky and sensationalist and over the top. I went home after the premiere with a pounding headache from inhaling too much gas, gallons of which had been used - well, wasted - to fuel the 10-foot flames blasting from all corners of the cinema's forecourt.

Noise from the roaring Batmobile still rang in my ears. But despite my reservations about its marketing, I loved the film. It was spectacular. Intoxicating. Comical. Horrifying. Fear is everywhere, but so is kindness - a sentiment the movie makes clear.

For all Gotham's moral wretchedness and destitution, it has some smatterings of light. The city has a soul, and so do its people.

This is apparent even in the Joker, whose heart can be detected beneath his velvet jacket and ghostly skin, whose pain is hinted at behind his sickly eyes.

The city's people have hope too, even if it is of the blind variety. And they are ultimately good, something Ledger's clownish villain fails to realise until the end when it is finally proven to him in one of his sick "social experiments".

The director, Christopher Nolan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with his brother, Jonathan, has commented that any “real world parallels” are unintentional.

But I do believe the film reflects our world quite uncannily. Great goodness sits side by side with terror, moral righteousness verges on the omnipotent and sinister, and moral bankruptcy and terrorism can be mistaken for a joke or, more unsettling still, anarchic dynamism.

The good people of this world are joining cults, idolising terror figures and carrying knives to disguise their fear. The good people of this world can turn mad at any point.

The Joker, undoubtedly, was good... once. Like the film, this world is not so black and white, in spite of our fervent desires to make it so. Like District attorney Harvey Dent, who ends up as the bitter Two Face, we all have different sides. People will no doubt deride the movie for its gleeful violence and sensationalism.

They will worry about “copycat” behaviour from deranged fans. But I say no way. Leave it. This art imitates life. And we should all be forced - like Batman - to confront our fears.

The Joker loves knives. He even loves potato peelers. Unfortunately he won't be teaching kids with knives anything they don't know already.

We may not have the avenging Batman to lock up "baddies", but we do have our own rays of light in this world. We do, of course, have fear, anger, love, resentment to drive us. These feelings can help, as well as destroy.

Batman is driven by his crippling fear of bats. The strength of his oh so human emotions is what, in the end, makes him so special.