The horror of failure is something Batman succumbs to, and is punished with, at major points throughout Arkham Knight's 10-12 hour storyline.
They're very funny movies — self-mocking in their self-pity — and the intimate horrors and failures they portray are the stuff of his artistic glory.
Henry was little more, in other words, than an "ego-centric monstrosity" whose reign "owed its successes and virtues to better and greater men about him; most of its horrors and failures sprang more directly from [the king]".
A constant theme in my day job, as a lawyer, is that one small initial horror – a government failure to condemn newspaper headlines that label judges as "Enemies of the People" for example – invariably leads to the next, up the scale.
Its subject is greatness in failure and horror in success, so how could it have made money at the box office?
But the truth is that if the script of Bloody Tuesday had been offered to a studio it would have been turned down not for the scale of the horror but for its failure to supply identifiable villains.
Everyone has a horror story of carbon failure "that happened to a mate", yet it was noticeable that after the 20 bike pile-up in Stage 3 of this year's Tour how many riders hopped back on the same bikes or suffered from fractured bones rather than snapped frames.
In the Middle East, where the conflict is like that between two men chained together, who gouge out each other's eyes and tear at one another's faces with their teeth, the long history of failed negotiations is a history of mad attempts at getting the most expensive bargain going - striving for as much as possible for as little as possible, where the stake of failure is horror and death.
And so finally I realized that in this case, even more than opening wider to it, what was truly required was another invitation I've received from my teacher: to courageously "Dive Deeper" into this pain of personal/universal shame, failure and horror.
We all remember the horrors that followed the failure of the subprime.
