2008’s The Dark Knight is a modern classic—the superhero movie that made the genre critically viable, and which turned Ole Chrissy Nolan and its whole cast into household names in the US.
Its quality springs from an aphoristic script that codified classic ideas of chaos and order into a modern social lexicon, using the lens of the most enduring hero and villain tale of the 20th Century (Batman vs. Joker), reinvented to kick off the 21st.
The Dark Knight’s cultural zeitgeist is remembered mostly in the character design (not just visually) of Heath Ledger’s Joker; but this character is the most easily-misunderstood in the film; especially because he lies about himself constantly in-context, and also because no one else in the film really understands him. Even Nolan seemed intent on writing a character he didn’t totally understand himself so that he could translate that mysteriousness to the audience.
I, on the other hand, understand the Joker.
He’s just simply a guy who feels compelled to test the limits of supposed social structures. Before the Batman existed, the world was already so corrupt and chaotic that it didn’t present an “unbroken rule;” but Batman did. This one guy was determined both to stop crime, and also never to kill anyone, which Joker found so inconceivably hilarious and self-contradictory that it felt like a worthwhile challenge.
Joker considers himself the inevitable result of Batman’s existence; but Batman sees right thru this. Joker has every choice to be someone else; but he likes himself this way.
Joker insists that it’s all meaningless—but that’s impossible. He’s only really being honest when he tells Batman, “You complete me.” It could be said that Joker’s goal, more than anything else, is to monopolize Batman’s attention. He’s obsessed.
I feel like all of this is kind of obvious when I spell it out like this, and I’m sure that plenty of people had this read on the character immediately, or already felt this way about him based on the presentation from other media before this film, regardless of what Joker or Nolan or Alfred has to say about the character; because it’s correct. That said, I didn’t personally understand the character that well in 2008 when I was 16 years-old, and it’s not a surprise to me that the creators may not have, either.
Art is a funny thing in how it can continue to exist and inform culture in perpetuity, even as the people who created it come to see it in a new light. Sometimes I don’t really know what I’m talking about until I say it—and after I hear what I said again, I realize that I could have said it differently and better—but the moment is already passed, and it might be something I can never really take back. You might not even agree with my conclusion that the new words are better than the old ones, and the people that they can reach may be totally different; notwithstanding how everyone that hears the words probably understands them a bit differently, no matter what.
There is plenty of media that I’ve had a long relationship with, and eventually I have the opportunity to consider how it could’ve been done better. There are songs that I think I can sing more beautifully than how they were performed on their first recording, and which I’m also sure the artist could now sing even-more-beautifully still; because they recorded that song when they were twenty, after practicing it for maybe a couple of months or years at the most, while I’ve been learning it and performing it for decades and know it better than they possibly could have at the time it was recorded.
I know this to be true because I feel the same about all of my own songs; and I also understand the futility that would come from re-recording them and “making them better.” It didn’t matter in the first place—they were already good enough to keep me coming back again and again until I made them better for myself, inwardly.
Christopher Nolan is by all descriptions a genius at writing and directing movies, but also kind-of lacking in emotional understanding. He creates stoic films that seem almost fascinated by feeling as a concept—which is a worthwhile perspective, but also means that much of what his films regard as mystery seems obvious to someone else, or becomes obvious under enough observation (while it will always be mysterious to anyone but him how he actually accomplishes the realization of the amazing scripts and movie-making techniques he understands).
Even the people that take the Joker at his word, and believe themselves to be like “a dog chasing his tail that wouldn’t know what to do if he caught it,” are really more like the character than they realize, whether Joker misunderstands himself or is just lying (or maybe only really understood himself in those last moments of the film).
They are people who feel powerless to the bleakness of reality, and so they want to be dangerous so that they feel above the system. They want to feel like they will eventually fly off the handle and do whatever they want, going down in a blaze of glory by cop or hero or what have you. In real life, these people never really do much of anything, because there isn’t really a Batman out there to seek attention from. Instead, they got a Joker movie that had more to say about the kind of life that actually makes someone start acting like this (I didn’t see the movie, no comment on the quality).
“Some men can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn,” is an awesome quote, but it’s just not really true, and certainly isn’t in the context of the movie. Alfred wanted to protect Bruce’s conscience and reassure him that he didn’t need to put too much thought into why this villain is doing what he does, and just needs to put a stop to him.
I wonder, though, if the worldly Alfred actually came to this conclusion when he thought it through, and wanted to be sure that Bruce didn’t also: that the best way to stop the Joker without killing him would be to kill the Batman.
I personally think that Alfred made a mistake if this was his thinking. Batman would never have chosen his or the Joker’s death, and instead would have tried a different approach if he’d better understood the Joker’s motive (to force him to kill one of them and break their “immovable object/unstoppable force” stalemate) instead of thinking that he was just a mindless agent of chaos.
Then again, maybe Alfred really just didn’t get it. Maybe I wouldn’t get it either, if I didn’t have the last 16 years to think about this character and what he really stands for in this movie.
However, I think the film only truly works if we decide we know the Joker better than he knows himself. The thing that always bothered me about this movie is how Joker insists that he isn’t “a schemer,” and yet executes some of the most comically elaborate schemes ever in a film that anyone still kind-of takes seriously. He is clearly the most of a schemer in the world; and so you could take him as just lying and trying to throw everyone off of his intent, or you could view it as his own misunderstanding because he won’t admit to himself what really compels him. Joker lives in self-denial, and Batman sees him for exactly who he is; and the same is true in reverse.
Maybe Nolan only knew it would de-mystify the Joker to admit that he really wrote this character with a total understanding of what they are like; but I think it’s more like Nolan wrote the character from a position of his own self-denial. A character built from the instincts that he denies within himself: instincts he works against because he cannot rationalize them, and so he created a character from his conception of “irrationality” (which isn’t necessarily irrational from another person’s perspective).
To me, Joker becomes both relatable and more hatable the better you understand him; and maybe it’s the part of Nolan that relates to Batman (a character that by all rights there’s no way he “understands”) who really hates the Joker the most. I’m getting really armchair psychology now so we’ll wrap it up here. Tell me about a character that you’re sure you’ve thought about so much that you understand them better than whoever wrote them in the comments below.