An Excellent Debate
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles lately with headlines
like “Why Heath Ledger’s Joker Will Never Be Matched”. I was going to do a take
down of that for several reasons; he’s largely a product of a post-9/11 world
that will eventually move on from that mindset, The Arkham game
portrayals are better really, etc. But while I was mulling over that listicle I
really sat down and deconstructed The Dark Knight. I’ve come
to the conclusion The Joker is actually the hero of the film. More than that,
he’s arguably better at it than Batman.
Let’s consider how we meet The Joker in that opening scene
which will go down as one of the greatest heist scenes ever shot. Joker stages
an elaborate plot to rob a bank and even though there’s a dramatic reveal near
the end we all knew it was him because the clip had been released as a promo
long before it came out. So everyone who saw that film was already in the
mindset, “Here’s The Joker, what crime is he going to pull?”
The thing is, he doesn’t pull a crime. He stages an
elaborate bout of vigilante justice worthy of Batman himself. The bank is a mob
bank. It houses millions of dollars of funds gained through extortion, drugs,
theft, murder, you name it. Not only does The Joker rob the bank, he does so in
a way in which all his criminal accomplices murder each other one by one thinking
that they’ll get a bigger cut if they do. This is supposed to look diabolical
bit of insanity but it’s really him immediately eliminating five dangerous
murderers while he’s literally in the middle of crippling the mob financially.
Swap The Joker out for, say, The Punisher for that scene.
Sure, he’d be a killer with a gun and killers with guns are how we know guys
are bad in Batman movies, but the real result is that The Joker completes a
major anti-mob strike while getting a quintet of thugs off the streets for
good. He doesn’t kill any civilians, and only wounds the manager with a shotgun
in self-defense. Even then he lets the guy live with a joke.
In fact, for the whole movie his target is mostly the same
mob that Batman has apparently been unable to really stop since Batman
Begins. Not only are these crime families still going strong, but they are
augmented by the fact that Batman was unable to stop the spread of Scarecrow’s
fear toxin, creating a permanently deranged underclass that are now presumably
desperate and starving. It’s these largely forgotten downtrodden that The
Joker recruits for his army, which implies that Gotham has left them to rot.
Now granted, The Joker also wages a war against the
institutions of law in Gotham including assassinating judges and commissioners.
That is clearly wrong, but again, look at it from The Joker’s point of view. We
know that the police and the courts are corrupt. It’s one of the main reasons
that Bruce Wayne became Batman in the first place and why he only trusts James
Gordon and Harvey Dent. No one else is incorruptible.
And if the system is so broken that it requires a man like
Batman to dispense justice then why is it worth preserving in the first place?
If you’re The Joker and you hate the mob then why would your plans stop at
robbing them and killing their henchmen? The upper echelons all have the
supposed legitimate government catering to them, which is the sort of joke
that might indeed make a man become The Joker..
There’s what he does to Harvey Dent to consider, of course.
He murders his girlfriend and leaves him scarred and full of rage. Then again,
that’s not how The Joker says he sees it. He tells Batman that he turned Dent
into “one of us”. What does Dent do when he becomes Two-Face? He goes on a
rampage that leaves mob bosses and crooked cops dead in his wake. It’s only
when Dent is threatening to kill innocents that things become a problem.
Hey, have you ever noticed that it was that exact time that
The Joker made it a point to tell Batman exactly what he’d done to Dent? Almost
as if The Joker knew that once Dent’s spree on deserving victims was spent he
would do something that Batman should stop.
Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight is an agent of
chaos. He says as much, but what does that mean? For him “organized crime” is
the problem. It’s institutional, monolithic and supported from people that
masquerade as law-abiding citizens who look to the skies for an unlawful
vigilante to protect them from the common thugs of the street. He knows that
the “rules” are a smokescreen to protect evil and so he fights a two-front war
against both the mob and those that who enable the mob to continue to do business.
One of the most-remembered lines in the film is “I believe
that what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.” Great line, but people just
write it off as a quip. I don’t think it is. It comes after the wounded bank
manager is spitting at The Joker about how criminals used to believe in honor,
once again pretending to a moral code moments after he started shotgunning the
robbers to protect illegal income.
We never really ask where The Joker comes from in The
Dark Knight, but what if he’s the product of a mob hit that he wasn’t
supposed to survive? What if those famous scars, his Glasgow smile, are the
result of criminal violence just as the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents was? He
tells different stories to different people in the film, but you notice that it’s
always to people he feels are already lying; a gang boss dressed in a fancy
business suit, an assistant district attorney in a system he considers coddling
the mob, and a man in a costume dispensing justice with his fists. They’re all
part of the joke.
In the end over the course of The Dark Knight The
Joker does more to eliminate crime and corruption in Gotham than Batman ever
comes close to. He does it in a horrific way, but that’s what you get when you
almost kill a man like him. He’s Darkman. He’s The Bride. Heath Ledger’s Joker
is the real Dark Knight.
Jef has a new story about robot sharks, "A Senseless
Killing Machine", out now in Lurking
in the Deep. You can also connect with him on Facebook.
