One gets the feeling that The Joker could have done with a chat with the guidance counsellor before investing his time in this nonsense. The Joker from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight was a hugely successful villain in the history of cinema. Heath Ledger’s portrayal thoroughly deserved the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was a great performance by Ledger, but The Joker is not a great character. He is an unrealistically capable man-child. He suffers from a lack of fatherly attention, and he is the DC equivalent of Dennis the Menace, with extra violence.
“When the chips are down, these, uh… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other” – This line from The Joker in The Dark Knight didn’t show that he was deluded. He is mostly correct here. In fact, Thomas Hobbes would have probably taken The Joker’s side in this debate. He probably came up with this line after being grounded by his father (as we know he is lying consistently about what happened to his face, but odds are it was some form of rebellion by self-harm)
However, the fact that The Joker is right is what makes him such a weak character. The Joker believes that humanity turns on each other when things get tough. This is correct in many ways. However, it is also obvious that if all the stability and security that we enjoy in society, we revert to the state of nature, and that is, as Hobbes put it, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
I would not normally give this movie character the time of day, except that the reality is that he is seen as iconic and people endlessly quote the lines. If you remove the safety, security and stability of human society, you get savagery. Well done, Joker. You get a lollipop. If you don’t water plants, they die. Next.
The Corruption of Harvey Dent: Nothing new here
The Joker succeeded in corrupting Harvey Dent, the maverick prosecutor in The Dark Knight. Harvey Dent loses half of his face and his fiancée thanks to The Joker and reduces fate to a coin toss. However, this didn’t prove that Harvey could be corrupted morally. It only proved that every man has a limit that can drive them to insanity. Harvey Dent was clearly not of sound mind when he went on his killing spree. It was not his morality that was corrupted but rather his mental health.
Batman’s Choice
This is even more silly. The Joker kidnaps Harvey and Rachel. By telling Batman the location, he makes Batman choose. It didn’t prove anything corrupt or immoral about Batman or Bruce Wayne. It just showed that The Joker is a trickster. There wasn’t a right or wrong choice here. Only the fact that Batman seems far faster than all of the Gotham police combined (I think Batman would be better served sharing his billion-dollar vehicles with them).
A better class of criminal
The Joker burns money and states, ‘This town deserves a better class of criminal. And I’m going to give it to them.’ In truth, Joker is not a criminal with better class. He is a different category. He is a terrorist. He wants to achieve a political aim. He infiltrates the police. He uses criminal gangs. But this is not criminality. It is terrorism. The Joker should have looked up the difference before burning loads of money he could have used to further his aims.
Attention-seeking child
When Batman interrogated The Joker, we see that The Joker is an attention seeker. He is a grand schemer and a master manipulator but it is all to get an audience with Batman. He is the DC version of Bart Simpson putting acid on the grass at Springfield Elementary or putting graffiti on the walls around Springfield as El Barto.
All three villains in the trilogy have an unhealthy obsession with destroying Gotham City and emotionally breaking Batman. All three villains also try to back their destructive plans with some political philosophy, which I would not even call half-baked. Jack Nicholson’s Joker wanted to commit mass murder in Gotham but it was clear the character had lost his mind (and was insane before the events of the movie). Jack Nicholson’s Joker was also comic book driven. You were not encouraged to examine him too much. But with The Dark Knight’s Joker, there is a political point being peddled to the masses. And here is the contradiction. Anyone as capable of planning what The Joker has done would not do so for the reasons stated by The Dark Knight Joker version. The Joker had the police in his back pocket. He had the mob under his control, and he had enormous financial resources. The flaw in the character writing is that he has the philosophical knowledge of a 12-year-old. If it wasn’t for Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance, this character would have been a dumpster fire.
The Joker is an example that a great performance by a dedicated actor can paper over the cracks of horribly conceived character motivation and outlook. Just like Javier Bardem did to Anton Chigurgh, Heath Ledger made a poorly designed character work better. Tom Hardy would also get stretched to his limits in The Dark Knight Rises because the ideas of the three Dark Knight movies are so muddled and immature. At least Cesar Romero’s Joker was comprehensible.