Published: July 24, 2008 11:29 am         

Joker is the embodiment of chaos in ‘Dark Knight’ movie

With “The Dark Knight” in theaters, I’ve been pondering the modern movie villain in light of what appears to be the defining on-screen depiction of the Joker by Heath Ledger.

Considering we’re talking about a comic-book adaptation, it’s probably a good idea to consider why the Joker is considered Batman’s greatest enemy.

The Joker is not the smartest or strongest member of Batman’s rogues gallery, and he certainly isn’t much of a fighter. (He loves getting pummeled too much to put up much of a fight.) He may not even be Batman’s craziest villain.

The most interesting insight into the Joker I’ve read is in Grant Morrison’s 1989 graphic novel “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.” The Joker’s psychiatrist informs Batman she’s not even sure the Joker can be defined as insane.

“It’s quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here,” she says. “A brilliant new modification of human perception more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.”

What makes the Joker so dangerous is that Batman is fighting to save a world the Joker doesn’t inhabit. Batman fights to save society, to uphold a standard of goodness, and these are aims the Joker doesn’t just oppose or find meaningless — he doesn’t even recognize their existence.

In the best depictions of the Joker he’s a terrorist and a mass murderer, not because he necessarily takes any pleasure in it but because, from his point of view, these are perfectly reasonable actions. This may sound like insanity, but it’s only insane if the Joker isn’t seeing the world for what it is and acting accordingly.

Ledger’s version of the Joker arrives on the heels of two other murderers who stormed popular culture by way of the movies. Javier Bardem as the sociopathic Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men” and Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” are radically different characters, but both lack a psychological depth that in the past seemed a necessary component for a rich, complicated villain. Neither character is given a motivation or personal history that illuminates his deviant behavior. On the screen, they just are.

In “There Will be Blood” it becomes clear that Plainview is an abyss sheathed in human skin and will never be sated no matter how much oil, money and power he sucks from Earth and others. Plainview isn’t so much human as he is the foul embodiment of unchecked American ambition.

Chigurh, however, is an altogether different animal. An implacable killer, he is possibly all too human. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played in the film by Tommy Lee Jones, is so unnerved by Chigurh that he is no longer sure he recognizes the land where he’s lived and worked his whole life. America may literally be a place more suitable for Chigurh than people like Bell.

In the last scene of the film, and the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, Bell tells of a dream he had. His father passes him in the night carrying fire through the darkness. In McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” — soon also to be a movie — “carrying the fire” becomes a mantra, repeated by a father and a son wandering through a wasteland, that means keeping humanity alive amidst the unforgiving ruin and depravity of the other ragged survivors.

From what I’ve read of the Joker in “The Dark Knight” — I’m seeing the movie in a few hours — he, like Chigurh and Plainview, isn’t given an origin. The movie doesn’t try to explain why he has a scarred face and dresses like a clown. Who cares? It’s enough to know the Joker sees society and its conventions as purely human constructions that fall apart too easily once people realize, as he does, they never existed in the first place.

Like Plainview, the Joker isn’t so much human as he is the embodiment of chaos. But more interesting is that the Joker is the Chigurh to Batman’s Sheriff Bell — the volatile agent that makes Batman question if saving this experiment called humanity is even possible. Maybe the Joker’s version of reality is actually saner, more logical than Batman’s, and to Batman that is scarier than a dose of fear toxin.

     

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