tags: spoiler-heavy, TDK, terrorism, No Country For Old Men, villains, symbols, overthinking it
1. There's an essay by W.H. Auden titled, appropriately enough, "The Joker in the Pack" that I'm convinced the Nolan brothers had to have read at some point. It argues, by way of character analysis of Iago in Othello, that practical jokes are essentially anti-social acts:
The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they learn that all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually the puppets of another’s will. Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes. Unlike the ordinary ambitious man who strives for a dominant position in public and enjoys giving orders and seeing others obey them, the practical joker desires to make others obey him without being aware of his existence until the moment of his theophany when he says: “Behold the God whose puppets you have been and behold, he does not look like a god but is a human being just like yourselves.” The success of a practical joker depends upon his accurate estimate of the weaknesses of others, their ignorances, their social reflexes, their unquestioned presuppositions, their obsessive desires, and even the most harmless practical joke is an expression of the joker’s contempt for those he deceives.
You could probably capitalize a lot of those J's and arrive at plot points in The Dark Knight, or at least at several of Joker's speeches. Assuming that they did read the essay, it's extraordinarily clever of the Nolans to make the Joker into a terrorist: it's hard to get much more anti-social than that.
2. This segues nicely into something else that I thought was interesting about the movie: like No Country For Old Men, it seemed like the essential theme of The Dark Knight was a variation of the idea of the thin red/blue line separating civilization from chaos. Both films deflected this message in interesting ways, too: whenever it came up directly in No Country, the theme was treated with irony and with ridicule (witness: the news story about the San Francisco couple that dissolves into "sometimes I laugh myself," the misdirected concern over children with green hair after Moss's murder), even though the rest of the movie -- right down to its closing metaphor -- is ultimately a demonstration of that principle. Similarly, despite its use of Bush-era terrorist policy as an obvious foil, I think that, thematically-speaking, The Dark Knight was ultimately an affirmation of the need for leaders in the current era to make extremely difficult choices in the service of a greater good.
3. I also think that Auden's essay is interesting, but incomplete as an analysis of Iago. As Shakespeare critics like to point out, the character's motivation is constantly shifting and contradictory. So it goes with this Joker: witness his changing backstory regarding his scars, his later disregard for money (since oil is apparently cheap in Gotham) despite brutal efforts to maximize his share in the opening heist, his insistence that Batman completes him despite earlier overtures to the mob that he will kill him, etc.
4. That kind of irrationality is, I think, central to the power of a good villain. Whether motivations are overdetermined, as with Iago and this Joker, or merely absent, as in the case of Chigurh or, say, HAL-9000, the key to a well-drawn evil character is behavior that you don't (or can't) understand.
5. In the case of The Dark Knight, I also think that the conception of the villain serves the theme. Part of what makes terrorism such an effective bogeyman (witness its specter: Cloverfield) is the fact that, despite the glut of economic or cultural theories explaining it, on a psychological level it just seems, well, irrational. Additionally, like all monsters, the Joker (and Chigurh, and Iago, and HAL) occupies a middle ground between being a symbol and being a psychological being; this only underscores his service in the name of the movie's theme.
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6. I want to finish up by inveighing against stories that rest on Big Themes: even when I'm sympathetic to them, I see these as an intellectual crutch. Polemic is boring and didactic in this context; really, fiction should trade in ideas without settling, and the experience of a story and its characters should be what sustains, not its message -- secret or otherwise.