Why no perspective?
According to Wired, there is a group of Heath Ledger fans demanding a moratorium on big-screen portrayals of everybody’s favourite clown. According to the article:
“We truly believe Ledger’s performance as Joker is the best an actor could ever do,” the site’s team leader, Fer Barbella, told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.
“Any other performance will be below expectations for sure, so we want to forever keep Ledger’s Joker as the one,” added Barbella, who launched The Ultimate Joker site last week with his colleague Nico Pimentel.
Now, I admit I had a good time with The Dark Knight, but I honestly believe that if Ledger gets an Oscar for his performance, it’ll mostly be a sympathy vote. That Joker was edgy, and anarchic, and vicious, and very very disturbing. But worthy of an Academy award? Hardly.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can we look objectively at the demands of these obsessed fans? They are requiring that one of the staple villains of the Batman canon be taken off the big screen. Never mind that Ledger needed a script and a director to perform off. Never mind that the Joker can (and has been) written and performed a whole bunch of different ways, and there will be more to come.
Sure, the current fad in comic book movies is for Dark and Gritty(tm), and this calls for an inhumanly intense and bipolar Joker, doesn’t mean the next time round it will be the same. Or that it won’t be better. Ledger doesn’t have a monopoly on that character, and other actors shouldn’t be denied a chance to try it out.
Maybe I’m just getting worked up over nothing, but Ledger was nothing special, and just because he took too many pills, doesn’t mean we should claim him to be some sort of shining light in Hollywood.
Originally published at Conjunction. Please leave any comments there.