Why So Serious?

Here are some random, pseudo-intellectual post-mortems on The Dark Knight, specifically directed to the most talked-about character in the movie, that is the Joker. Note that this is not so much a criticism of Heath Ledger's performance, which in any case is almost flawless, than an analysis of the nature of Joker himself, as is confined by the plot.

Firstly, I have to admit Joker wasn't quite the character that I had expected him to be. When I first saw his costume, I was reminded of Ann Demeulemeester's aesthetics, which naturally led me to want to believe Joker as a poetic, romantic idealist, who somehow turned into a criminal when his ideals were shattered into pieces. It's as if Don Quixote started slitting Sancho Panza's throat and burning down his village at the end of his adventure. But Joker was nowhere near that expectation. I had expected a complex personality, what with delicate veils of emotions behind that goth-ed-out facade. Yet, Joker is just like the character he was modelled after, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, ie. what you would expect from the hardcore punk genre: anarchic, abhorrent of the rules and the norms of the society, destruction for its own sake, or as Johnny Rotten himself belted out "Don't know what I want but I know how to get it, I wanna destroy the passerby". Watching Joker was like listening to Black Flag's three agressive minutes of one power chord and nothing else. We did get a glimpse of how this maniacal character came about, apparently from a disturbed childhood spent in a malfunctioning family. Yet, if the director had subtly filled us in with how this led to his evolution, I would have better appreciated him.

I can however appreciate Two-Face better as a (tragic?) criminal. I see him as an idealist, a visionary to some extent who eventually saw his world crumble because the very system that he believed in had failed him (or at least he believed so). He was to some extent the embodiment of what I had expected Joker to be. Having said that, I did not believe that his society was entirely culpable in turning him into a criminal. He shared the blame too, as we could probably see from his last encounter with Batman. Two-Face could have been the Batman's version of the Achillean tragic hero save for his myopia and for his failure to overcome his emotions post-Rachel's death.