The Batshit Odyssey has returned to us! This time, we're discussing
The Dark Knight!
https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=700.msg266897#msg266897I think this assessment of Harvey Dent's downfall, and in particular likening the Joker's philosophy and worldview to an attitude of teenage rebellion, is a little unfair. Nolan isn't shy about having his characters explicitly spell out their motivations, and Dent is no exception. He replaces the laws and systems he's followed to his detriment all his life with what he believes to be a simpler, fairer method of determining justice, and one that can't be twisted by the corruption of others - the toss of a coin. He certainly doesn't ignore or overlook the Joker's culpability in what happened, either, as the Joker is literally the very first person he confronts and "judges," right there in the hospital. None of this is to say that what Dent does is reasonable or rational, but you're never going to tell a story about a district attorney who bases their decision on whether or not to murder people on a coin toss and still comes across as reasonable or rational. For the purposes of this movie, which underneath its grittiness and semi-realism is still capeshit, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to buy that Dent's trauma, rage, guilt, vulnerable state of mind, and a few unconscious elements like his unease at being labeled "two-faced" and the defacing of his lucky coin pushed him over the edge and set him on his fatal path.
"For the purposes of this movie" is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting. This might just be my own take on the movie and not something that a lot of people agree with me on, but I've never tried to interpret the Joker's "philosophy" seriously, and I think that the people who do - both critics and enthusiastic fans of the movie - are overthinking something that isn't really all that deep. Underneath the Joker's charisma and intelligence, he's really just a crazy guy who wants to spread chaos and destruction throughout Gotham, and also for its citizens to join him in doing so. And for a capeshit movie, that's a perfectly fine motivation. On paper, the Joker is a decent antagonist, but it's Ledger's terrific performance that elevates him to being one of the greatest capeshit villains of all time. It's certainly not his goofy philosophy, and I swear I die a little from the cringe every time I see another dumb edgelord on the Internet say something like, "Childhood is idolizing Batman. Adulthood is realizing the Joker makes more sense."
This inability to recognize that Ledger's charisma is the main reason why his Joker was so memorable and compelling has predictably led to Hollywood giving villains in later genre movies some of his more superficial characteristics in an attempt to recreate the magic. I've complained about this tendency in this thread before, but I couldn't possibly let a discussion of TDK go by without bringing it up once more. Villains are now more chaotic and less focused, simply causing destruction and chaos randomly rather than actually pursuing specific goals. Villains now seem to be more concerned with proving some sort of philosophical point to the hero or utterly breaking their spirit rather than just killing them when they have the chance. Villains are now often apparently irrational to the point of insanity, sabotaging their own schemes and engaging in other pointless, self-destructive behavior whenever it's convenient to the plot. And the one that I find most galling, probably because it's the most obvious, is the rise of villains who get captured and then dramatically reveal that they
meant to get captured for whatever reason and then escape. Moriarty from
Sherlock, Lex Luthor from BvS, and the Riddler from
The Batman, to give three examples, all owe a
tremendous debt to the Joker. Silva from
Skyfall and Khan from
Into Dumbness show plenty of influence too. I'm sick of movies and TV shows mining influence from TDK rather than doing something different.
Oddly enough, this influence never seemed to extend to other versions of the Joker. Other villains became more Joker-like, but other Jokers didn't become more Ledger-like. For all the cringe surrounding Jared Leto's turn as the Joker and the marketing thereof, he at least didn't try to copy Ledger's performance. Certainly neither did Joaquin Phoenix. And in the realm of animation and video games, it's Mark Hamill's decades-spanning interpretation of the character that most voice actors eagerly emulate. I just hope that if and when Barry Keoghan's Joker gets a bigger role, he makes the character his own, as the deleted scene of him I linked above does seem to me to be the exception to the rule, with his cadence and lip-smacking feeling very reminiscent of Ledger.
But perhaps the most influential thing associated with Ledger's performance is the mythification of his subsequent death. To be clear, there is no evidence that playing the Joker had an especially negative impact on Ledger - at least no more than putting a lot of effort into trying to nail down a tough role would be for a dedicated actor - let alone that it caused his death. But the fanboys out there couldn't let the facts get in the way of a good story, and soon the legend spread. As Crudblud put it:
There is a temptation to read in, to blur the lines of fantasy and reality, professional and personal, to give in to the romantic notion of the method actor, who inhabits their role and temporarily loses their own being, sacrifices it to their art, maybe even relinquishes some small part of it forever. Few are more keen to have this notion accepted than the ones who do it, what some call “love me” acting, wherein the Method, originally a far more humble, “pure” craft-oriented conception of acting through deep empathy, gives way to the spectacle of the actor, of a performance beyond the performance. The desire to conflate events occurring around a film with the film itself is a curious one. It seems in some ways a mirror to the desire for (typically) science fiction and fantasy media to expand infinitely, so that the adventure, the escape, never comes to an end. Here the fictional spills out into the real, the artifice loses its boundaries; Heath Ledger becomes the Joker becomes Heath Ledger.
The most obvious example of an actor who took this all to heart is Jared Leto. I don't know if it was his Oscar win for his role in
Dallas Buyers Club or his casting as the Joker in
Suicide Squad that broke his brain, but ever since that general time period, whatever acting talent Leto may have ever had has been entirely buried by his frantic efforts at self-aggrandizement and desperate flailing about for attention. But other, more respectable actors have capitalized on the respect that award ceremonies have for these kinds of roles that apparently rely on actors suffering for their art or physically punishing themselves. Joaquin Phoenix had received multiple Oscar nominations in the past, but didn't win one until he too played the Joker in the movie of the same name - where he attracted plenty of media attention by losing a dangerous amount of weight. Leonardo DiCaprio famously spent several years actively courting the Oscars, but he didn't win until his lead role in
The Revenant, a movie where much of the marketing revolved on just how difficult it was physically for DiCaprio to be diving into cold water or really biting into steaming animal organs and all that. I can't say I agree with the notion that the best acting is always of the transformative or traumatizing kind, and award ceremonies so consistently rewarding actors who buy into it doesn't fill me with hope for the future of cinema.
But back to the movie itself. I think it's great! Ledger's Joker is great, Two-Face is a good foil for Batman, although I will agree that his villainous turn might have been better saved for a sequel, there's some interesting exploration of Batman as a character, and while the hand-to-hand combat in these movies was never much good, the car chases and hostage rescue scenes are done extraordinarily well. There's almost nothing about this movie that I'd call mediocre or middle of the road. The worst thing I could really say about it is that it's a particularly aggressive example of the kind of capeshit that's essentially embarrassed to be capeshit, but that was largely the preferred style of most live-action capeshit back then, and only seems out of touch nowadays because Marvel has seen such enormous success in movies that embrace their colorful capeshit roots. In short, Crudblud is a hipster.