Playing the villains
July 20, 2008
I saw The Dark Knight on Saturday at the Prytania Theater, which opened in 1915 and is the last remaining single-screen cinema in Louisiana. Am very glad that we took Alissa’s lead and didn’t go the Canal Street one – a student ticket at the Prytania costs $6.25 and shows before 6pm cost a dollar less! It is also located smack in the middle of a residential area, with complete disregard for generic city planning.
SPOILERS WITHIN.
As far as my limited knowledge on this subject goes, superhero villains in film adaptations usually get disposed of clean-sweep style. They dissolve into dust. They are crushed by the shattered remains of mechanized weapons after the final confrontation. Isn’t that the whole easy cinematic point? Smoke, explosions, tired symbols of good triumphing over evil?
The strange thing about the new Batman movies is how the villains simply hang around. And I’m not talking about the minor bad guy who’s just there to milk the laughs. Scarecrow makes a brief appearance at the start of this movie, still very much at large but apparently not threatening enough to warrant more attention. (Didn’t he keep Batman fairly busy the last time round?) And we don’t find out what happens to Heath Ledger’s Joker, who is completely void of backstory and thus unjustified by identification or motivation. Christopher Nolan purposely adapts the villain so he “just is the Joker;” a concept rather than a human-based character. As a result Heath’s last role hovers very unsettlingly.
I’m not sure whether it was the reason for or result of the other characters bumbling around having zero development, even and especially Batman, but if it hasn’t already been made clear by everyone and their mother, Heath owned this movie. Though unintended by both the actor and character, the reasonless killer became the sympathetic one. The comic-book Joker is famous for his unreliable narrations, but where did he get his multiple harrowing explanations for the scars on his face? Was he too crazy to be genuinely evil? I’d say the mindlessness he portrayed and perpetuated stands for evil’s strongest form.
The original Joker was humanized with a fairly consistent backstory. He had a wife, and in typical comic-book-villain fashion went mad after she was murdered, although he was under more than a little stress in the first place.
The strange thing about the new Batman movies is how the villains simply hang around. And I’m not talking about the minor bad guy who’s just there to milk the laughs. Scarecrow makes a brief appearance at the start of this movie, still very much at large but apparently not threatening enough to warrant more attention. (Didn’t he keep Batman fairly busy the last time round?) And we don’t find out what happens to Heath Ledger’s Joker, who is completely void of backstory and thus unjustified by identification or motivation. Christopher Nolan purposely adapts the villain so he “just is the Joker;” a concept rather than a human-based character. As a result Heath’s last role hovers very unsettlingly.
I’m not sure whether it was the reason for or result of the other characters bumbling around having zero development, even and especially Batman, but if it hasn’t already been made clear by everyone and their mother, Heath owned this movie. Though unintended by both the actor and character, the reasonless killer became the sympathetic one. The comic-book Joker is famous for his unreliable narrations, but where did he get his multiple harrowing explanations for the scars on his face? Was he too crazy to be genuinely evil? I’d say the mindlessness he portrayed and perpetuated stands for evil’s strongest form.
The original Joker was humanized with a fairly consistent backstory. He had a wife, and in typical comic-book-villain fashion went mad after she was murdered, although he was under more than a little stress in the first place.
[DC Comics, Batman: The Killing Joke, 1989]
It is hardly a new concept for villains to remain unexplained. (After all, Gary Oldman, who portrayed the all-round good cop James Gordon, has his own history of playing psychotic bad guys.) But Nolan didn’t mean to examine the psychology of man within the Joker – rather through him (keep up the count for the number of people he drove mad). We’d like to say Heath did a phenomenal, posthumous-Oscar-worthy etc etc job of withholding that Hollywood-style redeeming quality, but don’t you think he’d have to sacrifice something sinisterly giant within himself to represent a slippery force no other character was able to withstand?
