valet
The official Chaplain of the Coli
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles lately with headlines like “Why Heath Ledger’s Joker Will Never Be Matched”. I was going to do a take down of that for several reasons; he’s largely a product of a post-9/11 world that will eventually move on from that mindset, The Arkham game portrayals are better really, etc. But while I was mulling over that listicle I really sat down and deconstructed The Dark Knight. I’ve come to the conclusion The Joker is actually the hero of the film. More than that, he’s arguably better at it than Batman.
Let’s consider how we meet The Joker in that opening scene which will go down as one of the greatest heist scenes ever shot. Joker stages an elaborate plot to rob a bank and even though there’s a dramatic reveal near the end we all knew it was him because the clip had been released as a promo long before it came out. So everyone who saw that film was already in the mindset, “Here’s The Joker, what crime is he going to pull?”
The thing is, he doesn’t pull a crime. He stages an elaborate bout of vigilante justice worthy of Batman himself. The bank is a mob bank. It houses millions of dollars of funds gained through extortion, drugs, theft, murder, you name it. Not only does The Joker rob the bank, he does so in a way in which all his criminal accomplices murder each other one by one thinking that they’ll get a bigger cut if they do. This is supposed to look diabolical bit of insanity but it’s really him immediately eliminating five dangerous murderers while he’s literally in the middle of crippling the mob financially.
Swap The Joker out for, say, The Punisher for that scene. Sure, he’d be a killer with a gun and killers with guns are how we know guys are bad in Batman movies, but the real result is that The Joker completes a major anti-mob strike while getting a quintet of thugs off the streets for good. He doesn’t kill any civilians, and only wounds the manager with a shotgun in self-defense. Even then he lets the guy live with a joke.
In fact, for the whole movie his target is mostly the same mob that Batman has apparently been unable to really stop since Batman Begins. Not only are these crime families still going strong, but they are augmented by the fact that Batman was unable to stop the spread of Scarecrow’s fear toxin, creating a permanently deranged underclass that are now presumably desperate and starving. It’s these largely forgotten downtroddens that The Joker recruits for his army, which implies that Gotham has left them to rot.
read the rest: http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/th...ize-heath-ledger-s-joker-was-the-hero-7435017
Let’s consider how we meet The Joker in that opening scene which will go down as one of the greatest heist scenes ever shot. Joker stages an elaborate plot to rob a bank and even though there’s a dramatic reveal near the end we all knew it was him because the clip had been released as a promo long before it came out. So everyone who saw that film was already in the mindset, “Here’s The Joker, what crime is he going to pull?”
The thing is, he doesn’t pull a crime. He stages an elaborate bout of vigilante justice worthy of Batman himself. The bank is a mob bank. It houses millions of dollars of funds gained through extortion, drugs, theft, murder, you name it. Not only does The Joker rob the bank, he does so in a way in which all his criminal accomplices murder each other one by one thinking that they’ll get a bigger cut if they do. This is supposed to look diabolical bit of insanity but it’s really him immediately eliminating five dangerous murderers while he’s literally in the middle of crippling the mob financially.
Swap The Joker out for, say, The Punisher for that scene. Sure, he’d be a killer with a gun and killers with guns are how we know guys are bad in Batman movies, but the real result is that The Joker completes a major anti-mob strike while getting a quintet of thugs off the streets for good. He doesn’t kill any civilians, and only wounds the manager with a shotgun in self-defense. Even then he lets the guy live with a joke.
In fact, for the whole movie his target is mostly the same mob that Batman has apparently been unable to really stop since Batman Begins. Not only are these crime families still going strong, but they are augmented by the fact that Batman was unable to stop the spread of Scarecrow’s fear toxin, creating a permanently deranged underclass that are now presumably desperate and starving. It’s these largely forgotten downtroddens that The Joker recruits for his army, which implies that Gotham has left them to rot.
read the rest: http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/th...ize-heath-ledger-s-joker-was-the-hero-7435017
