by Matt Hanson

originally published in Flak Magazine

            After Batman- The Dark Knight has broken every conceivable box office standard ever known to man, people are excited about the late Heath Ledger's portrayal of...well, you know.  At first, the idea didn't sound likely: a handful of other actors either expressed interest or were reported to have been approached for the role.  The most logical one, for my money, was Sean Penn.  There's something about the anger and the wild flamboyance of the Joker that made sense for him.  It's a method part.  One can't do the joker properly unless one taps into him in some kind of automatic, unconscious level.  Nicholson, ironically, seemed to forgo this completely with his characterization: his joker is funny, not scary.  Unless of course you're 14, which was fine, considering that it fits in perfectly with the rest of the film.  Michael Keaton, if you remember, plays the tormented subversive Bruce Wayne...for laughs.  Nicholson did too.  He also had the wit and good taste to admit as much in an interview.  He referred to his performance as "a piece of pop art".  No problem there.  How serious is a movie rated PG-13 required to be?       

            Ledger, of course, did something else entirely.  His Joker is a mumbling, ragged, lascivious pile of germs and spite who looks and acts like nothing so much as a guy who actually decided to paint his face like a violated court jester and run around killing people.  Somehow, Ledger's Joker cuts to the bone because it's realistic.  The reason the Joker has survived as an archetype is partly because he's meant to be just as much John Wayne Gacy as he is Ceasar Romero.  Even the comic itself has been known to waver on just how manically evil he ought to be.  Christopher Nolan decided to take the Frank Miller route (as if his sensibility had any other choice) and allowed Ledger to become the most truly (that is, actually) terrifying movie villan in recent memory.      

            The amazing thing is just how many layers Ledger was able to put into it.  One minute he's cracking wise, the next he's slammed a pencil into the eye socket of an offending goon without touching it.  One of the more crackling moments of tension comes when he flatly and coolly denies that he's even insane.  Then it's off to the races with a bogus, spontaneously told story about his own origin, which he will later contradict.   You want to see more of him- and the amount of actual film he gets is almost the same amount as Bale's sleekly doleful Knight does.       

            Each person I have spoken with about the movie has described him in a different way.  Ledger himself was oddly vague when describing him as "a psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy."  Well yeah, but what kind?  This is where the old saw about trusting the tale and not the teller comes in handy.  And there's (almost) no limit as to how much symbolic power he was able to access.  References and textual counter-points abound.  It's not that any of these observations encompasses the real Joker, it's that somehow Ledger was able to flit between ancient personae, tossing them into the air one after another until they burst into tiny, purple atom bombs.  Here are nine of them, each aligned with each other but not quite the same.  

1. 1)Misanthrope.         
   

"You know what I noticed?  Nobody panics when things go 'according to plan'...even if the plan is horrifying."          

            The first comment I heard before seeing the film was that the Joker hates people.  Obviously it seems clearer to me having been prepped for it but nevertheless it holds true.  It's safe to say that he doesn't hold much of his fellow humans in very high esteem.  What he wants is to push the simpletons out of his way as he careens down the path to killing them.  The fact that they are generally slack jawed with shock and surprise doesn't help matters.  

2. 2)Terrorist.        
   

           

Slate's own Dana Stevens just comes right out and says it: "make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist."          

            The italicised emphasis underlies the urgency.  It's easy to start talking about the Manichean good/evil dialectic in the film, which encourages it.  Nolan's microscopically serene direction just stands far enough back to let it play out onscreen.  Wayne's butler, the sage like and suave Michael Caine, pretty much spells it out for the viewer: "some men just want to watch the world burn."  This, as we have been reminded, is all too true.  Some of these types simply smoulder.  Some fly airplanes.  It's best not to forget this- regardless of how much Bush and his administration want to manipulate it.    

3. 3)Nihilist.         
   

"When the chips are down, these, uh civilized people, they'll eat each other."             

            The Joker doesn't get off on righteous outrage.  The Joker doesn't have a cause, no endpoint on the horizon.  He doesn't bat an eye when he goes hurtling to his apparent death, we see and hear him laughing on the way down.  Life and death mean nothing to him, and neither does much of anything else.  Burning a pile of money which might strategically come in handy, he enjoys the look of shock on his fellow miscreant's faces.  He laughs as a way to hear the hollow echo of his own emptiness.  Ledger's Joker, when sitting for any length of time, seems frenetically bored.  

4. 4)Anarchist.          
   

"The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules...tonight, you're gonna break your one rule."          

            Bakunin would have dug him.  He's not interested in organization, even of the subversive kind.  It could be very easy for him to simply join forces with the Falconi gang and the rest of Gotham City's underworld and wreak havoc accordingly.  His various stunts sometimes have an allegorical quality: he puts on a series of morality plays which intend to stoke moral ambiguity over the sheer facade of civilization.  There are two boats full of people challenged to blow each other up to save their own lives.  This kind of extravagant philosophical posturing wouldn't be out of line in Dostoevsky's "The Possessed", at least rhetorically.  This little side-plot also provides a moment where the human spirit is actually evoked in a monologue which is delivered beautifully and provides the film with its only clear blast of raw humanism.   

5. 5)Will incarnate.       
   

"I'm like a dog chasing cars.  I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it!  You know?  I just...do things."      

            Ledger's Joker is all action, improvisation.  Manic energy defines him.  There is certainly a scheming, detailed mind at work here but he relentlessly moves, in a way that seems less than planned.  Hyper-responsive, hyper-reactive, hyper-verbal, there's a certain kind of blindness in his machinations.  Ledger's masterstroke was to make the Joker gleeful (and actually funny!) in the way a bright, psychotic preteen would be if given full reign of an empty house after a few hours doing whippets alone in the woods.  

6. 6)Sadist.      
   

            This one's almost too easy.  Ledger's Joker gets his kicks in violence, condescension, humiliation, disdain, abuse.  He loves the power of inflciting pain onto people.  And what's more, he seems to have a special yen for bringing out the sadist in others- which could be considered a sadism all its own.  

7. 7)Masochist.  
   

"Come on.  I want you to do it.  I want you to hit me.  Hit me.  Hit me!  I WANT YOU TO HIT ME! Come on.  Do it!  HIT ME!"      

            The Joker spends quite a bit of time getting himself beaten up.  He provokes people into doing it.  He comments on it as it happens and he sometimes doesn't seem to feel compelled to hit back.  Think of the scene where he goads his police guardsman into it ("I probably killed some of your friends...") and he simply crumples there for a little while longer than he might have to.  Sartre said that the psychology of the masochist is such that one desires to be rid of the possibility of active, free choice and therefore desires to make oneself an object, to be acted upon and abused.  For a guy who's full of pep, being the victim might have a strange appeal.  Particularly, one might say erotically, if its Batman.   

8. 8)Parodist. 
   

"(After Batman slams his head into the interrogation table) Never start with the head.  The victim gets all...fuzzy.  He can't feel the next (Batman does it again.  He pauses and pretends to look confused) See?"          

            Ledger's Joker is very ironic, very postmodern, quite full of meta-commentary.  As he is escorting himself out of the room in his first big scene, he reveals a large amount of grenades wrapped beneath his overcoat.  There's a moment when he almost mockingly plays with the string, opening his eyes really wide as if to mime naievete.  The ever present refrain is "why so SERIOUS?"  The way he treats Gotham's upper crust as he crashes the party looking for Harvey Dent is full of ironic references to his appearance, his purpose and his significance.  Just watch the way he self-consciously smoothes back his ratty hair as he appraoches the scrumptious Maggie Gyllenhall.  Throughout the film, he plays on the I'm-wearing-a-mask-but-that's-the-real-me-you're-seeing thing with wit and gusto: the Joker is a joke to himself!    

9. 9)Ghost.    
   

"I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve."        

            Hear me out on this one: If the logic of religious beliefs (at least, the ones that sound convincing) the world over holds water, and we have spirits within us which are released upon death, and the logic of ghost stories (at least, the ones that sound convincing) is true, that a spirit pulled out of its human shell in an untimely, accidental fashion (as Ledger's certainly was) is going to be mighty pissed and cause trouble, then it would make for a diabolical irony that Ledger's soul was splaying its wretched, luckless annoyance over missing this year's Oscar ceremony, doomed to be stuck on celluloid forever.  Not to suggest in the slightest that Heath Ledger was evil, just to propose a sort of prophetic quality to one of the most effective, varied and deeplu unsettling villians of any summer blockbuster, ever- if not of all time.  

Pyschopath.  C'mon.  This one's a gimmie.