Why So Serious?

Unless you have been living under a rock, in the woods...in the frickin’ Amazon,  and/or have no discernible values as a cultured human being, you know what I’m going to talk about. The Joker.

Specifically, the Joker as played by the immortal Heath Ledger (R.I.P), in The Dark Knight (2008). NOT the Cesar Romero or Jack Nicholson versions. Maybe a little bit of the Mark Hamill voice over animated one. Now, I know what you’re thinking, what’s left to say? It’s already the stuff of legend for the fans and it’s been five years since it came out. But you see I gotta put my two cents in. For my own peace of mind.

I will NOT be analyzing Ledger’s performance, because it was practically perfect and also it’s douchey to do that. The man can’t defend his choices against the all knowing, can’t shut the f*ck up critics.

All I’m going to expound upon is why I love that character, so much so that it used to be a slight cause for concern.

I shall begin at the beginning.  A couple of my closest friends and I were at the movies, at PVR Cinemas, Forum Mall, Bengaluru, about to be disappointed by Will Smith in and as Hancock, when the trailer for The Dark Knight came on. It was the one with Ledger’s voice explaining how Batman “changed everything”. I had heard that Ledger was playing Joker, but to me he was still the guy from A Knight’s Tale. So I had no idea that it was Ledger’s voice, and I had expected TDK to be in the same league as Batman Begins, good enough but nothing spectacular. And then the Joker revealed himself – “Evening, Commissioner...” HOLY SHIT! I mean, there was an audible gasp from the audience. I knew then and there that my new favorite movie character of all time had just declared his awesomeness in just two sweet, sinister sounding words.

Okay, now a little context to the obsession. Me and my best friend at the time, hung out pretty much every day after class to bitch about how much bullshit there was around us. After I had a couple of drinks, complaining would turn into analysis of the situation and then into a debate about why people were juuuust sosoo stuuupid.. I’m not going to go into all the details of that, but trust me when I say there was a lot of stupidity. A LOT. Then again, stupidity like beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, so..

For dissatisfied, intellectually disenfranchised, armchair revolutionaries like us, the Joker was tailor made, with his hatred for “the plan” and “schemers” and people who live by things that are “bad jokes”. In fact, for almost the entire movie we were rooting for the Joker, we couldn’t give a crap about Rachel Dawes or Harvey Dent, no fault of their own though.

We came out of the movie speechless. We stayed that way for a few minutes, then we couldn’t stop talking about it for days. The character of Joker permeated most every discussion we tried to have. Funny thing was he fit into it, often seamlessly. Besides, I had always been fascinated by the full spectrum of the human psyche, especially serial killers and stuff. I’m currently in the process of getting a P.G. Diploma in Forensic Psychology and Criminal Profiling, btw. It wasn’t exactly a ‘phase’ I was going through.

Then there’s the incident. Don’t hold your breath, it was nothing monumental. But it does make me smile. One evening, we were walking out of a local bar where we were known patrons,  after one of our two hour discussions about life, skimming across and dipping into many social disciplines, with my arguments fueled by liquor and smokes and my relatively sober friend reigning me back in (unique conversations as you can imagine, when only one person’ s drunk), we see something lying on the ground right outside the bar, on the side of the road. We almost stepped on it. It was.. wait for it.. A Joker card... I know what you are thinking -  well screw you, it was bloody awesome! The odds of that particular card, no other ones from the deck, lying in front of that bar, that evening, in that less than cultured street, in that kinda local, almost rowdy neighborhood, for us to find and no one else... We laughed out loud for a few seconds. Then we stared at it and each other for a few seconds. We both knew that no one would or could give a crap about what had just happened, like you probably don’t right now. Then my friend picked it up, didn't say a word and put it in his wallet. Then we continued on with our evening.

He carried that card in his wallet, all the while I knew him - till the end of college. Maybe he still does, I dunno.. To us two self proclaimed outcasts, it was a reminder to never be one of those bad joke, scheming, followers of the plan “trying to control our little worlds”.

Every time I see TDK I am not only reminded of all these things, but I see new things about the Joker himself. Little things he does and the way he says certain things. I’m sure that in all probability, neither Nolan nor Ledger, ever intended to give all the meaning in all the things I read into, but like I always say ‘The author is dead’.

The way that he is high on what seems to be, to him at least, a higher truth, and so you never see him intoxicated. He casually throws the drink out of the glass before putting it to his lips at Wayne’s fundraiser. How he emphasizes ‘gentle’ when he says “Ladies and gentlemen”. The only time he loses his cool demeanor is when he tells the mobsters that he is not crazy, “No I’m not..No I’m not.” He has no problem admitting he’s a freak but insane he is not. I like that fact that his voice changes from its usual high, taunting one to almost a heavy animal roar precisely twice. When he yells at Batman to hit him with the bat-bike or whatever (“Hit me!!”) and when he tells the Batman wannabe to “Look at me!”, and this is he does symbolically from off camera. The way the anchorman is hanging upside down when reading out the threat. How Joker always gets away in a school bus and how the diversion on the road during Dent’s prison transport was a fire engine on fire. How he sanitizes his hand after walking out of Dent’s hospital room, before pressing the button on the detonator and blowing up the hospital. And the layers to the lines he throws out somewhat casually: “I believe what doesn’t kill me, makes me stranger..”, “Let’s see how loyal a hungry dog really is”, “Insanity is like gravity, sometimes all it takes is a little push” and so on.

Ledger’s Joker is right up there with, maybe even a little above, Hopkins’ Lecter, in my book. I was devastated when I heard that Ledger passed away at 28 years. I was incredibly glad that he won the Academy award, though it was posthumously. C’mon... young medieval British commoner pretending to be a knight, a revolutionary war soldier, a European- well – ‘Casanova’, a gay cowboy and the most deep, layered and menacing villain maybe of all time... all by 28. A true tragedy. And I’m just a fan of his work.  To the people who actually knew him? Wow.. Don’t wanna go there.

Anyways, to me the Joker remains the epitome of how a bad guy should be played. I mean he practically made a guy in black, tight, bat costume legit and the story feel real. I’m also a huge Nicholson fan but his Joker is not in the same league as Ledger’s. Yeah, I know... different time, first attempt at a serious Batman movie, different kinda movie, Tim Burton and all that. But I have to work with what I have. To put it simply, The Dark Knight’s Joker, is the definitive Joker to me because he makes a saying I read somewhere on the internet seem pretty true – “When super villains want to scare each other, they tell Joker stories.”   

Now..Let’s put a smile on that face...