Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight opens in the UK next weekend. Novelist Alan Bissett considers the history of the character all the buzz surrounds:
Frequently rated among the greatest fictional villains of all time, the Joker is the same chaotic trickster who appears in every culture, from Loki in Norse lore to the Judeo-Christian Lucifer, or the Dionysus of Greek myth, inspirer of ritual madness. His literary antecedents are Shakespeare’s Fool, happily ridiculing King Lear; Professor Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, a lurid showman who wreaks havoc in Stalinist Moscow; and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. Indeed, the idea for The Joker first came to Bill Finger after seeing Conrad Veidt in the film adaptation of Hugo’s book, a German expressionist nightmare with a permanent smile.
A classic piece of pop-culture design himself – with his fixed grin and chalk-white face – we can see the Joker’s visual influence on V for Vendetta, Stephen King’s It and Bono’s ‘Mr MacPhisto’ persona from U2’s Zoo TV tour. His anarchic spirit cackles in Tyler Durden, Jack Sparrow and Andy Kaufman. If Batman is the classic anti-hero then the Joker is surely an ‘anti-villain’, charismatic and colourful, a glam-rock hood thumbing his nose at authority. Politically, he is an anarchist. Philosophically, he’s exisentialist. His art school is surely Dada. He doesn’t commit crimes, he commits ‘performances’. Life for the Joker is a cosmic farce, the only logical reactions to it being laughter or murder. Batman’s great dilemma is: how do you defeat someone who cares nothing about his own existence? In The Dark Knight we see the Batpod speeding towards a raving Heath Ledger. ‘C’mon!’ taunts the Joker, ‘Kill me!’ Batman bottles it, swerving at the last moment. The Joker, we sense, is almost disappointed. Even the great supervillains from the comic world – Lex Luthor, The Leader, Doctor Doom – are mere variations on the mad scientist theme, hellbent on world domination. The Joker doesn’t want to run the world. He wants to fuck with its head.
First posted: Sunday, July 20th, 2008.
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Top notch analysis with many fun links!
Has anyone noticed the uncanny similarities between Heath Ledger’s Joker and Patrick McGoohan’s Scarecrow of Romney Marsh? Check it out.
/ Posted by Bill Ectric on July 20th, 2008 at 9:42 pm / Permalink /