"Angels are partisans not of Good, but of divine creation. The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning in God's world. World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between demons and angels. But the good of the world does not require the latter to gain precedence over the former; all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power. If there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all its meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as impossible." - Milan KunderaIn Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter & Forgetting, he not surprisingly deals much with the idea of laughter and its meaning. According to Kundera, the Devil invented laughter: "Laughter is the province of the Devil. It has a certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things are looser than they seemed, we have greater latitude in living with them, their gravity does not oppress us)." In light of this, the Devil is thus both a liberator and a tempter. He is a singularity of abyssal irony, something we all find in ourselves but could never become completely. He both repels and attracts; he is a she and she is an it. As Max Von Sydow reminds us in The Exorcist, "Satan is a liar and a cheat." But does he ever lie about that?
In Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, The Joker, so superbly played by the late Heath Ledger*, is none other than a modern take on this Devil character, i.e. humanity's absolute Other. Unabashedly unified in his chaotic whimsy, he is also lacking the strength of restraint and the power of compassion, the stuff angels are made of. The choice to have The Joker tell two completely different stories about how he got his scars shows how completely inhuman he is; for him, there is no past and no future. His seductive qualities lie in his complete immersion in the moment, in the act of orgasm, of complete and singular fulfillment of desire above all.
Batman, on the other hand, is very human. He needs the rich, kung-fu-chopping Bruce Wayne to exist (as all the imitators make painfully obvious). Furthermore, if Bruce Wayne ceased to exist, Batman would surely descend into the world of The Joker. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Alfred burning Rachel's note, ensuring that Bruce will never know the truth about himself, has secured Batman's reality as a role and nothing more. While Bruce Wayne's reserves about being Batman are deeply human, his choice to persist as Batman is divine. The twist is his status as an anti-hero, but even this is no more than par for the saviour course; after all, Jesus being crucified was part of God's plan, and his being part-God was just as critical.
To withdraw from Theology and move over to Idealism: Gotham City is nothing less than the jumbled mind of Man**, disconnected from its destructive instincts and irrationally but ignorantly bound to a superficial order of things. In Gotham, you basically have The Joker as Chaos, Batman as Jesus, and People as People in all their near-sighted, vain, but ultimately endearingly graceful glory. Chance is the absolute reality these people must face, and it is their attitudes towards it that define them: The Joker laughs at it and does what he can to master it for his own amusement, Batman gravely looks it in the eye and does what he can to combat its destructive downswings, and People are largely trapped in its ebb and flow. Indeed, The Joker and Batman are apart from Chance while People are caught in its gears, perhaps even constitute it. Within the sphere of Chance, The Joker's anarchic machinations create the necessity*** for Batman, and without either, Gotham wouldn't be Gotham and humans wouldn't be humans.
Bullshite analysis aside, I loved this movie. The performances were explosive and the plot sizzled with relentless excitement. I think Harvey Dent was an extremely interesting sub-plot and I think his necessity to the story is fascinating. In reality, he saves Batman and is the hero Gotham needed, albeit thanks to a white lie. Harvey Dent "falls" because he cannot fathom The Joker; he cannot account for his existence. He naively believes that evil is evil and evil is not him, thus with blind good conscience he makes it his goal to eradicate it. One devastating twist of fate, however, leaves him a shell of a human who, like Anton Chigurh, begins tragically to worship the amorality of Chance in order to quench the often seemingly unquenchable thirst for justice in a world where The Joker not only exists, but thrives. Also, it is probably his cleft chin, but he continually reminded of the Father in Troll 2 (!).
A question for other people who have seen The Dark Knight: Does The Joker intentionally mix up the addresses of where Dent and Rachel are being held or is he mistaken? If it's totally his show as it seems, how did Ramirez enter the fold? Was it a mob set-up that The Joker happened to privy to, or did he author it?
* - SO FUCKING SUPERBLY.
** - I apologize for this sexist lapse. I only use it for rhetorical effect as well as appropriateness. Come on, those German assholes were straight-up misogynists.
*** - I say necessity in terms of Freedom being the ultimate goal of human endeavor. The Joker seems free, but of course he is not, being slave to his whim and endless desire.
