The Dark Knight Matters: The Joker's On to Us

The hype for "The Dark Knight" has mainly focused on Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker. Hank Stuver, writing for the Washington Post, hints at why:

Finally, in this reevaluation of Joker, there is the obvious matter that the actor playing him died in January, not long after completing the film.

That's a whole other story, about which much has been written, and there is no denying that Ledger's pill overdose increases the macabre fascination we get this time from watching Joker. Ledger's meaningless death is what passes for deeper meaning in the pop world of outsize comic books and the celebrity costume party of superhero movies. If the Joker were real, he couldn't have planned a more cruel joke.

In all the fretting this spring about whether this would affect the marketing of "The Dark Knight," people found it very difficult to say the awful, Joker-like truth: We like it better because of it.

There is no deigning that Ledger's death will hang over ever frame making the film more ominous, more dark, more completely a product of the bleakness that shrouds the Batman myth. Batman has always stuck me as Grimm-like fairytale whose original ending, the one in which Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten, has been sanitized for mass consumption. Unlike Superman, the line between good and evil in the Batman universe is paper thin. Bruce Wayne, like every villain in Gotham, is severely psychologically scared by a society that fails him in an extremely personal way. His and theirs response to this is to operate outside of the boundaries of that society to manipulate it to his or their own ends. The overarching message then is not that Batman is good, but that his bad behavior just so happens to benefit the public (minus all of the property damage he causes).

Which brings us to the current chapter of the Batman saga, Christopher Nolan's, "The Dark Knight." I can't comment extensively on this film, as we are still a week away from its release, but if it's anything like "Batman Begins" where the "happy ending" took place on the rubble of Wayne Manor we should brace ourselves for a movie whose moral could be, "Suffering is all around us, and its meaningless." Mass market Hollywood movies rarely carry such a grim message but the gitty anticipation for this film exposes our collective desire to embrace the darkness.