The Joker's Onto Us

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The Joker, Through the Years

A look at the many faces of Batman's nemesis, on film, on television and in the comics.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

Batman is a bore, isn't he, beneath all that sculpted latex? He's at his best as a concept, a shadow, drawn alone on his vantage points, in lots of dark ink, talking to himself in thought balloons. Put him on a movie screen, and then he has to speak aloud more than he gets to brood, and then . . . something . . . isn't . . . quite right.

But thank the Devil for Joker.

The villain is always more interesting, right? People write about the hero, but come Halloween or Comic-Con, they dress up as the bad guy.

Audiences with high expectations for "The Dark Knight" shouldn't be blamed -- once they see Ledger's mesmerizing take on Joker -- for wondering why the whole movie couldn't just be about him instead. Why do we have to go through Batman at all?

"You complete me," Ledger's kinetic, unhinged Joker explains to Bale's stony, gruff Batman (managing to mock Dr. Evil mocking the drippy dialogue of "Jerry Maguire").

This time Joker's a greaseball, at once evoking Norwegian metal rockers, Jame Gumb (the killer from "The Silence of the Lambs") and deranged drag queens. He's someone everybody wants to beat up, not just Batman, and everyone has a go at him. Previous Jokers came with a variation on the same origin story, where a younger Joker is kicked into a vat of chemicals by a younger Batman, turning his skin white, his hair green and his mouth into that grin. This Joker is simply smart, bizarre and damaged. His grin is a nasty cheek-to-cheek scar, which he likes to tell people was carved on his face by an abusive father. The clown makeup is something he wears.

Not since Baby Jane has lipstick been so scary. See how much simpler it is without the vat of chemicals, without the complications -- more awful when it's redacted? Who needs explicit origin yarns, when you can just as easily freak people out with too much Maybelline?

Batman moves around stiffly here, trying out his new computer-vision sonar software. Joker moves like a disturbed dream. "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stranger," he says, and: "Guns are too quick. You can't savor all the little emotions." They took away about 60 percent of the cackling and maybe half the one-liners Jack Nicholson would've liked, and just let Joker ooze into each scene. This is no longer a comic book; this is the Joker we deserve, having ratcheted up our appetite (and tolerance) for death masks, violence and anomie.

Joker sits in a Gotham City holding cell and asks the cop guarding him, "How many of your friends did I kill?"

"Six," the officer says.

"Six," the Joker mouths silently, gleefully astonished at his own achievement.

Wait for the part where Joker terrorizes a hospital. He's dressed as a candy striper. It took him a long time to get here, but he's made us forget entirely about Batman.

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.

Batman, the vigilante: so yesterday.

Joker, unhinged, bringing death: so today.

Who needs whom the most, now?