The basic point that Arkham establishes is that Batman is, in some sense, as crazy as the Joker — he’s a grown man who dresses in a bat suit and jumps around on rooftops at night. He’s doing this because of psychological trauma he suffered as a result of witnessing his parents’ murders.

The Joker is a necessary foil for Batman — he exists (as Frank Miller put it in TDKR) as the result of The Batman. As the Joker says in TDK, life without the Batman would be “boring.” And that’s the point — the Joker would be bored if he just had to go back to ripping off mob dealers. That’s why he’s so thrilled that Batman can’t just walk away — it lets the hilarious game of explosions and murder and high drama continue.

The way I’ve always understood the Joker’s motivation is that he understands that *he’s a supervillain* and he loves it. He not a Bond villain — he doesn’t really care about money or justice or control — all he wants to do is kill and burn and play in the hilarious high drama of it all. He’s not serial-killer redux, either; he doesn’t get off on pain or sex — what he enjoys is the game. To the extent he wants to drive other people over the edge, that, too, is a fun game.

The way to see the Joker is as a kid poking at an anthill and laughing as he watches all the little ants scurry about not knowing what’s going on. And humans are even better, because they can be manipulated in more interesting ways.

The Joker is like the main character in his own little personal game of Grand Theft Auto and he loves every minute of it. And that’s the point of Batman, too — how much less fun would GTA be if there was no Army to chase after you at 5 stars?

There’s all that “You complete me”/”We could do this forever” business with Batman. He’s trying to make ordinary people go insane, so he’ll have company in his madness. He even paints/carves a Joker face on the faux Batman (the comic book Joker takes this even further with his Joker toxin that leaves people dead with a huge grin on their faces). His solution to loneliness is to make everybody just like him.

I’m not sure that was Ledger’s/Nolan’s/Goyer’s intent, but it’s my own personal interpretation, and watching the movie with this motivation in mind seems to work.

But yes, if he drove everyone else in the world crazy, he might be satisfied. (Or he might find out that having gotten what he wanted, it’s not as much fun as he imagined it would be–with everyone crazy, there aren’t any sane people to drive mad. Luckily, he’s always going to have Batman as a bastion of (relative) sanity to keep from getting bored.)

Oh, and Will: You’re totally right about there needing to be a third pretend origin. I’m sure Nolan thought that having a third that he starts to tell Batman was good enough, but there needed to be a third that the audience hears, to hammer home that the guy is just making them up as he goes along. (Because otherwise, you might think that the “child abuse” one is real, then you might post about it on your blog, then when people pointed out the other origin, you might get defensive to the point where you claim that everyone’s just a DC fanboy who’s trying to suppress your freedom of speech by expressing contrary opinions and pointing out your factual inaccuracies, then when people point out that doing those things doesn’t actually suppress your freedom of speech, you might lock off comments for the thread and go on an epic sulk that finally culminates months later with your publicly swearing to never express an opinion ever again because people are mean to you. Um, you know, hypothetically speaking. )

I think he’d say, “Good. Now go burn down a hospital. Spread the philosophy.”

In this perspective, the Joker is a virus.

And I am in no way reccomending this, but…in my head I always imagined Gary Busey as the joker. While I am absolutely not advocating that, he’d make a good supervillain for something else, even if its not in the franchise.

Seems like this would make good fodder for another post. As would Christopher’s comments about genre up the way, in which he notes my calling The Dark Knight a good crime movie. Genre’s a tough bitch to crack.

But hey, I’ve been wanting to take more advantage of the “guest contributor” thing, anyway.

I can’t go with the comparison of Ledger’s Joker to Bardem’s No Country for Old Men villain. Because Bardem wanted something. He wanted the money. He wanted to complete the job for which he had been hired. He had very clear, very specific motivation.

I don’t care if you want a sandwich. You’ve still got to want something.

Maybe Joker did just want to push everyone’s buttons. To make people break their own rules.

But if so: why?

I mean, here’s the thing: if you just sat down with the Joker and said, “Dude, you’re right. There’s no such thing as moral certainty, nor absolutism. We’re all just trying to do the best we can, and we do that because we care about other people and about the world,” does he just stop? Does he say, “Thank you for validating my beliefs” and walk away?

People bring up the fact that he’s a liar and a trickster, but even those characters (especially tricksters) do things because they want them. Even if all they want is a coconut (as in many trickster myths).

Michael Keaton.

This makes me think of No Country For Old Men, where Tommy Lee Jones’ character essentially admits that the movie’s villain is less a character than a force of nature. That victory in the traditional “catching the bad guy” sense isn’t possible, and that any closure in the conflict would be pyrrhic at best.

The Joker is presented similarly, and your interest in defining a clear motivation for the character is self-defeating, b/c of his nature as a liar, trickster, and corrupter. He’s less interested in making everyone insane as he is in chipping away at moral certainty and absolutes. In some ways the Joker is trying to justify his own existence, but as his multiple origin stories illustrate, the “why” is a red herring as to the “what” is happening in the story.

And again, I really think the comparisons to Fight Club are highlighting shallow similarities. Tyler Durden had a deliberate anti-consumer/anti-capitalist agenda (with a subtext about the duplicity of misogyny and masculinity) whereas the Joker could be seen as a nihilist or a relativist, he’s mostly engaging in “terror for terror’s sake.” One could argue in this same way that Durden is derivative of Holden Caulfield in his attempts to unmask the phoniness and illusions of modern life and the lies that trap adolescent men, so really Fight Club is just a poor man’s Catcher In The Rye, rather than a work unto itself.