Batman’s most infamous character, the Joker, has been a longstanding face for prankish mayhem, and the late Heath Ledger’s masterful performance in The Dark Knight has only elevated the character to new heights. Despite the Joker’s unforgettable acts as a sociopathic murderer, many people are intrigued by him and even find him charismatic.
So what’s there to love? A
lot :
1> ‘Do I look like a man with a plan?’
The title itself is an illusion to our minds.
Be it the bank robbery or
the plan to kill Judge Surillo, the Commissioner and Harvey Dent. Or carrying a
bomb in his trademark purple jacket when he first meets the mob, saying, ‘Let’s
not blow.. this out of proportion’. Or, the biggest of them all, planning his
own arrest, the Joker was a master planner with each of his move over-shadowing
the other.
2> Give a call to your dialogue-writer
‘I believe whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you... STRANGER.’
‘You remind me of my father. I HATED my father.’
‘This city deserves a better class of criminals. And I am gonna give it to them.’
‘Why so serious?’
And the list can just go on! His vocabulary is just an institution of sorts wherein you can just sit with your eyes closed, smiling in this extremely magnetic negativity.
3> Master story-teller:
Okay so I could have combined this point with the previous one but then, it would have taken off a little from the charm of his stories about his scars, about his fiend father sticking out a blade in his mouth and putting a smile on his face. Or of the funny side that he sees when his beautiful wife cannot stand a sight of him. There’s a magic in his choice of words that just gets hold of the viewer. An art that, to learn, one can die for.
4> Slaps with reality:
‘When the chips are down, these people, these “civilized” people, they’ll eat each other.’
Can anything get better than this in describing who we really are? The way he forced the good to turn into ugly, the best into the worst, simply revealed the covered truths and the underlying naked lies of a “society”.
2> Give a call to your dialogue-writer
‘I believe whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you... STRANGER.’
‘You remind me of my father. I HATED my father.’
‘This city deserves a better class of criminals. And I am gonna give it to them.’
‘Why so serious?’
And the list can just go on! His vocabulary is just an institution of sorts wherein you can just sit with your eyes closed, smiling in this extremely magnetic negativity.
3> Master story-teller:
Okay so I could have combined this point with the previous one but then, it would have taken off a little from the charm of his stories about his scars, about his fiend father sticking out a blade in his mouth and putting a smile on his face. Or of the funny side that he sees when his beautiful wife cannot stand a sight of him. There’s a magic in his choice of words that just gets hold of the viewer. An art that, to learn, one can die for.
4> Slaps with reality:
‘When the chips are down, these people, these “civilized” people, they’ll eat each other.’
Can anything get better than this in describing who we really are? The way he forced the good to turn into ugly, the best into the worst, simply revealed the covered truths and the underlying naked lies of a “society”.
5> The Provocation:
‘Do you want to know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all the… little emotions. In… you see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are. So in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did. Would you like to know which of them were cowards?’
Boom! That piece of annoyance is enough to drive the calmest of the men, crazy! While you sit back and enjoy the results of your act, the other person is already mad with anger.
6> That Wild humour:
Okay so who would imagine a statement, ‘Madness is like gravity, all you need is a little push’, coming from a person hanging upside down from a dangerously tall building and going to die in a matter of days? Unless the person is the Joker.
And not to forget the very famous, ‘Very poor choice of words.’
There is this wicked humour lying inside the core of this character that you can’t help but envy.
‘Do you want to know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all the… little emotions. In… you see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are. So in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did. Would you like to know which of them were cowards?’
Boom! That piece of annoyance is enough to drive the calmest of the men, crazy! While you sit back and enjoy the results of your act, the other person is already mad with anger.
6> That Wild humour:
Okay so who would imagine a statement, ‘Madness is like gravity, all you need is a little push’, coming from a person hanging upside down from a dangerously tall building and going to die in a matter of days? Unless the person is the Joker.
And not to forget the very famous, ‘Very poor choice of words.’
There is this wicked humour lying inside the core of this character that you can’t help but envy.
7> You are at your best when you don’t carry any baggage :
As Alfred said, ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn.’
The Joker, unlike most the negative characters, did not have any specific motive or want and so it was all the more difficult to bring him down while he kept shattering the city of Gotham and its people. As his past is left majorly under-developed, he comes across as a completely crazy freak and it requires some serious mental courage to fight against someone who is free from wants.
‘It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message.’
8> That smirk of pain :
And just as I showed the previous point to one of my friend, probably one of the biggest of ‘The Dark Knight’ trilogy fan, he comes up with the painful back story of this extremely loved character, *no spoilers here*, refer to ‘The Killing Joke’ for it.
What you learn from the Joker’s past is that essentially nobody is good or bad but the product of the good or bad times they have been through.
‘The reason why a person smiles is because he is in a lot of pain.’
9> Madness is the emergency exit :
The crumbling pressures that build around you: societal, familial, from other friends, the city, the country, ‘Everything that drives a man crazy is decided by the difference between what he is and what others want him to be.’
‘So if a man goes crazy, IS IT REALLY HIS FAULT?’
10> ‘If you are good at something, never do it for free.’
Can anything get better than this? I wouldn’t write anything on this and will leave it to you to be charmed and learn from the best advice ever.
Yashluv
It's an intriguing read. I think you've been able to characterize Joker in a way people don't generally see him, and that is good. I enjoyed reading it and hope others will too.
ReplyDeleteAn article isn't enough to do justice to the work done by Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger. You just can't have enough of his masterpiece.
ReplyDeleteLike hours after this article was published, I got to know another thin detail of a particular scene in the movie that I had failed to notice in years!
Anyways, pleasure that you liked this one. Thank You :)
Keep Reading :)