A Tale of Two Jokers

Throughout his history, many foes have faced off with the Caped Crusader. Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Bane - and that’s just in Batman & Robin.

But undoubtedly the most iconic Batman villain, and perhaps most iconic of all villains, is the Joker. The Joker was first introduced in the first standalone Batman comic in 1940. The characters' trajectory throughout the next 80 years in film can show us how our perceptions of villains are evolving. 

While we will be talking about the Joker in the 1966 Batman film and the 2019… experiment .. Joker, we’ll primarily be focused on Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the 1989 Tim Burton Batman and Heath Ledger’s Oscar winning portrayal in The Dark Knight. 

Nicholson’s Joker has a much darker edge than the previous incarnations seen on screen. Cesar Romero’s Joker from the 1960s was nearly whimsical. He delighted in playing pranks and was very much a clown in the traditional sense of the word. 

Burton’s 1989 film works as an origin movie for the Joker. We see him first as a gangster and crime boss in Gotham. We get no sort of inclination of his backstory beyond that - though we do come to see he is not quite top of the ranks and we learn he is Bruce Wayne’s parents’ murder. At first, we’re introduced to a man who loves power, money, and women - presumably in that order. 

Nicholson’s Joker takes a turn when he’s set up by a fellow gangster for his lusts. There, Batman intervenes and inadvertently causes the Joker’s creation. He drops the crime lord into a vat of toxic chemicals which render the Joker pale, while a blow to the face has also resulted in a plastic surgery smile glued to his face. 

It feels a little out there to call Tim Burton’s Batman an allegory for a Cold War turned hot, but the more I examined it the more I started to buy into it. Batman and Joker are two of the most wealthy and powerful people in Gotham. They clash not for the good of the common people, who they hardly come into contact with, but because each of them is ideologically opposed to the other. 

Batman offers no alternatives to criminals mugging families to make ends meet. He simply says “Stop doing crimes,” usually speaking with his fists. This mirror’s the U.S. 's policies regarding socio-economic injustice in the 1980s. Instead of cutting to the root of the issues, Batman is ideologically set on stopping “crime” as he believes it will help the greater good. Joker, meanwhile, is a clown version of the American idea of a Soviet communist. He gives away cash freely, then tries to gas those he benefited. Joker uses the idea that he doesn’t need money and can spread the wealth to gain power. 

Again, I’m not arguing that this is in any way an accurate portrayal of the USSR. I think it’s instead a caricature of an American’s perception at the time. I think it’s only in retrospect do we see that Batman is not quite the hero he believes himself to be either. The film frequently asks the people of Gotham to decide which of the men is really the villain. 

At the center of the conflict is also what was at the center of the Cold War - resources. In this case, the resource is Vicki Vale. Vale doesn’t represent a resource either of the men need, however. Both Batman and Joker live well above their means. However, she is a resource they both want. She becomes the Helen of Troy that causes men to wage war, while being given little to do herself. 

I was struck by how little dimension Batman has in this movie. The film is undoubtedly his - we start and end with him and the action revolves around his choices. However, the greatest change in the movie in terms of character arc is without a question the Joker’s. Not only does he undergo a physical change and a conversion from bad to evil, he also evolves in his desires and purpose. Joker here is set on revenge more than any particular ideology.

While many Joker incarnations seem to be agents of pure chaos, Ledger’s Joker to me is an exception. Though, perhaps he’s the exception that proves the rule. Everything we see Joker do in The Dark Knight is methodical and carefully executed. His decisions aren’t spur-of-the-moment or random. He is calculated but his calculation is set on evil purposes, so we as an audience don’t want to sympathize with him enough to see the careful planning that must have gone into his many schemes.

The Dark Knight’s Joker is nihilistic, embodying a certain general feeling in a post-9/11 world and simultaneously painting society’s villains as amoral forces of evil. Joker does make a number of valid points throughout the movie, and in some ways his nihilism does come across as more genuine than Batman’s stoic morals. Where Burton’s Joker was set out for revenge, Nolan’s joker sets out to prove that everyone is corruptible.

He proves this most obviously with Harvey Dent, who he toys with and pushes over the edge of madness. But even Dent seems to be a means to an end - breaking Batman’s moral compass. And at the end of the movie, we see just that. Batman, who had gone out of his way to save Joker from a fatal fall in the previous scene, allows Harvey Dent to fall to his death in order to save Commissioner Gordon’s son. While you could argue that Batman is still morally right in making that choice, the choice exists sort of as an extension of the boat bomb experiment before it. Who is worth saving, and who has the right to choose that?  Batman makes his choice and in so doing, proves the Joker right. 

Where it may be a stretch to call Tim Burton’s Batman an allegory for the Cold War, many more have interpreted The Dark’s Knight’s imagery and use of surveillance to connect it to the post 9/11 War on Terror. To read the film this way, Batman’s ultimate corruption is a standin for tough decisions the U.S. and other Western powers had to make in the face of terrorism. Harvey Dent, the city’s foremost seeker of good turned evil, furthers this idea, showing how even great forces of good can turn to sinister tactics when provoked. Perhaps, then, the killing of Rachel by the Joker represents the 9/11 attacks themselves - a tragic event spiraling good men to madness. 

However, the ending of the film backpedals on this a bit. It paints Dent in a positive light, having Batman take the blame for his murders and pitting him as the next target for public outcry. This ending both speaks to America’s need for a scapegoat throughout the Aughts, as well as stating the filmmaker’s final thesis. Yes, everyone is corruptible, but the fact that we might do something bad shouldn’t stop us from doing good. 

The Joker’s nihilism is tempting. Acting without fear of consequences would be liberating to many of us. But the film asks us to recognize that while the Joker may be right about all being corruptible, we must still work within moral and ethical codes in order for society to exist and for there to be hope.

In Batman, Joker is positioned as the murderer of Bruce Wayne’s parents and therefore the creator of Batman. Batman, by pushing The Joker into a vat of chemicals, creates his most heated foe. In The Dark Knight, the Joker is given no back story. While we see the origins of Batman in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight sets them as almost eternal opposing forces. 

While we get a sense of who Nicholson’s Joker is and where he comes from, we don’t get that from Ledger’s Joker. The closest we get to a backstory from him is his famous “how I got these scars” speeches. He tells two completely different stories, so we really can’t believe either of them. Though, it is clear he hates his father. 

While 1989’s Batman is a story of the Joker’s descent, The Dark Knight is the story of Batman’s descent at the hands of the Joker. Audiences of the Cold War era were well-versed in how two opposing forces could feed against each other and muddy the waters of who is right. 2008 audiences, instead, had watched as a war was raged under less than sterling pretenses. They saw how people they perceived to be mad terrorists like the Joker could lead people they respected to commit atrocities not unlike those that originated the conflict.

In both films. Joker is essentially a loner. He laughs away pain festering within him. He makes sharp jokes and gradious gestures of force. Both Jokers act sort of like cult leaders to garner new followers. They prey on weak and ill people in need to do their bidding. Neither seems to have any sense of compassion, and their deepest connection seems to be with Batman.

While I want to keep the conversation tied mostly to these two movies, I’d be remiss not to mention what I think is the best exploration of the Joker and Batman’s relationship - The Lego Batman Movie. This movie better than any other explores the pair as soulmates; two sides of the same coin. Batman needs villains like Joker in order to be a hero, and Joker needs Batman’s antagonism and attention. If you skipped this movie because it seemed like a cash-grab of the two franchise’s success, I encourage you to give it a watch.

I’d never hear the end of it in the comments if I didn’t include mention of 2019’s Joker. However, in my opinion, the film does little to add meaningfully to this discussion. Perhaps a topic for a different video, but I think it leans too heavily on The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver as inspirations. And if I wanted to watch either of those movies, I would just… go watch them. Where I do think Joker contributes to our conversation is in how we’re asked to sympathize with him.  Todd Philip’s Joker is a full anti-hero, an archetype we’ve seen throughout the history of literature in some capacity but that permeates mainstream on-screen entertainment through today. Breaking Bad, Maleficent, and many others asked audiences to see the villain’s point of view. It fed into the culture’s growing desire to get inside the mind of the sick and twisted. Instead of just rooting for the bad guy as you might in a Friday the 13th movie, you see the character’s backstory and are asked to sympathize with them.

This is a very big departure from the two previous appearances by The Joker on the big screen. Batman gives Joker an origin and a bit of a backstory, but its made clear that there was never any hope for redemption. The Dark Knight paints Joker as a force that has always and will always exist. These approaches to the character speak to me more, as they allow me to fill in the blanks and allow me to find discomfort in identifying with the ideals of a psychopath instead of Phillips’s approach of comforting me that we are not so different.