The Joker: The Creepiest Villain Whom We Love To Hate.

So yes, I am such a comic nerd that I fully intend to discuss this topic thoroughly. And I am putting off my budding screenplay by doing this, but I felt it was necessary to write this note before this coming Thursday at midnight, for obvious reasons.

The Joker. All he has to do is laugh and we are all quivering in our pants. Why are we so intrigued by his disturbing and yet profound character? And why are Batman and The Joker so intricately connected in a twisted relationship? And what makes the Christopher Nolan/Heath Ledger interpretation of this manical clown so literarily superior to the others? These are all questions I intend to answer in this three-part super note!

Part One: Batman Who?
Sure, Batman is the true hero in the story, but come Halloween, who do we dress up as? I will give you a hint: it requires an excessive amount of makeup and green spray paint. Since the original version of The Joker, created by - well this is a disputed subject in itself but for simplicity purposes I will say - Bob Kane, audiences and graphic novel readers have developed a curious infatuation with this particularly creepy villain. Is it his ominous calling card, a joker extracted from a deck of cards, that he leaves on bloodied corpses? Is it the dark, witty comments he tends to make? Or is it that freaky cackle? Sure, we for some reason love all of these aspects (or rather, love to hate them), but there is one element that The Joker possesses that makes him particularly interesting. He is totally psychotic. Unlike most villains who tend to have very specific goals for obtaining ultimate power, The Joker just kills people. Sometimes he has a plan, but for the most part he is just koo koo pants. And yes, this is the reason why it is hard to sleep in the same room as our Batman comics, but it is also what makes him steal the show from other villains and even Batman himself.

Part Two: The Odd Couple
"You complete me." Yep, that is an actual line stated by Heath Ledger's Joker in Dark Knight. But this is no allusion to a gay relationship between the two star-crossed heroes, but rather the statement that defines the concept of good versus evil. To have good, there must be evil, to have evil there has to be good. It is an essential law of the cosmos, but it is also applicable to Batman and The Joker. In a way they are completely dependant on each other. And they have known from the beginning that one of them would have to kill the other in the end (woah, Harry Potter much?). A classic Batman graphic novel quote even said: "I've been thinking lately. About you and me...." (ok I have to interrupt again...because I just realized that this is yet another line that starts out sounding like it is being said to a lover! ok back to the quote...) "About what's going to happen to us in the end. We're going to kill each other, aren't we?" And actually, over the years The Joker and Batman alike have each died a couple of times, always coming back one way or another of course. But their relationship interests us. It is not your typical hero/villain relationship. In this relationship, the mysterious man in black is good, while the clown is evil. Now that's twisted!

Part Three: The Joker Remix
The Joker we are going to see in Dark Knight is going to take creepy clown to a whole new level. To start, a new concept has been developed behind the messy makeup and permanent grin that have made The Joker an icon. In the past, it has generally been explained that The Joker had been pushed into a vat by Batman. The vat had contained some icky gooey poison stuff that turned his face discolored and painted an indefinite wide grin on his lips. But Heath's Joker has a much different story. His grin is a large, curved scar that he attributes to an abusive father, though this could just be The Joker's twisted sense of humour. And the makeup, well the makeup he wears by choice. And that makes it so much creepier. And definitely increases his level of koo koo pants. The simplicity of why he is the way he is freaks us out far beyond the complicated origins of chemical vats and such ever did. In Dark Knight, much of the Jack Nicholson one-liners have been done away with. The Joker is anything but joking. He is to the point, but still manages to be eerily dark humoured and highly manipulative. There is even less cackling, but there is a plethora of creepy. Take this Heath Joker line for example: "Guns are too quick. You can't savor all the little emotions." Yep, creepy.