Batman, the Joker, and the Heart of Evil

Ever since Heath Ledger put on that disturbing, chalky face paint and exploded onto the silver screen as the Joker in The Dark Knight, the lore behind the Joker has fascinated and frightened me. After watching the film and reading about this uber-villain, I couldn't help but think that although the Joker flaunts a certain eccentricity and psychosis, he nevertheless comes close to being a villain in the real world because of what drives him. And what drives the Joker is his maddeningly unpredictable selfishness that runs rampant within a worldview of meaninglessness. In the words of Michael Caine's Alfred, Joker fully embraces and embodies the notion that "some men just want to watch the world burn." 

In other words, Joker arrives at his psychosis through very rational means: He first makes an existential assessment of the world and concludes that all is meaningless, like a mad joke. He then wants to show the world the meaninglessness of its own institutions and systems, and he does so by doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants. And the Joker goes even further, snuffing out not only society's institutions and systems but also the lives of the very people that make up those institutions. In so doing, Joker devalues human life by treating it like a trifling toy for his amusement, a toy that he can crush or that he can leave intact at his own discretion - whatever he finds funnier. He turns all of existence into something to be laughed at and scorned and treated as nothing for one's own amusement. 

And to me, Joker thus embodies the very heart of villainry. His evil runs much deeper than simple greed or lust or revenge. His evil runs much deeper than robbing banks or murdering people or any other instance of lawbreaking. The Joker does not take pleasure in breaking the law; he takes pleasure in acting as if no law exists at all. His evil glories not in lawbreaking but in total lawlessness. He acts not unlawfully but lawlessly, and in that lawlessness comes Joker's deepest evil. It's not that Joker recognizes a law but revels in his rebellion against it; it's that the notion of law simply does not compute in Joker's mind as anything but a bad joke, a joke not worth listening to. Consequently, the Joker does whatever comes into his mind with no regard to any sense of law because he figures that all law lacks any real basis or ultimate meaning. In fact, good and evil do not compute Joker's mind as anything but meaningless words made up by stupid society, which he considers his plaything. 

And it is here that I think the Joker most strikingly reflects the greatest criminal masterminds of our real world, those with so much ingenuity or money or power that they can treat everything and everyone else as a plaything for personal amusement. Those who assume that nothing holds ultimate meaning so that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. Those who act out of a lawless disregard for all responsibility to any other person than self. 

Indeed, it is not the unlawful person but rather the lawless person that scares me the most.

Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas!