I know I should be blogging on serious things, like Barack Obama in Afghanistan. Bear with me for a minute. Professor Schaff posted an excellent review of The Dark Knight just before I did. I agree with almost all of it. I am not quite sure I agree with this:
One of the few disappointments I have with the film going experience is the laughter some viewers had with the Joker, a character so obviously devoted to cruelty as a way of life. As I noted above, the Joker is amusing at times, but as the film develops his sadism is so clear that he is no longer an object worthy of laughter. I think this error is on the part of some in the audience, not the film.
I don't believe for a moment that the audience was laughing with the Joker. Oddly enough, laughter doesn't always mean that something is funny. Sometimes it is a genuine reaction to something outrageously anomalous. It is not unusual in movies for a villain to look down at the sword thrust into his torso (by the hero of course), and laugh. The laugh just means that he can't quite believe what he is seeing. The Joker's goofy behavior as he beats Batman with a crowbar, it made some of us laugh (myself included) because there just can't be such a creature as this. And yet there he was.
One of the brilliant touches in the movie is that the Joker offers us an explanation for himself. He explains that, as a boy, he watched his father murder his mother. And as a man, he made a great sacrifice for his wife (this explains his scars), which she repaid by hating him and abandoning him. A few decades ago that would have sufficed for an explanation: he was abused and traumatized, so now he abuses. But this not the Joker's view. Life gave me lemons, look at the delicious lemonade I have made from them! He is a sociopath to be certain, but it is not at all clear that he is insane. He knows the difference between right and wrong, knows that death is death, etc. He is just utterly uninhibited by such notions. He kills without the slightest hesitation, and is perfectly free from any fear of his own death. The Joker is an artist and an idealist, but his ideals are mayhem, misery, and death. That is what is so truly terrifying about him.
All this is correct, in the context. What justifies the superhero is the pure evil of the perfect supervillain. But it's not, unfortunately, just fiction. There are people for whom the most brutal murder has become a high ideal.
Consider this, from Slate:
In 1979 Samir Kuntar entered Israel on a boat from Lebanon and kidnapped a young father and his 4-year-old daughter. He shot the father, Danny Haran, to death in front of his daughter, Einat, then killed her by smashing her skull against a rock with a rifle-butt. Israel has just released him and others of his ilk, in exchange for the bodies of two of their soldiers. His return to Lebanon is a national holiday. The streets are filled with cheering. What a triumph for the terror organization Hezbollah, which all but controls Lebanon and has long been demanding Kuntar's return. In an excellent column on this, Mona Charen asks, "What can you say about a people who welcome a child murderer as a hero?"
Kuntar is the guy with the thick, black mustache. A lot of commentary on The Dark Knight has focused on the similarities between the Joker's bombs and 9/11. But it's one thing to blow up a building to achieve some political objective (wicked though that might be). It's another to celebrate a man for beating a four year old child's brains out with a rifle. That is real murder of the most brutal sort, and apparently it represents a heroic act to a lot of Lebanese. The Joker has at least one redeeming quality that all these new wave barbarians lack. He doesn't really exist.
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