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Clap If You Believe in Batman The Dark Knight Christopher Nolan (Director)

2009; Wiley; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1744-6163.2009.00206.x

1744-6163

Randolph Dreyer,

Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art

There is a scene in the The Dark Knight tailor-made to get a snigger out of every psychiatric advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) who sees it. It is a scary scene, set in the outskirts of the urban Neverland called Gotham City, where our hero's arch nemesis, the Joker, shows up at a hospital . . . disguised as a nurse! Holy Snake Pit, Batman! This newfangled Joker is wearing a uniform that hasn't seen the inside of a hospital in thirty years. He looks a little like Nurse Ratched, who terrorizes her patients in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He is definitely creepy, but he's also kind of, well, pretty. The dude looks like a scary nurse lady. Holy Jerry Springer! Sadly, on the day this writer saw the film, no one in the theater even chuckled. The goblin-nurse getup either didn't scare anyone or they were too mesmerized by the painted visage of Heath Ledger, the intense actor playing the new Joker. In early 2008, Ledger overmedicated himself for a sleep disorder and died while The Dark Knight was still in postproduction. His death has had a poignant effect on the picture overall and on the character of the Joker especially. Nevertheless, with a countertenor voice and staccato gestures, Ledger plays the part for eerie laughs. In the above scene, Ledger's Joker totters away from the hospital still wearing the nurse outfit and trying to work the remote control clicker in his hand. He clicks the button. Nothing happens. He clicks again. Nothing. He looks back at the hospital building. Still nothing. He raises his arms in a frustrated shrug. Ka-boom! It's funny, but almost no one got the gag. Common grief has changed the audience's perception in a way that director Christopher Nolan could not have anticipated. Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Batman Begins) also wrote and produced The Dark Knight, and leading man Christian Bale continues his portrayal of Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. The Batman. The film tells the story of the sacrifice Batman must make in order to maintain the public's belief in truth and decency. Along the way, a cavalcade of stars crosses the screen to help our conflicted hero. His trusted butler, Alfred (Michael Caine), and his trusty aide, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), keep him prepared with sage advice and cool gadgets. His unrequited love, Rachel Dawes (this time, Maggie Gyllenhaal), his secret supporter, Police Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), and his promising protégé-to-be, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), give him ample opportunity to save them and Gotham City from the malevolent bad guys that seem to skulk around every corner. And of course, there's the baddest of bad, the Joker, conceived here by Nolan and Ledger as a concoction of wild-eyed antics and pathological aggression. But is he the same old madman or is he a new kind of crazy? The character's limited back story is new. The killer street cred is new. The sloppy, ghoulish face paint is not so much new as new age. And his reason for taking on Batman and destroying Gotham? It might be new, but it is purposely vague, leaving lots of questions without answers. Also new is the manifestation of his primary pathology: the Joker loves to play mind games, and he does it here with a sinister glee, pitting a boatload of ordinary citizens against a boatload of ordinary inmates. If another actor had played the Joker, the result may not have been so well defined. For instance, if Richard Simmons had been the Joker . . . okay, that was never an option. In the hands of Heath Ledger, whose career had been peaking after his Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and his tour de force performance in the hard-edged Candy (2006), the Joker's mysterious motives became an opportunity for the talented actor to create a more profound and sinister character. In a high-concept action film like The Dark Knight, it's easy to overlook the finer nuances of Ledger's performance. We are drawn instead to the thrills and chills. When Batman leaps off the highest floor of a Hong Kong skyscraper with nothing but a pair of man-made batwings, we are not exactly considering his frame of mind. We are thrilled by his daring. Likewise, when another character refuses medical attention for agonizing injuries, we don't ask “wazzup wit dat?”—would we ever ask that? Rather, we’re chilled by his sickening transmogrification. And even when the Joker makes his first deadly appearance in the film, it is that incongruous clown-face and his icy violence that rivets our attention. But later, as the fiend slides a jagged switchblade into the mouth of his next victim and tells the hypnotic tale of his boyhood facial mutilation at the hands of his own father, we are simultaneously drawn in and duped. Ledger's Joker is almost a real person rather than just a comic book character. He is a bigger-than-life bad guy but with a believable reason for being so, and we want to know more. He plays on our empathy. Aren't we all capable of bad things? (Except for maybe blowing up hospitals.) If we can learn more about him, maybe we can understand or even care about him. What we don't know and what the Joker's victims don't know is that we are expected to react that way. The Joker retells the story of his facial mutilation over and over, each time threatening, each time spellbinding, each time different. His nom de guerre says it all: he is a joker. He is a maniac. He is a sociopath. And, oh yes, he is one crazy dude—in both real and unreal worlds. Psychiatric APRNs who work in the criminal justice system will tell you that criminal behavior often has a sociopathic or psychopathic genesis. Patients may modify their behavior with medication or therapeutic counseling, when it is available, but there are still those who are unable or unwilling to change. That would be the Joker. It is almost as if in researching for the role, Heath Ledger went online and searched how to know if someone is a sociopath. Check it out and you’ll find a long list of traits, including “criminal versatility” (WikiAnswers, n.d.). Of course, storytellers know these traits are also the dark qualities that give depth and motivation to most of the legendary evildoers, from Hannibal Lecter to Captain Hook. The Dark Knight is about Batman discovering a newfound hope for humanity, but the Joker steals the show and not just because he looks good in nurse whites. Comic book aficionados have long understood the unusual relationship between Batman and his grinning adversary as more than the traditional battle of good and evil. It is a real but hostile bromance, a symbiotic relationship, like Peter Pan and his errant shadow or, more fittingly, two sides of the same unreal coin. The public eventually gets what it needs, both in the movie and from the movie. We must save the world from bad guys like the Joker. We must believe in good guys like Harvey Dent. We must question the vigilante on a private crusade, and that is why Batman, who is sometimes the hero and sometimes the rogue, must ultimately sacrifice himself: For the common good. In the end, Batman is a lot like Tinkerbell. He needs us to believe in him—yes, even to clap for him! And the pitiless Joker? As the credits rolled, some of us also clapped for him. He is a deadly Peter Pan and we believe in him, too. At least the nurse in Peter Pan's story is a Saint (Bernard). Holy archetype!