Analyzing Evil: The Joker From The Dark Knight

hello everyone and welcome to episode 36 of

evil

analysis with our selection of sponsors for the month of july the

dark

knight

joker

a maniacally depraved and disturbed character this iteration of the

joker

has been etched in the minds of viewers since the release of this movie Almost 13 years ago and for good reason, although a character is first conceptualized with the written word, it is often the case that the actor playing a character actually makes the character who he is and Heath Ledger in this role is one of the best examples of this. If you take the time to read the script for this film, you'll discover that there is a lot of the Joker that Heath Ledger made his own, a good part of which is in the little details that really make this character who he is.

Suffice it to say that without Heath Ledger there would have been a wild card in this film, but the wild card as we know it would not have been possible without Heath. In this video, I will explain every detail of this larger than life character. one that instills in us a macabre sense of wonder, a character that stood the test of time proving to be one of the most definitive versions of the joker without further ado, let's start by discussing a possible backstory for the joker now with these I usually make my own inferences about the a character's backstory from what we are given in the movie and I still will, however this character has inspired many fan theories over the years and one in particular is According to Some Things that I observed in this film, I am going to mention them in this part of the video.

The way I see it, there are three things that can be true for the Joker's backstory: He probably had an abusive childhood. a wife who was mutilated by the mafia due to gambling debts and served for a time in the military, which is the fan theory I mentioned before. The thing about these three theories is that some or none of them could be true. I myself am biased. that they are all true, but since there is no concrete evidence of this in the movie, we will never know exactly what is true and what is not, but to support the idea that they are all true, we have a few things that point to this fact first, of course , are the speeches he gives to Gamble and Rachel regarding his scars, which indicate that he may have had an abusive childhood and a marriage that ended in the mutilation of both him and his wife.

In a speech, he claims that his father. He came at him with a knife one night during a drunken argument with his mother and slashed the prankster's face for being too serious and on the other he says he slashed his own face after his wife suffered facial injuries at the hands of loan sharks. . Again, we have no way of really knowing that these stories are true, as they could very well have been made up for dramatic effect and the parts about how he got his scars can't both be true at the same time, but the reason I think that may be true.

It's the fact that the prankster has obviously suffered to some extent in the past and both scenarios being true could partially explain why he is the way he is, an abusive childhood coupled with the mutilation of his wife and the destruction of his marriage. he. It may very well have been enough to drive this man crazy. On top of that, it could be the fact that he also served some time in the military, which we can assume had a negative impact on him, even where he perhaps acquired the scars from him. suffer this injury after being captured or in the middle of combat, a fact that may be supported by a line that the joker says during his interrogation by Batman where he states that Batman is a weirdo like him and once his friends in the law They no longer have Use it for him, they will expel him like a leper just as the military and society may have expelled the prankster.

It would make sense that he served in the military and was kicked out of it, as he displays multiple abilities throughout the film that would indicate that he has had any type of resistance combat training with explosives and firearms or this could be completely false and that he was self-taught in all of these things, but it's a great way to explain his distaste for society and his abilities. Now there is one thing we know. We will definitely never know and this is exactly how he got his scars, as these three scenarios could be true or none of them, however, we can put these theories together to give us a scenario that could explain how he got them. a boy who manages to escape from an abusive home and after doing so finds the love of his life and marries her, then joins the army in an attempt to create a prosperous future for himself and his new girlfriend after a long tour full of many unfortunate people. events that include scars on your own face you become disillusioned with society and the government upon returning home you discover that your wife had gotten into trouble with organized crime falling into debt due to an excessive gambling addiction leaving your new life and your wife in ruins now imagine she takes her own life or leaves you for whom you have returned and all you have left in the world after escaping an abusive home and experiencing physical and mental torture during your time in the service is nothing, nothing to go back to home and nothing. look forward to it you are just a broken soldier, one who has been kicked around not only by his family but also by the government and criminals.

You go crazy with pain and rage. The absurdity of life has destroyed you to the point that you have nothing, nothing matters. and the cruel machine that is the world of men has brought you pain and only pain, your life up to this point has been one great comic act and the world laughs at you instead of succumbing to despair, you think to yourself, why not laugh? You've had a life of misery and despair, so now it's time to have fun. Forget the rules and laws of men. You no longer act according to any morals and you will enjoy your pleasures however you want while doing so.

Because? Don't take your pain and your grief and throw it in the face of this cruel world, showing them that everything they have done, everything that stands falsely in the name of law, order and justice, can be dismantled much faster. of what was set in motion. You disappear, you erase yourself from the known world and you plan and wait until the right moment arrives, the moment that allows you to unleash anarchy and chaos in a city that has been riddled with corruption, bringing heat and fury to a world that is so cold. and unfeeling as the black void of space now this is all just theory and none of this could be true at all, but if these exact circumstances are not what happened, I imagine that something similar to them occurred some combination of desperation and unfortunate circumstances that led him to become the man we see in the film.

With these things in mind it is easy to see how his personality has become bold and confident with a brazen bravery in the face of danger. The joker is manic, passionate, cruel, brash and unhinged. He is someone who prospers. a hostile environment a man who can look down the barrel of a gun with a smile on his face and laugh as you pull the trigger is a bit susceptible when it comes to his mental state prone to outbursts of anger when he tries to do something point and has a habit of moving in an erratic and disturbing manner, such as when he licks his lips, but is otherwise fairly calm for someone who is so disturbingly capricious in the way he conducts his criminal enterprises that he seems to have little to no empathy for anyone that you know. he comes into contact with seeing every life as just another form of entertainment for his ever-expanding pursuit of chaos.

His iconic look is a great representation of his personality, as it is a mix of grim and dirty with makeup that looks like it was applied days before. stiff and dirty and a fine tailored suit that is a little tattered and dirty, which tells us that he wants to instill a certain amount of fear in people with his appearance, but at the same time he cares very little about the maintenance of his outfit, your personality merges. Well, with his motivations and his philosophy, his potential background may make it seem like what he's doing is in the service of getting revenge on those who have wronged him, but I think this is only partially true, while animosity certainly has something to it. see with their actions. he is overridden by a madness that has caused him to take pleasure in the misfortune of those around him, transforming him into a man whose pleasures now reside and dismantling the world as we know it.

The Joker's main motivation in this film is the disruption of the natural order of Gotham City through a philosophy I like to call planned chaos, the Joker says he is not a man with a plan, but this couldn't be further from the truth. true, in fact, you could call him a master tactician, I think that would be fair. He says he doesn't know exactly where his plans will take him, but everything that happens as a result of his actions throughout this movie is certainly planned. There are three reasons why he is pursuing this chaos for fun to prove a point and To create for himself a world to live in that he considers fair, the prankster seeks to demonstrate that the established order is essentially imaginary and, to prove this point, He is going to remake the world into a wonderland of chaos, where everything is abandoned. to the whims of each individual and where he can live a life of depraved fun, a fun that he never had before his ascension to this crazy clown in a way that the joker advocates for a kind of revolution and that is not necessarily a bad thing since The world as we know it was built on the foundation of a revolution;

However, this is not a revolution to evolve society towards a better state, but one that will return it to its base or form a society where law and order take a backseat. primordial chaos that is present within all of humanity, however, there is one person, one entity that is exempt from being dismantled and that is Batman, as the joker says. Batman has completed it, allowed the Joker to thrive, and created a world where he can do whatever he wants. he wants to do if Batman didn't exist the Joker wouldn't exist and in the same way if he defeated him he wouldn't have anyone to compete with a cat without a mouse so to speak in his quest for chaos although he wants to hinder Batman's efforts to preserve the natural order does not want to kill him is playing a game with him one who never wants to win a constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction that they will play as long as any of them come back to life depending on From your point of view, the chaos that the joker advocates is not necessarily a bad thing, since this type of worldview is in line with how some anarchists would want the world to be ordered.

No, it is not the idea of ​​what is called fair and chaotic. Society is what makes the joker

evil

, it is the way he pursues this goal and his personal reasons for doing so. To fully understand this, we must look at each component of his plan as we review his plan. We will also keep track of the murders he is responsible for to give us a better idea of ​​the scale of his crimes. Now robbing a bank is a crime and a terrible thing. Robbing a bank from the mafia may be a little more forgivable, but at the end of the day still a crime, robbing the bank is not the worst part of this act, although the plan behind it is to break into a building and have the people hold live grenades and set up a chain of murders to be orchestrated among your team members during this heist is what makes this stand out above the typical bank robbery.

To be fair, if you sign up to rob a bank and the man who hired you tells you to murder other crew members once they've completed their mission. jobs and don't stop to think that maybe something similar is waiting for you, you are partly to blame here, but the man who uses people and their greed to further his own ends and then discards their lives as easily as one would a hammer after a job is the biggest culprit, not to mention inspiring absolute terror in what I assume are innocent people as they are literally hanging on for dear life during this sequence, we now see four men killed due to the prankster's actions. what he does with his crew here is a common theme for the joker manipulating people he takes advantage of two types of people in particular the not so innocent criminal and the mentally ill the next component of his plan involves taking advantage of the former to rob a mob Bank simultaneously drew the attention of the organized crime structure in Gotham while demonstrating to these gangsters his vulnerability and his own abilities.

The prankster anticipated that the mafia was becoming increasingly fearful of the ever-increasing invasion of their assets on two fronts by Batman and the authorities and once they reached a point of desperation, he reveals himself to them to propose an alliance of sorts, an agreement that will see Batman dead and his former glory restored. This worked to the point that Gamble was definitely not willing to work with the Joker, but once the Joker kills Gamble and Batman captures Lao, the Joker gets the upper hand, giving Moroni and the Chechen another option than hire the wild card, whichprovides two crucial tools you will need to further your plans: mob resources. and a free pass in the criminal underworld to do whatever he wants during his attempt to convince the mafia to hire him.

He murders three of Gamble's associates. He bets on himself and orchestrates the deaths of two more associates after they test out for his team bringing his kill count up to ten, however, it is not just the mafia that he needs to submit to, but the government and legal system of Gotham City, as well as the general population, are sure that he can use the corrupt and greedy to do inside jobs for him and try to work the system from within but the total capitulation of the government and the city's population would not be possible without him.

Fear, intimidation, and murder, Gordon is not wrong to characterize the Joker as a terrorist, as terror is ultimately what he seeks to inspire the people of Gotham during their pursuit of Batman and murder. The image of the copycat vigilante on television raising his death toll to 11 is intended to instill fear in the common citizen and turn them against Batman, painting him as a self-centered plague on the city, one that is causing the deaths of innocent people. who murder the police. Commissioner and Judge Cyrilius lets everyone know that no one is safe and that anyone who dares to come before the court in an effort to undermine the prankster's plans will suffer the same fate, he also tries to do the same with Harvey Dent and if would have managed to do so which would have eliminated three of Batman's most crucial allies in one fell swoop, further isolating him as an outcast and a selfish man who will not give himself up to prevent the deaths of others.

One could argue that the prankster is not murdering anyone. called out innocent people during this time when he murdered a vigilante, a commissioner and a judge who could all be guilty of various crimes but that is a poor argument at best and murder is still murder and it also murders to two other men who, as far as we know, are. Definitely innocent, all of these deaths bring his death count to 15. In the next phase of his plan, he attempts to assassinate the mayor and after Harvey reveals himself to be Batman, he attempts to trap him once again, all in an effort to dismantle order. natural.

As Gotham City moves further toward the chaos it so desires during this second attempt to capture Dent, the wild card ends up being responsible for the murder of five more cops, the trucker who may or may not have been working with him, and three civilians who were bringing his Se It is unknown if the death count reaches 24, whether or not being captured at this time was part of his plan, but at least he planned it by placing a cell phone bomb in the abdomen of one of his associates, this associate and Thomas Schiff . The paranoid schizophrenic who was involved in the plot to assassinate the mayor are the only examples we have of the wild card using the mentally ill as pawns in his game, but this is a pretty heinous crime to commit the mentally ill have a certain amount of their own.

Free will, no doubt, but forcing these obviously sick men to participate in his plans is malicious and is another reprehensible part of his character. You could argue that he's giving these men a chance others wouldn't, but that's a stretch considering The Joker doesn't seem to care about anything or anyone innocent or otherwise, especially considering he used one of these men. men like a living bomb, killing that man and four others in the process, bringing his kill count to 29, the next step in his career. Planning the capture of Rachel and Harvey Dent guarantees that he wins no matter the outcome, knowing that Dent is approaching extrajudicial action, the joker knows that if Rachel dies, he will break Dent beyond the point of no return, if Dent dies, he will free to the city of dent. death would either way be addressed and would be one step closer to changing society.

The next actions he takes are meant to test the limits of society and show that people will also abandon their morals in times of need. In addition to cementing his position as the city's leader with his murder of Lao and the Chechens, he tried to test this before when he demanded that Batman reveal himself or people would die, but that didn't work as well as threatening to blow up a hospital now with a most tangible threat put in the faces of the citizens of Gotham, they begin to go crazy proving that the joker may be right that once something dear to a person is put in jeopardy, all bets are off and they would hit it big. strives to protect what is important to them not only manages to reveal this side of society but also manages to hurt harvey dent more than he had already been placing the blame for rachel's murder and her mutilation on moroni losing harvey in gotham as an unwitting agent of the joker as batman says towards the end of the film dent was the best of them and the joker managed to corrupt him beyond the point of no return the death of rachel lao the chechen and the two police officers he murders in The hospital brings its end, the death count reaches 34.

Although he has already done enough to establish himself as a cold-blooded and ruthless killer, his final act is what really confirms to us that his intentions fall far short of noble, establishing a trap for Batman and the authorities in which the hostages have been dressed as hostiles, the joker reads to sacrifice these lives, as well as the lives of at least one ship full of people. Fortunately, none of these lives are lost and you would think at this point that the joker may have been trying to test these people. and trying to see if humans really are as terrible as he thinks they are and now that he's been shown otherwise, these people don't need to die until now, the prankster has been blurring the lines between revolutionary and mass murderer which he claims to the citizens of Gotham who is doing what he is doing to improve the city, ridding the world of the Batman mafia and the corrupt entities that have been bogging down this city for years, even as he tells the Chechens that the city deserves a better kind of criminals. perhaps in his eyes, a real criminal would be committing crimes in the service of the transformation of society, after all, he himself says that it is not about money, it is about sending a message, but here, instead of recognizing the These people's choice to forgive each other tells if they want something.

If you do it right, you have to do it yourself and he proceeds to try to blow up one of the ships himself. What message would he be sending here? Surely no one would know by now that he was the one who blew up the ship, but what does this accomplish? proving that people are terrible when they're not, if anything, this just proves that the joker cares little about the people of this town and only cares about his vision of a quote-unquote better world, one where the rules of society are obsolete and he can operate the way he likes by terrorizing Gotham City as a crazy clown bent on macabre fun, in the end the joker succeeds in a way like when we meet Batman years later in The Dark Knight Rises, He has become a broken man who has gone into hiding. of society allowing Bane to bring to life a chaotic society that the joker would have been very proud of, so in the end, who was the joker?

He was a man who probably suffered a substantial amount of hardship in his life, hardship that broke his head. and transformed him into a cynical, callous man who had his sights set on destroying society and remaking it into something chaotically just where he could kill and destroy almost with impunity in his mad effort to create a world where he could play an eternal game of cat. and mouse with batman, murdered 34 people, ruined the lives of countless people, caused an enormous amount of destruction and ensured that batman was defeated, setting the stage for the rise of bane, the joker may have been trying to send a message with his crimes, but when in the end, he was an incredibly selfish man, one who reflected his own pain and suffering on society in an effort to satisfy his own sadistic desires, there are not many redeeming qualities for this character and, although he may have suffered until certain point. degree, that is no excuse for the number of terrible crimes he committed, crimes for which he had no remorse whatsoever, making him a man whose entire being radiates chaotic and unrepentant evil.

Thank you all for tuning in to this evil analysis episode and I hope you enjoyed it. What do you think about the wild card? Did I miss something? Let me know below and leave a suggestion for a villain you'd like to see appear in a future episode while you're at it if you like this video and want to see more. Like it in your feed, hit the subscribe button to stay up to date with the latest episodes and feel free to leave a like while you're at it. Thank you once again to all my current subscribers for your continued incredible support.

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