Film Theory: Joker Is The Hero of Gotham (Batman The Dark Knight)

Well, the rest of the world is busy talking about Joaquin Phoenix's new Joker. Well, we've done it twice already, so I'm going to revisit the Dark Knight and you know, it's a miracle no one in Gotham notices. Bruce Wayne Batman Connection I mean, think about it Coleman Reese, aka Bruce Wayne's accountant, appears on live television saying that he's going to reveal Batman's identity. I mean, who else is he exposing here? People, Wayne Enterprises HRF looks like Gotham's biggest villain isn't the Joker. basic critical thinking hello internet welcome to

film

theory

, the show that right now deserves its own place and how it should have ended x'v Ilyn pub because of how often we defend history's most iconic bad guys Thanos scar Light Yagami dr.

Doofenshmirtz, but today we're going to tackle one of the most iconic bad guys of all, Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight. Now I know I'm not the first to suggest that the Joker could be the good guy in this movie. In fact, a Reddit

theory

went viral about this exact topic a few years ago, which then led to us hiring him as a sub Zack researcher, but it's been a long time since that original theory and therefore with a very different view of the Joker currently in theaters, our newly combined theoretical forces wanted to revisit that post one last time and at this point we're both convinced that the world has been watching this movie completely backwards.

The Joker is the Dark Knight

hero

. He is the

hero

Gotham deserves. Not only are we overthinking things, it's clearly an intentional decision on the part of the creative team working on this movie, so prepare to watch your world burn along with everything you thought you knew about this movie. First, let's set the stage by talking a little about Gotham, the main setting of Nolan's trilogy of Batman

film

s beginning with Batman Begins and ending with Dark Knight Rises now these films are as much about Gotham as they are about Bruce Wayne when the series It begins first introduced with a Gotham that is completely corrupt overrun by mafia crime bosses and bribed police officers; in fact, the villains' plot in Batman Begins is about setting Gotham right by purging it.

It is time for the founders to ask that the city has become a breeding ground for suffering and injustice, can no longer be saved and must be allowed to die. and if the fake Ra's al Ghul here sounds a little harsh, that's because he is, but he also talks about past experiences that he went through before, of course, in fact, if you rewatch Batman Begins and just focus on the League of the Shadows and Ra's al Ghul. We are repeatedly hit over the head with the motivation that their only goal is to reboot Gotham, a city they believe has become so rotten that they can no longer save it.

The forest becomes too wild. A purge fire is inevitable. A natural movement back to harmony. be unstoppable this time or at least would have been unstoppable if it hadn't been for that meddling bat even though Roz pumped fear gas into the city. Gotham is finally saved by its greatest hero Batman or is it movie 2 that the Dark Knight chooses. About a year later and things are looking a lot better for Gotham than when we last left off. Oh, sure Batman is cleaning up petty criminals here and there, case by case; has been unable to do anything about the real institutional corruption that permeates the city, the mafia is still running around, wild corruption is still everywhere in the police station, hell, we're even starting to see the negative effects of Batman himself on the city ​​despite trying to clean up crime.

Batman's vigilante justice has only resulted in one important thing. The escalation of criminals, the imminent threat of Batman being out there threatening to thwart any clandestine behavior has forced criminals to become more extreme in their behaviors, they now use bigger weapons and have more protection, it was actually something that the Future Commissioner Gordon worried in the first film of the trilogy, what about the escalation of this collision? We start with Eric, my automatics, they buy automatics, we start using Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing bullets and what do we have at the beginning of Dark Knight, a humble drug dealer who travels heavily?

Armed with multiple guard dogs, Gordon's fears have come true. The escalation is happening and it's all a result of Batman entering the Joker, who describes himself as an agent of chaos. I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. Rob's banks explode. The hospital sets up impossible game theory scenarios where lives are constantly threatened. Wait a minute. Games theory. I love that show, no matter how you look at it. He's a villain in every sense of the word, or at least. it's until you actually look at his actions because at the end of Dark Knight Gotham that city that was so corrupt had to be destroyed in Batman Begins, yes at the end of the second movie it is cured, saved and saved by a man, not by Bruce.

Wayne, but for the Joker, you see, it's easy to turn away from this movie just by reciting the catchphrases. I don't know what has these scars, it's time for Gotham to get the hero it needs, not the hero it thinks he deserves, but if you pay attention. to the plot The Joker's ability to understand human behavior and arrange dominoes so that they fall in the correct way is practically ingenious. As the film begins, we see how the Joker robs a bank, not to make money, but to alert the mafia to the fact that his money is being actively tracked, this causes his accountant to run away with all the money in the company. gang to Hong Kong.

Joker uses this to convince the combined Gotham gangs that Lau will reveal everything to Batman unless the gangs give him half of his money to kill Batman. First Batman has no jurisdiction, he will find him and make him scream when Batman actually does exactly what the Joker predicted and forcibly extradites Lau. Lau begins to sing like a bird and the gangs give in to the Joker's demands, but the Joker is not happy. With only half the money at this point, he allows himself to be caught by the police to kidnap Lau and get all of the gang's money, money which he then quickly burns.

In this series of moves, the Joker has now taken the mafia to the brink. bankruptcy. The inhabitants of Gotham are now broken and penniless, something no one has been able to achieve yet, so with that out of the way, the Joker turns his attention to the ultimate evil that is plaguing Gotham, that rooftop-jumping lunatic. in a ninja costume that the police refuse to do anything about Batman, but their plan is not to kill him. Oh no, killing Batman would only encourage more Jalan Ts to take up his mantle, just like the random guys we see at the beginning of the movie who are woefully unprepared for the world of hurt they're walking into, the The only way to end Batman's problem is to get him to quit, retire, disappear, and instead have the city recognize a healthier, safer traditional hero to make up this wild card that Batman is drawn to. to a construction site using hostages while the reality of him works his magic in the background, you see him manipulating Gotham's golden boy, Harvey Dent, into becoming a homicidal monster.

Joker leaves Batman no choice but to kill him. Batman is forced to break his only rule and in the process, he realizes that he has to retire to save Harvey's reputation and give Gotham the hero he can believe in. He tells Gordon to blame himself for all of Harvey's murders and Batman just gives up. Game over. He retires for the next eight years until The events of Dark Knight Rises Batman remain retired, so at the end of Dark Knight we have three key things: a destabilized mafia that is penniless to the majority of that mafia and corrupt officials in prison thanks in part to the passage of the Dent Act that honored Gotham's supposed hero by denying appeals to criminals convicted in those corruption cases and three lawless vigilantes roaming the streets, that means that for eight years after the events of the Dark Knight, Gotham was the paradise that Bruce Wayne and Ra's al Ghul never thought would come, the mob defeated dozens of corrupt cops, discovered or killed the ineffective alcoholic Commissioner replaced by the incorruptible Jim Gordon and there was no need for vigilantes heavily armed and that, dear theorists, was the Joker's intention the whole time he saved a city that everyone thought was beyond.

No, the first thing many fans are probably thinking is that he's not the Joker, an agent of chaos. You played that exact clip earlier in this episode. You know what I am. I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with it. One, I did get it, but can we really believe what the Joker says here? Of course not, we're talking about the Joker. Just think about the logistics of his plan. First of all, the Joker had to think about the actions and reactions of the mob. the police and Batman to manipulate them all for an undeniable example, just think of his final battle against Batman, he creates a situation where the alleged hostages are actually his goons and vice versa, but the SWAT team and Batman that is entering don't. they know.

So Joker is effectively pitting Batman against the SWAT team that is supposedly on his side. He even prepared for this final showdown using dogs that were effective against Batman until recent improvements to his suit, as well as setting the floor with deployable nets that entangled a bat. Clearly, this is not someone who just does things for the fun of it and sees what happens. He is someone who makes and impeccably executes very elaborate, very sophisticated plans, plans that specifically involve eliminating the most dangerous and corrupt people in Gotham. Do not understand me. The wrong Joker absolutely harms the innocent, but think of it like breaking some eggs to make an omelet.

Harvey Dent was willing to let the best mafia bosses walk. Batman only thought about how to solve a single crime or fight a small group of villains at any given time. At one point, meanwhile, Joker was playing the long game, the big picture, trying to fight the corruption underlying all of Gotham's problems, Joker specifically tells Batman about his plan while hanging off the side of the construction site. In a fist fight with you, you need an ace in the. hole if Joker really wanted Harvey Dent to kill Gordon's family and become a monster so all of Gotham would see why he would give Batman the chance to stop him why not let Batman realize the colossal mistake he made by next day when he read in the newspapers that is because the Joker really doesn't want Harvey to become that monster, he just needs Batman to think that Harvey will become that monster in order for Batman to make the sacrifice he finally makes with the Joker, as he himself admits that he is fighting a battle for The Soul of Gotham not to corrupt it but to save it in a way that only he is capable of doing.

No, I'm not saying that the Joker is a good person or that anything he is doing is worth replicating. In fact, I think the Joker is pretty sick. completely driven by consequentialist philosophy that he completely ignores the pain he creates along the way. My only argument here is that the Joker's intention was not to watch the world burn as some memorable quotes would have you believe, but to cure Gotham of its widespread corruption. I mean, consider that dinner scene in the middle of the movie, he takes a party full of rich socialites hostage and does nothing, I mean, he scares them with his little scar story and gets Batman to jump. through a window and that's it, no one else. no one else gets robbed, no one gets attacked or killed, it focuses on Batman and then he leaves and it seems like the movie pretends this is the case the whole time Alfred, in the middle of the movie, has a story that he used. to try to explain the erratic behavior of the Joker's super famous scene from The Dark Knight, but when you really stop and look at his story, it doesn't really seem to mean what he thinks it means to refresh you on the content of that story .

The thief was stealing precious gems from a local government, but instead of selling them, he was simply giving them to children because, as Alfred said, he thought it was a good loot, the only problem is that Alfred is completely and completely wrong about of the thief's intention. Let's listen to Alfred created this story a long time ago I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the government. They were trying to find the loyalty of the tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. True, these were not just random shipments of valuables between companies, these stones were specifically used to bribe tribal leaders into submission, the locals had every reason to try to intercept those caravans to try to protecttheir own sovereignty, the British controlled Burma from 1824 to 1948 and, well, almost everywhere the English invaded the Burmese people they were not particularly interested in this foreign power impressing its values ​​and way of life on the indigenous peoples to half a world away.

Alfrid thought that the thief just wanted to watch the world burn because he believed in chaos, but in the end it is Alfred and his friends who were doing all the burning, abandoning the forest in Burma, did you catch him? Yes, we burned a forest. If the thief really wanted to burn the world, it wouldn't be difficult to set fire to the forest. Joker points to himself. I enjoy dynamite, gunpowder and gasoline. Ultimately, it is the men who think they are protecting justice who end up burning the forest and blaming the man who only wants to save his home.

That is true of Alfred's story and it is direct. In parallel to Joker's role in The Dark Knight, you can't see yourself as the villain when you think you're the hero and that my friends is the twist, it also turns out to be the cruelest joke of all, but hey, that's it. just a theory, ah. ciney theory sure gunpowder and gasoline can be cheap, but they could be even cheaper thanks to the sponsor of today's episode, honey, do you ever buy something online and then find out that you could have gotten it for less, enough to drive a person crazy, and while Batman may be the hero Gotham deserves, baby, he's the hero the Internet deserves, baby, he's a browser extension that scans the Internet for coupon codes and other discounts and then, as per Magically, it automatically applies the one with the greatest savings to your cart at checkout and knows each coupon. selling codes or discounts on over 20,000 sites like Amazon eBay Best Buy Target or literally nothing can hide from honey, just like no criminal can hide from the bat.

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