The Hindu Business Line : The joker’s turn

One question that I will keep asking myself till the next Academy awards is — how truly deserving is Heath Ledger of the posthumous nomination everyone is talking about? Not that the man isn’t a good actor; he is one of the best. But the Joker too is in no less a league as a comic book villain. In retrospect, the version played by Ledger carried more meat for a theatrical performance than its nearest comparison from the 1989 Batman film. Simply put, he may have brought alive a multifaceted character pieced together afresh to seem contemporaneously malevolent. Watching the Joker explain his fascination for the slow killing knife or stumble away in that nurse’s uniform from a hospital blown to bits, I felt the shrinking distance from comic strip to real life with the echo of two dozen bomb blasts at home for background score.

It put the focus on the Joker. How much had he changed over two films?

Cut back to Jack Nicholson. His Joker, though rated one of the top-ranking portrayals of a villain in Hollywood films, rode more on joker element, even the unbelievable surprise in seeing this serious actor essay a comic strip role. As with the actor’s brief jig to music from a boom box, emphasis was on the clownish; clownishness etched graphically to stay unreal. You came off the theatre saying, “Nicholson was fantastic,” you never looked around and saw him brooding in the corner. From the time he debuted in Batman comics in 1940, this plain trickster face has been one side of the Joker’s calling card. But he has another side to his character, one described on Wikipedia as ranging from murderous sociopath to even — this is probably for those deep into Joker fascination — a super-sensitive person, capable of “recreating himself each day to cope with the chaotic flow of modern urban life.”

According to the Web site, the Joker’s introduction was as a “straightforward mass murderer” but later during the 1950s and 1960s, courtesy the Comics Code Authority censorship board, the character was muted to that of a harmless, cackling nuisance. In fact, in 1964 he disappeared altogether from Batman stories. The Joker then returned in 1973 with a character shadowing the original blueprint, progressively getting restored to his full, vicious glory.

Ledger’s Joker is firmly rooted in the dark side. He dances, just for a second; he slurps as though mocking his own attempts to connect to the sane. Why connect perhaps, when there are enough jokers in the real world to make him mainstream? In the latest film, the character is everything bizarre and bloody credited to him — the mass murdering sociopath with a devilishly intelligent brain that fully lives up to this quote from The Killing Joke, on the Joker recalling his past, “sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another….if I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.”

What we are talking of here is the portrait of a master of mayhem, whose nature has become terribly palpable given the insecure world in which the audience actually lives. Between 1989 and 2008, as the real world burned to a darker shade like Harvey Dent’s coin, celluloid’s Joker too shifted gear to his overtly violent side. Brilliant cinema is when what’s on screen hits home like real. The Joker of 1989 had a face akin to a mask. It was a facade on a face; the outer one rather unyielding in its contours and projecting a person, who, to everyone was the mask — the Joker. Almost 20 years later, this facade is more a thinly veiled scar than a mask. The make up is deliberately shoddy as if done by a man who couldn’t care two hoots how his violent self appeared to the world. The white paint cracks easily along facial lines, the black below the eyes resembles the accumulated darkness of mental illness and the red lips are a careless smudge over wounds and a tale of violent childhood. The key result being — the person behind the Joker shamelessly shows through. Between a mask and a smudge, the latter is a role on a platter for any great actor. Ledger without doubt, is one.

I suspect however that support for Ledger doesn’t end there. Look closely, the feel of Gotham City has changed. There is no pretension to being a comic strip in the 2008 film, save in the life and gadgets of Batman. The rest is stark real down to the rust-tainted steel of giant American cities. No Gothic architecture, Art Deco style or snow-swept, misty roads for ominous atmosphere. You have a regular city instead, only the odd sign board or name plate betrays the comic strip origin of the context. More than ever before, this Batman film has been packaged for today. Makes you think of the Jokers in our midst long after Ledger himself has left. Did you reflect the same way about Batman? I doubt it for despite solid presence, Bruce Wayne had shrunk to little better than a sustained side act revealing the perplexity of imagination when the motifs of goodness are cast in stone and it’s the evolution of evil that spices a story. The Dark Knight was therefore the Joker’s film.

So, does Ledger deserve an Oscar? Probably — if you overlook the creativity of many who built up the Joker, including these tangibly insecure times.

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