FLASHBACK: Batman The Dark Knight - Should We Fear Imitation of the Joker?
BY JOHN-HENRY WESTEN
Fri Jul 20, 2012 16:31 EST
Editor’s Note: In light of last night’s horrific Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre by a young man imitating the Joker character in the movie, Batman The Dark Knight, we are re-publishing this 2008 LifeSiteNews commentary by John-Henry Westen on that movie. We publish this not to exploit last night’s tragedy, but to add to the credibility of warnings that these types of intense, morally and psychologically chaotic movies, of which there are currently even more being produced, may be socially unhealthy and dangerous.
August 14, 2008, (LifeSiteNews.com) – I finally saw the movie which has grossed $400 million in its first 18 days - well on its way to overtaking Titanic as box-office champ. The movie was visually and viscerally stunning but deeply disturbing, even diabolic.
My concerns were confirmed when LifeSiteNews.com co-founder Steve Jalsevac told me he had also just seen the film and shared my unease.
Some have pointed to the extreme violence in the film, but my concerns go well beyond that. In a Canwest News Service review Jay Stone refers to Joker as a “psychotic butcher”; Jenny McCarthy in her August 2 review in the London Telegraph wrote, “The greatest surprise of all - even for me, after eight years spent working as a film critic - has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film.” One reviewer even called the film “torture porn.”
The story’s focus is the Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger of Brokeback Mountain fame. The Joker is portrayed as a man engaging in a purity of evil rarely seen. An anti-Christ type figure, he engages in evil for evil’s sake and not for any material motive, and is totally unconcerned about his own well-being.
So youth seeing the film will see the evil of the Joker, be repulsed by it and turn away from it, right? Wrong.
There are two supermen in this film - Batman and the Joker.
One problem, however, is that while Batman is a somewhat distant figure - a multi-billionaire whose money is largely the source of his being a superhero - the common man can relate more to the Joker who is a man dealing, in his own intensely cruel way, with a rough past.
In one scene the Joker describes the way he got his ‘smile’ - the two obvious scars which run up from both corners of his mouth. He describes domestic violence in his home where his father attacked his mother and then turned on him as a child, saying, “Why so serious? Let’s put a smile on that face,” and carved one in. As sick and scary as that scenario is, it is nevertheless one with which a great many of today’s youth - deeply scarred internally - will easily identify as they too have been subjected to domestic violence.
And if that’s not enough, Joker changes the scenario half-way through the film. He explains that his ‘smile’ is the result of an incident stemming from a disagreement with his wife who would thereafter have nothing to do with him. Hence, Joker’s psychosis is portrayed as being a response to the all-too-common experience of domestic turbulence, whether involving one’s parents or one’s spouse.
The Joker and Batman are both presented as virtually invincible; indeed, if anything, the Joker is presented as being more powerful in many respects. He is completely unrestricted in terms of his actions, while the film clearly portrays Batman as hampered by his conscience. Batman The Dark Knight could easily be seen to portray good as a weakness which is used and repeatedly exploited by evil - the Joker. The corruption of the good in people is one of his main aims - it is in fact the only purpose which can be discerned in the Joker’s otherwise completely chaotic acts.
But for all the power of this anti-Christ portrayal, there is no portrayal of an equally pure Christ figure. An heroic man in public power, one of the main characters, is eventually corrupted by the Joker’s devices, and the only two good guys left - Commissioner Gordon and Batman himself - are themselves corrupted in that they must foster and live with a lie to maintain the illusion that the one who thoroughly succumbed to evil was actually the hero of the day.
Batman, meant to be the hero of the film, is far less morally consistent in his pursuits than is the Joker. As Bruce Wayne the billionaire, he is portrayed as a jealous, spiteful ex-lover, insulting his rival and using other women (even three at a time) to inspire jealousy in his ex-lover. The portrayal of Batman is weak and conflicted compared to that of the Joker. The Joker’s character dominates the screen and the brilliance of Ledger’s performance in this role serves to highlight this difference.
It should also be noted that many have pointed to Ledger’s Joker role as possibly having a role in the 28-year-old’s death by an overdose of drugs including sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication shortly after filming of the movie was completed.
The suspicions are not unfounded as his final interviews indicate Ledger was very troubled during and after the filming. A New York Times interview which took place during the filming noted that Ledger’s Joker role was “physically and mentally draining”. Ledger described the Joker as a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy”. He also revealed he was having trouble sleeping and the reporter noted his bizarre restless behaviour.
Reported the New York Times:
“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.
Even as he spoke, Mr. Ledger was hard-pressed to keep still. He got up and poured more coffee. He stepped outside into the courtyard and smoked a cigarette. He shook his hair out from under its hood, put a rubber band around it, took out the rubber band, put on a hat, took off the hat, put the hood back up. He went outside and had another cigarette. (see the full Times interview)
A video interview, which took place just after the filming finished and is billed as one of the last interviews before Ledger’s death, visually demonstrates that bizarre restlessness.
Are there going to be imitators of the Joker portrayed in The Dark Knight? There already are. Just look on YouTube for the number of videos where teens are dressing up as and imitating the lines of the Joker. Even more seriously, however, there have been crimes committed since the film’s release where the criminals have dressed in Joker makeup.
The film would likely not be dangerous for those well-grounded in morality; but for the many in today’s world who have not received the moral training that would allow them to clearly distinguish between good and evil, Joker character and philosophy of “anything goes” presents an all-too-appealing alternative way of attaining power and recognition.
Seeing the film only a few days after the very disturbing and unexplainable beheading of a passenger on a Canadian bus, I could not help wonder if the perpetrator had seen the Batman film. The description of the killing and decapitation as having been carried out in a calm manner, entirely without emotion, and the killer taking the head of the man and glibly showing it to horrified witnesses, seemed to fit with the Joker’s character. Media screen shots of the film showing the Joker holding up his “calling card” (a Joker playing card with a decapitated head dripping blood) added powerfully to the association.
Superheroes in films normally generate imitation. Joker is every bit a superhero in The Dark Knight - but a super-evil one.
If your children have seen the film, talk to them about it. If they have not yet seen it I would tactfully discourage it.
For a parental review of the film see Screenit’s very detailed information (the Internet’s most useful movie information website for those concerned about ethical content)
See other reviews noted above here:
“This is a movie that turns its heroes into villains and its villains into immortals. It’s a haunting mess.” A‘psychotic butcher’
Torture Porn Aimed At The Kids by Jenny McCartney National Post, August 2, 2008
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And if the light in you is darkness, how deep will the darkness be? A cultural reflection on the latest mass killing
By: Msgr. Charles Pope
In the recent killing at the Batman movie the alleged perpetrator James Holmes said eerily, “I am the Joker.” Let me state right away, I do not pretend to understand what set this alleged mad man off, but his self-identifying with the Joker, the featured nemesis of Batman in the last “Dark Knight” movie, resonates deeply with the horrific, violence the gunman committed. The Joker was a sadistic, violent killer. There was nothing humorous about him at all.
Writing back in 2008 about the Batman move “The Dark Knight” English columnist Jenny McCartney wrote of the intense violence of the satanic “Joker.” Her words give context to the chilling words of James the alleged killer in Colorado.
Our attitude to violence is beyond a joke as new Batman film, The Dark Knight, shows. The new Batman film reaches new levels of brutality, so why are we letting children watch it? …..The maniacal, deranged face of The Joker, grippingly played by the late Heath Ledger, leers from posters all over town.
If I were the parent who relented and took a 10-year-old child to see The Dark Knight, would I be sorry? …You bet I would. It’s different from other superhero films, as fans are quick to point out. Certainly, there are surprises in its swooping camera angles and darkened, ominous screen.
But the greatest surprise of all – even for me, after eight years spent working as a film critic – has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film.
….The film begins with a heist carried out by men in sinister clown masks. As each clown completes a task, another shoots him point-blank in the head. The scene ends with a clown – The Joker – stuffing a bomb into a wounded bank employee’s mouth.
After the murderous clown heist, things slip downhill. A man’s face is filleted by a knife, and another’s is burned half off. A man’s eye is slammed into a pencil. A bomb can be seen crudely stitched inside another man’s stomach, which subsequently explodes. A trussed-up man is bound to a chair and set alight atop a pile of banknotes.
A plainly terrorized child is threatened at gunpoint by a man with a melted face. It is all intensely realistic. Oh but don’t worry, folks: there isn’t any nudity. [1]
Do the movies simply reflect these trends or to they help mold it? Probably both. But it in the context of the last Batman movie, that the words of the Movie Theater Killer “I am the Joker” can stun us with their overwhelming and sadistic darkness.
Was the Colorado killer an isolated and deeply disturbed man, an anomaly who, on account of his madness indicates little or nothing, other than his own madness? Sure.
But he did not grow up in isolation and we ought not simply dismiss him as a “one-out” situation. Our culture did reach and form him somehow: “I am the Joker.” He did not say “I am Neutromax from Xenon Alter.” He uttered a cultural artifact from this planet and this culture. He referenced a sadist killer and a context of intense violence that many of us see with moral neutrality, as entertainment and diversion.
It is a certainly significant that the recent Batman series emphasizes the word “dark” in its titles.Even the cinematography is shadowy, dark, and brooding. And it is not the Batman series alone. (By the way, Film Critic Tony Rossi says the New Batman movie redeems itself from its last violent escapadeHERE).
Yes, it is far more than Batman. We have discussed on this blog before how so many movies today are steeped in darkness. There is terrible violence, mass destruction, mass killing, natural disasters, chase scenes, death and destruction all about. High kill ratios compete with explosions. And even our hero is often portrayed as a dark figure, deeply conflicted, lonely and brooding over his own demons. It is all very dark, very brooding, violent, and a seeming picture of nihilistic, self-destructive drives. This is film noir on steroids. There are increasingly deep threads of this in our culture.
Jesus spoke in the Gospel of Matthew about our eyes as being the lamp of the body. And while the original meaning of these words is caught up in a complex cultural anthropology of the time, to us in the modern world, his words can serve as a strong reminder to be very careful of what we admit into our mind and heart through our eyes:
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness! (Matt 6:21-22)
Yes, if the light we choose to see by is already dark, how deep the darkness in which we walk.
But, Father, but Father, watching violent movies doesn’t make me violent. Perhaps not in the short run. But when this sort of fare becomes the steady diet of a culture, can we say that we are wholly unaffected? Or, from the other perspective, when these themes continue to recur in the movies that theoretically depict “us,” what does that say about us?
The Colorado killings are not a mere anomaly. We are getting more and more of these in our culture. Indeed, call it a steady stream:
• January 8, 2011: U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people were shot during a public meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Casas Adobes, near Tucson, Arizona
• November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, TX, Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 29 others.
• April 3, 2009: A gunman walked into an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y. on Friday, killing 4 people, wounding at six, and taking as many as 41 hostage.
• March 29, 2009: Robert Stewart, 45, shot and killed eight people at Pinelake Health and Rehab in Carthage, N.C. before a police officer shot him and ended the rampage.
• March 29, 2009: Devan Kalathat, 42, shot and killed his two children and three other relatives, then killed himself in an upscale neighborhood of Santa Clara, Calif. Kalathat’s wife was critically injured.
• March 10, 2009: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people • including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff’s deputy • across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.
• Feb. 14, 2008: Former student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, fatally shooting five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.
• Dec. 5, 2007: Robert A. Hawkins, 19, opened fire with a rifle at a Von Maur store in an Omaha, Neb., mall, killing eight people before taking his own life. Five more people were wounded, two critically.
• April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, fatally shot 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, then killed himself in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
• Oct. 2, 2006: Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, shot to death five girls at West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, then killed himself.
• March 21, 2005: Student Jeffrey Weise, 16, killed nine people, including his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion at home. Also included were five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn. He then killed himself. Seven students were wounded.
• March 12, 2005: Terry Ratzmann, 44, gunned down members of his congregation as they worshipped at the Brookfield Sheraton in Brookfield, Wisconsin, slaying seven and wounding four before killing himself.
• March 5, 2001: Charles “Andy” Williams, 15, killed two fellow students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.
• Nov. 2, 1999: Copier repairman Byran Uyesugi, 40, fatally shoots seven people at Xerox Corp. in Honolulu. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
• July 29, 1999: Former day trader Mark Barton, 44, killed nine people in shootings at two Atlanta brokerage offices, then killed himself.
• April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.
• May 21, 1998: Two teenagers were killed and more than 20 people hurt when Kip Kinkel, 17, opened fire at a high school in Springfield, Ore., after killing his parents.
• March 24, 1998 School Shooting – Jonesboro, Arkansas: 5 killed
• May 20, 1998 School Shooting – Springfield, Oregon: 2 killed, 22 wounded
• April 26, 1998 School Shooting – Edinboro, Pennsylvania: 1 killed, 3 wounded
• March 24, 1998: Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, killed four girls and a teacher at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school. Ten others were wounded in the shooting.
• October 1, 1997: School Shooting – Perl, Mississippi: 3 killed, 9 wounded
• December 1, 1997: School Shooting – Paducah, Kentucky: 3 killed, 6 wounded
• Oct. 16, 1991: A deadly shooting rampage took place in Killeen, Texas, as George Hennard opened fire at a Luby’s Cafeteria, killing 23 people before taking his own life. 20 others were wounded in the attack.
• June 18, 1990: James Edward Pough shoots people at random in a General Motors Acceptance Corp. office in Jacksonville, Fla., killing 10 and wounding four, before killing himself.
• Aug. 20, 1986: Pat Sherrill, 44, a postal worker who was about to be fired, shoots 14 people at a post office in Edmond, Okla. He then kills himself.
These are just the most prominent cases. You will likely remember more. Note too how many of the killings above are school shootings.
And in just about all these incidents the case is usually made that the given shooting is just a “one-out” case, a local madman with his own issues. Perhaps, but we are producing a pretty steady stream of them. There are more than a few nuts falling from our family tree and something, many things, work to produce them, beginning with Satan himself. But we do well not to be wholly dismissive of the steady stream of shootings and violence as mere “anomalies.” They are regular features of our culture.
I would also say we cannot simply dismiss the regular fare of violent movies, video games and TV. They are a factor. I am not for Government censorship, and I realize it is more than movies. Mother Teresa traced violence in the West to violence in the womb through abortion. And violence from all its sources is continuing to overflow in our society.
Think about it, and give serious consideration to what your children are watching, to what you are watching.
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness! (Matt 6:21-22)
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