Lochinvar Guides: Part I: What Hath Ledger Wrought?

On November 28, 2007, an entertainment feature appeared on Yahoo! UK & Ireland stating that, in order to prepare for his role as the Joker in the forthcoming blockbuster movie, The Dark Knight, Australian actor Heath Ledger had “locked himself away for a month while he perfected the maniac laugh,” a key feature of the villain of the Batman legend. The article went on to say that Ledger had “gone all out” in his preparation for the character: He told Empire magazine, "It’s a combination of reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it.

"I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices — it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts.

"He’s just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris (Nolan - the director) has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker [sic] would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke."

The bit then concluded with what seemed just two months later to be an ominous clincher: “We can't wait,” the author said, “to see (and hear) the finished results”—ominous because on January 22, 2008, Heath Ledger died as the result of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers, anti-anxiety meds, and sleeping pills that he had taken to drive out the nightmares and anxiety which had plagued him in the weeks following the making of The Dark Knight.

Had the writer of the November 2007 article known what was going to happen, he or she might not have entitled the piece, “Ledger Went Bat Crazy Preparing for Joker Role”—funny in 2007, disrespectful now.

When I first heard of Ledger’s suicide, like most Americans I pressed my lips together and shook my head, saddened by the news of another young and (apparently) talented young person who had gone wrong in Tinsel Town. But then I heard a comment I had not heard before in stories of this kind: Folks-in-the-know were saying that perhaps Ledger had been pushed over the brink of sanity as a result of the dark world he inhabited as he prepared for and acted out the role of the Joker.

This aroused my curiosity because usually the entertainment industry works hard to downplay the effect their often violent and lurid productions have on people. “It’s just a movie,” they normally say, but this time it seemed much more serious (remember that word--serious).

When the movie came to town in July, the talk amongst my students on Facebook was that Ledger’s performance had been fantastic, that it was the centerpiece of the movie, that it should earn Ledger a posthumous academy award, and on and on. But it was my thirty-something son who first tipped me off to the underlying Christian theme in the movie. After hearing all these comments, I decided that this was one Batman movie I just had to see.

As we entered the theater, one of my students, Jack K., a high school freshman, told me a critic had complained that the movie was twenty minutes too long (I later found the quote on a blog by Darren Barefoot). As I viewed the movie, I kept wondering what it was that a critic wanted taken out—and why. Too many computer-generated crashes? Too much inane dialogue? A slow scene or two that interrupted the constant action of today’s “gotcha-now-don’t-I?” generation of script writers? But it wasn’t till the last twenty minutes of the movie that I actually saw what some might want removed: the approximately twenty-minute dénouement of The Dark Knight is a presentation (intended or not) of the gospel message of Jesus Christ.

On the one hand, one might conclude that the month Heath Ledger spent alone in that hotel in London had paid off in the sense that he did, indeed, master his character. On the other hand, it can be argued that in order to achieve the mastery he sought, the actor had to open his mind up to the most “sociopathic” figure in all of literature or history: Lucifer, son of Dawn, portrayed hauntingly in Gustave Dore’s famous illustration for John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which anticipates the Batman costume by about a hundred years. The story of Lucifer’s rebellion against God is recorded in Isaiah 14:12:

O Day Star, son of Dawn!

How you are cut down to the ground,

you who laid the nations low!

You said in your heart,

'I will ascend to heaven;above the stars of God

I will set my throne on high;

I will sit on the mount of assembly

in the far reaches of the north;

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;

I will make myself like the Most High.'

But you are brought down to Sheol,

to the far reaches of the pit.

(Remember those words: ascend, brought down). More of Lucifer’s story appears in Revelation 12:7-17. Here we learn that Lucifer now has a different name. His original name (or, more appropriately, our translation of his original name) was based on luce, the Latin word for light, but in verse 9 we see his fallen and less glorious name: Satan (based on the Herbrew word ha-Satan, the Adversary).

Having been expelled from the realm of light, he no longer can be associated with light. Still, he tries to sell his message as the offering of light. His motive is revealed in verse 12: “…[W]oe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”

Milton’s great poem embellishes the story in what classical schools would explain as an expanded narrative of the Biblical profile of Satan. In an act of revenge, as Milton tells it, Satan struck back at God by corrupting the most beloved of God’s creation, Man and Mother (Adam and Eve). In his spiel to Eve, we see him employ the tactic of the Light-Bringer he could have been, but like the theater audience who knows that Brutus smiles in Caesar’s face while hiding the dagger in his toga, we look on enraptured as the former Light-Bringer, now cloaked in darkness, works his spell on innocence incarnate.

He tries to “shed light” on Eve’s situation, as we would say in our idiom. He seduces the newly created man and woman with his invitation for them to follow his lead, to become like God by eating the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17), saying with the sarcastic tone that Ledger mastered in the London hotel, “You will not surely die!” (Gen. 3:4) And so the thing is done.

But there are consequences: there is, it turns out, sin and death in the wake of the act, evils that will not be defeated until the time of the Nazarene, who will not be born until the reign of Caesar Augustus while Quirinius is governor of Syria (Luke 2:1-2), whose birth will be heralded by the light of a star that beckons and guides the Magi in the East. His name will be called Jesus, the One who saves, the true Bright Morning Star (Matt. 2:2; Rev. 22:16).

Lochinvar Guides