Part III: The Antagonists

• The similarities between the Christ and the Batman are one thing. To a certain extent, it might be argued, most “good guys” (including the anti-hero of the late twentieth century) are oriented toward “good” as it is defined in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But what about Satan and the antagonist? Does that analogy hold water? To answer that, let’s take a look now at Satan (the Adversary) and the Joker as the actor, Heath Ledger, played him.

• First of all, let us examine what the Scripture says about the Adversary. Perhaps the primal characteristic of Satan was revealed by Jesus himself in a conversation with the Pharisees: "When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44). To what extent was the Joker, then, "a liar and the father of lies"? Almost everything uttered by the Joker is a deception of some kind, a trait revealed in the opening scene of The Dark Knight, the bank heist. In this scene, we see that each bank robber has believed that he has a special relationship with the Joker. How important each must have felt upon receiving instructions to kill the one ahead of him. Surely this was a sign of his own security. Yet, each of the robbers has stupidly believed the lie he has been told and does not realize that he, too, is on someone’s hit list until at the end of the scene all of those who had believed have been betrayed and murdered by the one who led them to believe, who drives off alone in a school bus.

• But the lies do not end there. The Joker presents two completely different stories regarding the origin of his scars: one that they were given to him "by my Father" and the other that they were self-inflicted to please a scarred woman, who thanked him by considering him repulsive. Interestingly, if one considers the spiritual paradigm in the movie, there could actually be a kernel of truth in these assertions. Lucifer was certainly marked by God, his Creator, his Father, in that when he fell, he lost his capacity for light. He is marked by darkness for eternity. In Revelation 12, where we learn the details of Lucifer’s fall, we see that after he was expelled from heaven, "he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child" (Rev. 12: 13), an obvious reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

• Though medieval Catholicism introduced teachings that Mary, like Jesus, never sinned, Scripture teaches that "all have sinned" (Romans 3:23). Therefore, Mary also has her scar, but the self-inflicted scar of Satan does not attract her; it repulses her. John writes, "But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness.…" Spurned, "the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring" (Rev. 12:14-17). But whether or not one accepts the analogy with Revelation 12, certainly the two different stories the Joker tells about his scars show that what he says can never be fully trusted.

• This propensity to lie is shown even more dramatically in the plan he laid for the destruction of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal). When the Joker reveals the two separate places where he has bound each of these characters to barrels of oil which will ignite and send them to a fiery death, he lies about the location of each. As a result, the Batman, attempting to save Rachel, finds himself at Harvey’s location while Lt. Gordon (played by Gary Oldman), who lacks the power of Batman, arrives at Rachel’s location too late. Because the Joker lied, she dies.

• Secondly, the Joker taunts Harvey Dent, ridiculing him for being a planner, a "schemer." Where, he asks, have all the schemes led Dent, who lies burned in the hospital? By way of contrast, the Joker seeks to cast himself as Dent’s opposite. He expresses delight in people’s responses when someone chooses to "introduce a little anarchy" into the civilized order. "I’m an engine of Chaos," he boasts. It is true that the Bible associates Chaos with Satan. James, the brother of Jesus, clearly associated disorder with Satan by writing to "the twelve tribes in the Dispersion" that they should seek wisdom from above, not from the "earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice" (James 3:13-17). Chaos and cruelty—the chief characteristics of the Joker.

• Yet, it is true that the Joker desires Chaos, but only, it turns out, for others. For himself, he plans. His many schemes required, if they were to be successful, the split-second timing of a Master Planner. Here are a few examples:(a) the bank heist, (b) the murder of each bank robber at the hands of another, (c) the Joker’s escape from the bank in a school bus which (with split-second timing) crashes backwards into the bank to collect the Joker, (d) the careful orchestration of the kidnapping and murders of Harvey and Rachel, (e) the carefully planned murders of the judge and the police commissioner, (f) the plot to kill the mayor, (g) the telephone/trigger sewn into the belly of one of his cohorts, (h) the plot to blow up the hospital, (i) the well-laid plan to coerce the cooperation of a police officer by finding the one officer who has a relative in that hospital, (j) the planting of explosives on two separate boats, one ferrying convicts (the condemned) to their prison, the other conveying (ark-like) those who have not merited death. Therefore, though he lauds himself as the king of Chaos, he is, in fact, a planner, a schemer of destruction.

• The ten schemes listed here once again drive home Paul’s counsel: "Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil" (Eph. 6:11). Regarding all of this planning, blogger Jason Sears analyzed the Joker’s behavior in the context of Taoism, beginning with this quotation from Tao Te Ching (translated by S. Mitchell): "The [Tao] Master leads by emptying people’s minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think that they know. Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place." Sears then makes this assessment of the Joker’s problem: "The Joker does not practice non-doing," he laments, "not at all. He, rather, chooses force. He forces people to choose between life and death, good and bad, heart and mind," he says, concluding, "Nothing will ever fall into place if you find yourself forcing things to happen. Tao is the key to unlocking the understanding of truth, and if the Joker realized this, he might become more beneficent than Batman himself."

• Though interesting, this neo-pagan interpretation of the Joker’s character fails to take into account that the Joker is not simply a man with a problem. Viewing him as a Satan-figure, a fallen angel with a mission, if you will, reinforces the point that forcing people to do his will is the Joker’s sine qua non. Without that motivation, he has no reason to exist, as we learn when the Joker freely admits to Batman, "I need you," more of which anon.
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  The third way in which the Joker represents Satan is that, through their contempt for human beings, both at times manifest an unfocused evil. The Joker shows loyalty to no one, not even to those who decide to trust him. What’s more, he is an equal opportunity deceiver. Again and again, we see that those who follow him, perhaps representing the fallen angels who were cast out of heaven with him, include both genders and various ethnic groups: Anglos, Hispanics, African-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Asians. He is loyal to none of them. He seduces and destroys those who serve him. And he laughs at them, one of the chief characteristics that Ledger said he hoped to get right in his depiction of the Joker.

• It is this lack of focus in the Joker’s evil that leads Alfred to explain that the Joker cannot be reasoned with, appeased, or reined in. He "just wants to watch the world burn." He is the incarnation of Irrational Evil against which, rational man cannot fight without a savior who is stronger than Evil, Batman himself, the Christ.

• In Scripture, Satan is only one of the post-Fall names for Lucifer. The other is devil, which derives from the Greek word, diabolos, accuser. Thus, one name, Satan, means Adversary while the other name, Devil, means Accuser. Adversary and Accuser—these certainly are two of the chief attributes of the fallen Lucifer. Adversary to God and Man, he tempts humankind to its destruction, and once a man or woman takes the bait, the Accuser runs to God and tattles. In Revelation, we discover that at the end of time, souls in heaven exclaim, "Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God" (Rev. 12:10).

• As it was with the fallen Lucifer, two of the chief roles of the Joker are to serve as an ever-present adversary and an unrelenting accuser. His role as the adversary of the people of Gotham City, Harvey Dent, and Batman himself goes without saying, but his role as accuser appears as well. "You let five people die, and you let Harvey take the blame. Even by my standards, that’s cold," the Joker tells the Batman. You did it. You did it. You did it. "I didn’t do it," he tells Lt. Gordon. "I was here [in lock-up]."

• Like many false gods, Satan is also a shape-shifter. He first appears in Scripture in the guise of a serpent, a serpent whose legs have not yet withered into the vestigial state that can now be seen, the biologists say, in the dissection of a snake. And so, like Satan, the Joker, too, is a shape-shifter. The snake symbolism appears in Ledger’s decision to employ the striking tongue of the snake as a characteristic of the Joker. Additionally, he appears at various times as a police officer in the plot to kill the mayor and as a nurse in the plot to blow up the hospital. When arrested, he has nothing which the police can use to determine who he is—no identification, no name, no habitation—not even a tailor whose records could be searched.

• But, of course, the primary appearance of the Joker resides in the joker disguise itself, an image familiar to anyone with a deck of playing cards.Why a joker? Is there any sense in which the joker of the playing cards bears any resemblance to the dark powers of the occult? Though diverse origins are ascribed to the joker of the playing cards, most writers indicate a connection to the Fool of the Tarot cards. A. E. Waite, an occultist of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) provides a telling description of the Fool, several phrases of which arouse interest. The Fool of the Tarot moves "with light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him," Waite says.

• Similarly, those on planet earth have little power to restrain Satan, which is exactly the reason Paul writes that we must take up the armor provided by God, "for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12-13).

• The Fool "pauses at the brink of a precipice," Waite says, "among the great heights of the world." Similarly, Satan in his temptation of Jesus “took him up” and from the precipice "showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to him, 'To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours'" (Luke 4:5-8). The same old lie trussed up in new clothes, but Jesus is not fooled.

• According to Waite, the Fool "surveys the blue distance before him—its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below." In much the same way, Satan focuses on his role as "Prince of the Power of the Air" and considers not the height from which he has been cast out of heaven and will be thrown down into the lake of fire. For the Fool, Waite writes, "The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height." The Fool believes that angels will hold him up. Certainly Satan relied on the host of fallen angels who threw in their lot with him, but perhaps he, too, is a fool to believe they will hold him up. They seem not to have a good record of loyalty.
  But there is one more aspect of Waite’s description of the Fool that should not go unnoticed: Waite expresses some qualities of the Fool in the subjunctive: "…as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height" [emphasis mine]. Those who have read to the end of the biblical story know there is no if about what happens. Satan will not leap; he will be cast there. "[A]nd the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire…." the apostle writes [emphasis mine] (Rev. 20:10). But, then, calling a push a leap is just one more example of the deception being played out on a grand scale. Just as he was once cast down to earth, he will at the end of time be cast down into hell. Though New Age thinkers may equate the light step of the fair-haired boy with a sunny self-confidence, Paul and John have dug much deeper to see in the Fool’s behavior the pathetic braggadocio of the devil.

• Postmodern commentator on the Tarot cards Andy Pollett has written, "[W]ith very few exceptions, Joker and Fool cards alone are worth nothing, their paradox power emerging only in the case of a challenge with another card." And, thus it is that the Joker surprises us when he confesses to the Batman, as indicated above, "Kill you? I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? You complete me. I need you." He has no power except in the challenge to the Batman. This sentiment directly corresponds to Satan’s mission on earth. He does not wish to kill Jesus, whom, of course, he cannot kill. He simply wishes to remain a menace, tempting, accusing, and murdering. As the Joker would put it, "I just want my phone call." Yet, the two do struggle on that rooftop, the Joker seeming to have the upper hand with Batman, who is bent back over the railing on the edge of the precipice. One last time, the Joker throws out his favorite question, "Do you know how I got these scars?" But this time, he is not addressing a sucker. This time the answer is not what he expects, as the Batman says, "No, but I know how you got these!" upon which he immediately releases the power he has kept in reserve until now, propelling blades into the neck and face of the Joker, causing him to "leap" (translation: fall) from the height. But there are no angels to catch him. It is the Batman who pulls him back up. "I think, my friend," the Joker intones, "we are destined to do this for eternity."

• Another aspect of the name Joker that identifies the Joker with evil is the issue of laughter. A joker of any kind…jokes. A joke is intended to cause laughter. But there’s the catch. There is more than one kind of laughter. The kind of laughter all people enjoy is the laughter of the joyous spirit. Ecclesiastes 3:4, for example, allows that "there is a time to laugh." This sentiment is behind the popular maxim, "Laughter is good medicine," which echoes the message in Proverbs, "A joyful heart is good medicine" (17:22). But Satan twists God’s teaching to make it his own. Thus, in the chase scene in The Dark Knight, the Joker and his men show up in a circus-themed 18-wheeler which originally had the maxim "Laughter is the best medicine" emblazoned on its side. The Joker has customized this in his usual imitative fashion, having spray painted the letter S in front of the word laughter so that the maxim now reads, "Slaughter is the best medicine."

• British illustrator and fantasy author Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) once wrote, "There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humor. It is naked noise and naked malice." This well describes the essence of the laugh Heath Ledger mastered when he locked himself away for a month trying to find "a somewhat iconic voice and laugh….more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts"—laughter with the seed of Satan in it, as Peake put it.
  
• The concept of the Joker as a laugher leads, then, to the very heart of the story as it is expressed in the Joker’s resounding question, "Why so serious?" The mouth scars of the Joker form a clown’s smile, extending on both sides to the center of the cheeks. They are the distinguishing mark of the Joker in terms of both physical and spiritual character. He explains in one of the tales about the origin of his scars that his father, after attacking his mother with a knife, took a knife to the son, mocking him with what has become the Joker’s primary mantra, "Why so serious! Why so serious!" And then the father carved up his son’s face. Nothing funny. Even the Joker isn’t laughing. But all these years later, the Joker has turned against seriousness. He mocks it. He avenges it.

• If the Joker is against seriousness, then, we must look for Scripture to see how this element of his character is an affront to God. The phrase sober-minded appears in Scripture seven times. Paul lists it as an important trait of an elder in the church: "sober-minded, self-controlled," and so on (I Tim. 3:2). Even the elder’s wife is to be sober-minded (3:11), and at the end of the epistle, Paul reminds Timothy, a young man, "always to be sober-minded" as he pursues his ministry (4:5). But it is Peter that discusses sober-mindedness in the context of Man’s struggle with Satan: "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (I Pet. 5:8). Why so serious? If, as Peter said, sober-mindedness is paramount to one’s watchfulness against Satan, who then can be surprised that the Joker makes it his mission to demolish seriousness by carving the smile of the Fool, the Clown, the Accuser, the Adversary into the face of Man, the destruction of whom is his only goal?

• Continued in "Part IV: Man"