Film Theory: The Joker Actually Saved Gotham From Itself
1. What He Actually Succeeds In Doing
When you look back at what The joker achieved, his successes speak for themselves. He cleaned up organised crime, he helped force corruption out of the police force and local government and he personally helped Jim Gordon - the other saviour of Gotham - get promoted. And he did it all far quicker than Batman, by being more efficient. More bloody, yes, but more efficient all the same.
And in Batman and Dent’s transformations, the Joker had his best successes. He realised that he needed more from Dent’s assault on crime than he could actually provide. And he also realised that he needed a means to keep the vigilante away, because he, in turn, inspired criminals to appear (just like the Joker himself).
Batman was bad for Gotham - perhaps not as bad as the organised crime and corrupt police officials, but he was definitely a menace. But crucially he was supposed to be a deterrent, and it’s fair to say that he wasn’t really succeeding until the Joker built him a new mythology with the murder of Dent.
Dent’s transformation into Two-Face was as precisely planned as the Joker’s prison break. He couldn’t have predicted his physical mutation, but he knew what the murder of Rachel would do to Dent’s psyche, so he stacked the deck against him and Batman. He turned Dent into a weapon in order to force Batman to deal with him in a more extreme way than his earlier principles allowed and he knew that there was no way Batman would allow Dent’s image as Gotham’s saviour to be polluted.
Fundamentally, the Joker gave Gotham the Batman and the Harvey Dent that it truly needed. And in the process he ensured that the work he’d done to clean up the streets and the police force remained intact (at least until Bane appeared). Dent’s legacy as the man who cleaned up Gotham was ensured and Batman’s horrifying mythology was allowed to blossom to make sure no criminals moved in to fill the vacuum left by the Joker’s clean-up.
And when you think about it, that peace in Gotham could have lasted, were it not for one of Batman’s past demons coming back to haunt the city in the shape of Talia Al Ghul.The Joker
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