Film Theory: Was The Dark Knight's Joker Actually A SPY?!

3. Psychological Manipulation And Withstanding Torture

One of the most significant scenes in picking apart the Joker's real secret identity is his face-to-face encounter with Batman in the interrogation scene. On the surface, it seems that the Joker is taking a beating here as some form of perverse validation - as part of his revelation that he and Batman are grotesquely linked - and that he feeds off the pain, as if his whole intention was to get Batman to hurt him.

But that's not true: the pain does nothing to him. As he says, Batman holds no power over him, because the "interrogation" simply doesn't have an effect on him. And not only that, but he reveals that he has experience of interrogation techniques almost immediately:

"Never start with the head, the victim gets all fuzzy. He can't feel the next-"

His ability to withstand torture, as well as his expressed awareness of how that sort of interrogation works, is a further hint that he has worked in espionage on the front line. Up until Barack Obama's presidency, torture was an acceptable practice in official interrogation, as the CIA used techniques actually developed from their own Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training given to military personnel to resist and survive torture in the event of capture.

Essentially, the only way the Joker could be both aware of the mechanics of torture and able to resist it would be if he'd been through that programme himself and had been employed at some point in "acquiring intelligence." Again, because he has to have been a spy.

And then of course there's the whole symbolism of him wearing masks...