The Evolution Of The Joker - Movie Timeline

3. The Dark Knight

By the time Heath Ledger's Joker arrived, he did so not in a pure adaptation of the Batman comics, but what the director and Ledger DID draw from the comics was that same old idea of dichotomy.

Nolan's trilogy is fairly obsessed with duplicity - the whole series is essentially one big masquerade ball where everyone's masks slip and we get to see their real demons. And more than previous movies, partly because of those ideas, Ledger's Joker was even more overtly presented as a flipped image of Batman. Tim Burton's writing had imagined Joker and Batman as two sides of the same character and Nolan took that idea and truly ran with it.

For all of the vagueness and the frustrations around Ledger's Joker's origin, the single most compelling truth he tells is the suggestion that he was created by Batman. He gave him purpose and balance and without him, there simply would be no Joker. And he sets about proving that the same conflict exists in everyone - a real world ideological examination that's as old as Shakespeare's works on conflict and evil. He wants to prove that everyone, including Batman can be their own Joker if they're just given the right push and the most intriguing idea of the whole trilogy is of everyone guided not by a devil on one shoulder and an angle on the other, but a Batman on one and a Joker on the other.

There are less real world allegories in this Joker, but that is perhaps because he's very much in a real world that barely even looks like Gotham, but the key point of him is that same old idea of contradiction and difference.

And even though it failed miserably, difference was the driving force behind the next Joker too...

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