by Chris Churilla

Writing a review of Joker (2019) naturally stirred up memories of Heather Ledger’s Academy Award-winning performance in The Dark Knight (2008). I remember the first time I saw it, I was absolutely mesmerized by his take on Joker.

But towards the end, I began to feel restless; something was off, but I didn’t know what. All I had was my instinct, honed by almost twenty years of watching movies.

I saw it again, and that same feeling happened again. This time I could tell where: in the third act.

I saw it one more time, and this time I identified the problem.

THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET

      I remember a lot of people were surprised when Ledger was cast as Joker in Christopher Nolan’s wildly successful reboot of the Batman franchise. Many thought he was incapable of playing such a role—then they saw him onscreen.

      His performance, based on a script written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, was mesmerizing. Here was an anarchist, someone who stood in direct opposition to Batman’s desire for order, but it didn’t stop there. He was smart, perceptive and charismatic, able to verbalize why he did what he did, and in some dark part of our minds, we agreed with him—or at the very least understood him.

      For the first two acts, the film was virtually flawless, with Ledger absolutely dominating every scene he was in, including an explosive interrogation by Batman which saw the Caped Crusader almost completely lose his legendary self-control.

      But then it fell apart at the end of the second act. In my opinion, the Nolan brothers made a terrible mistake in their script.

DEATH OF GREATNESS

      Joker kidnapped Bruce Wayne’s childhood sweetheart Rachel and District Attorney Harvey Dent, whom she was dating and was even considering a marriage proposal from him.

      Joker set them up in separate buildings wired with explosives, and after being beaten by Batman—with no signs of being the least bit intimidated—he gave up their locations, forcing the Dark Knight to choose whom to save. Given his attachment to Rachel Dawes, he naturally raced to the location given to him by Joker.

      But the only certainty with Joker is you can never be certain, and this proved to be the case. He said she was at one location, but somehow sensing she was more important, put her at the other, so Bruce ended up saving Dent and losing Rachel.

REBIRTH

      The loss of his childhood love sent Bruce into a tailspin, and here was what I thought was the mistake: he grieved for only one scene before getting back into the fight.

      When it appeared Jim Gordon died protecting Gotham’s mayor from an earlier assassination attempt by Joker, you could see Batman’s despair as Gordon’s wife wailed over his loss.

      He knew Gordon only for a short time and mourned him, but he had known Rachel his entire life. She deserved much more than just one scene.  She deserved days, weeks, months, maybe even years. He should’ve wallowed in his penthouse while Joker burned the city to ashes. What was the point of saving the world if she wasn’t in it?

       Comics and movies, while different mediums are still both visual; we need to see the how and why of something, much like Thomas did when he demanded to see Jesus’ wounds after His resurrection (John 20:24-31). We need to see it, otherwise, it never happened.

      Gone are the days of deus ex machina (literally Greek for “god from a machine”), in which some magical explanation solved a problem; we are more critical thinkers now, so we need to know how Bruce pulled himself from the depths of despair, and a short pep talk from Alfred about Gotham needing him wasn’t going to cut it.

      I have studied screenwriting, and screenwriter Blake Snyder called this point in the movie the “Dark Night of the Soul” (no pun intended). This is where the protagonist’s goal seems further away than ever. He has been knocked down, he is broken in spirit, and the antagonist appears unbeatable.

      But then the protagonist finds something within himself to get back up, to get back in the fight. I think this is one of the most important parts of the entire movie. This is where we see what the protagonist is really made of, what drives him to stand up when he has every reason to stay down.

      Dark Knight didn’t give us this, and that is why this movie is only two-thirds perfect. We went straight from mourning to action, with no transition in between.

GETTING IT RIGHT

      A movie that did this right was Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). In this, just as Bruce failed to save Rachel, Peter Parker failed to save his girlfriend Gwen Stacy.

Five months passed as he wallowed in his grief. We saw him standing at her grave as summer passed into fall and then into winter. Then she reached out to him from beyond the grave, inspiring him to return with a recording of the speech she gave as valedictorian of their graduating high school class.

This is what needed to happen in Dark Knight. Just before she was kidnapped, Rachel gave a note to Alfred. The note said she was going to marry Dent. She said she knew this would hurt Bruce but urged him not to lose his faith in people.

After Rachel’s death, Alfred prepared to give the note to Bruce but decided to keep it at the last second and later burned it. Perhaps if Alfred had left the note, this could’ve been the instrument of Bruce’s resurrection. 

 It would have hurt in the beginning, knowing she chose Dent over him, but in the end, perhaps he could have used it as his motivation to get back in the fight.

But that didn’t happen, and I have been left with two-thirds of a perfect movie.

Resources

We’ve created a free downloadable PDF to explore the article deeper. It contains discussion questions about the topic in general terms that will give you a jumping-off point for beginning a conversation.

The second page contains a way to see the topic from a biblical perspective.

And finally, to go deeper into the subject, we have chosen a few curated resources to explore from other authors’ and thinkers’ research or perspectives.

Read. Engage. Enjoy!

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