This is a place for fans of various creative works to share theories, interpretations and speculation related to that particular creative work.
I briefly checked the history by doing a few searches and didn't see anything quite like this, but I apologize if someone else has come up with a similar theory before.
Joker, although a lying psychopath, is actually the hero in The Dark Knight. Before the Joker, Gotham was a mess. Entire sections of the city were closed off due to madness, organized crime ran rampant, and the majority of important city officials were wildly corrupt. The city even tolerated a renegade vigilante who ran around wearing a rubber suit (Okay, special armor and carbon fiber, but they don't know that).
Along comes the Joker and by the end of a very short time, almost all organized crime was eliminated, many corrupt officials were imprisoned or dead, and the city's Vigilante even went into hiding for 8 years. This was all part of Joker's masterfully executed plan.
Everyone must realize that Joker, despite his claim otherwise, really was "The Man With The Plan" throughout the entire film. The very first thing we see Joker do is rob a mafia controlled bank, eliminating the entire team of expert bank robbers who helped him pull it off. Of course, the robbery wasn't about the money, it was about luring Lau out of hiding, preferably with all the major crime families' collective money.
This works beautifully, and as Joker predicts, Batman goes to Hong Kong to "Extradite" Lau. Now Lau is in a safe place which Joker can, amazingly, access with ease. This of course is all just the plot of the film, but Joker is playing it amazingly, murdering key criminals and corrupt officials that could help insulate those at the top. Dent actually argues FOR insulating the men on the top in the interest of cleaning the streets of lower-level goons, but Joker knows that won't work in the long-term.
At this point we honestly just have 3 men battling for Gotham's "soul" (as Joker puts it), but Dent and Wayne are simply playing into Joker's greater plan. This even extends to Joker's threats to destroy a hospital. With Batman and Gordon's help, Joker helps them root out corrupt police officials. Dent even kills some of those officials later in the film.
Gordon's promotion, too, did a major service to Gotham. I think a lot of people take the Joker's clapping during Gordon's promotion scene to be sarcastic, but I actually think that Joker believed in Gordon, one of the few officers on the force who was truly incorruptible.
So now Joker has a pretty clear path to getting rid of the Organized Crime problem and the corrupt officials problem, but the Vigilante problem remains. As we saw at the beginning of the film, Batman was inspiring other vigilantes, and a society cannot stand when each man takes his own justice. This symbol of fear and unbridled vengeance, as Joker sees it, needs to be stopped, but not Killed. If he were killed, he would just be a martyr, and his symbol would live on. Of course, since Dent was a far better symbol for the city, he would make a far better martyr.
I don't know if Joker actually intended for Harvey to be so physically scarred by the explosion from which Batman saved him, but I am certain that he wanted Harvey to feel the full pain of Rachel's death, which is why he purposely tells Batman to go to the wrong address. He knows what Rachel's death would do to Harvey psychologically, and that Batman would eventually have no choice but to kill Harvey. This breaks Batman psychologically, and also makes him a villain, a true villain, the kind that abandons his own principles. Batman now has no choice but to disappear, leaving his memory to fade into something of urban legend by the time of TDKR.
When we pick up in the next film we see a defeated Bruce Wayne who had retired 8 years prior. The city was safe and peaceful (until Bane shows up), and doesn't need constant vigilante justice to keep it safe. Joker shows Batman the error of his ways, but does so in a totally devastating way.
Even the display with the two boats at the film's climax only served to prove to the people of Gotham that they wouldn't turn on each other. He proved that there was good even in the most supposedly despicable of Gotham's inmates.
In the end Gotham is actually clean. It wasn't because of Harvey, who died too soon to do any good, except as a martyr, and it wasn't because of Batman who was ostracized and treated like the criminal such a vigilante truly is for 8 years. Gotham was safe because the Joker had cleaned up the streets. He eliminated the corrupt police, he destroyed organized crime financially, he uplifted Gotham's spirit, and he even got rid of the flying pest that had been corrupting Gotham ever since he declared himself it's protector.
Which in turn could have given some credence to the story of the mob being the cause of his scars and initial driving point. He does sort of admit his whole goal is to make batman see you can accomplish more by fighting fire with fire than water. A controlled burn stops the constant crime inferno continually destroying the city. Nice theory.
Edit: Phone Blips and Chitz
I always felt that the joker wanted to be the only game in town, but I like this theory better.
I don't think he wanted to be the only game. I saw it as him wanting the other players to come up to his level a.k.a. "This city deserves a better class of criminal."
I was really disappointed to see in Dark Knight Rises that Batman had been in retirement all those years. I though the implication in The Dark Knight was the the Joker was just the first in many of the more eccentric villains (yes technically Scarcrow was first) that Batman would be facing from that point on.
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He became crippled from when he fell in TDK after tackling Harvey and saving Gordon's son. And then I think the city remained clean when the dent act was still in place because the public never learned that Harvey Dent lost his shit.
Maybe the riddler from hush and hush guy of course
TDKR was disappointing for lots of reasons.
Fun Fact- Nolan only made that movie so he could make Interstellar. You can really tell the field where he grows his fucks lay barren when Bane does his best Adam Sandler impression during the "Gotham is yours" speech.
Actually when he was making TDKR Spielberg was set to direct it and Christopher Nolan only got involved after Spielberg dropped out and his brother Johnathan Nolan (who wrote both TDKR and Interstellar) showed him the script to Interstellar
And he only made the Dark Knight to make Inception, and Batman Begins for the Prestige. Sadly, he did a really good job the first two times so it got our hopes up.
That is a beautiful saying.
We spend the entirety of Act 1 having Batman "coming back" to only getting entirely broken down again by the start of Act 2. IMO they crammed too much into one movie and it made some confrontations feel rushed.
I always felt TDKR would have worked better as a two-parter. I generally hate the two-parter formula since it has almost never worked out "well" for any series that has adopted it, but there was so much content that was crammed in that it could have been great.
End TDKR Part 1 with Batman being broken by Bane in a big finale, with the shock of him losing, and then gets dumped in The Pit. He watches Gotham become a quarantine zone at Bane's football stadium takeover and screams at the TV in his cell, at which point it goes "See the conclusion in TDKR Part 2". Maybe give him a chance to take on another villain like The Riddler in-between the Bane shenanigans going on, or at least a little more Catwoman, and give us more proper Batman action. He barely felt like a player in TKDR for how much time he spent on the sidelines. This way we could have a full on proper "Batman" film before the big epic finale where he has to rebuild from The Pit and redeem himself and save all of Gotham one final time. Also this gives more time to John Drake and Gordon to build their resistance against Bane, and build up the Talia twist even more.
I didn't dislike TDKR, but I do feel like they should have just like Nolan go. There was kinda a precedent for directors only doing two movies, and they could have let someone new come in for a more shared universe friendly Batman.
A heavy price. I pay it gladly.
link or it didn't happen.
I would go further and say that the joker was almost in love with Batmans ideals, but not his methods of reaching them. He may have wanted a partner. Brokeback Gotham. (Just kidding about the last part)
In some iterations of joker, and more or less the joker as a whole, he is in love with batman. Not in some normal love way but in his twisted deformed love.
Twisted and deformed love is a great way to describe it.
What true gamer wouldn't love competition as worthy as Batman, let alone one so obsessed as Joker?
The Joker is an infinite player... as such he plays not to consume time but to extend play.
His inverted lines at the end of the Dark Knight are a perfect summation of he and Batman's twisted relationship... that cackling trill as he falls to his should be death - "holy shit he just killed me what a surprise woohahahaa", his observation of unstoppable force / immovable object, that ominous and almost under-the-breath "I think you and I are destined to do this forever"... chills.
And even in his "defeat" he reveals his Plan B - Dent... "You didn't think I'd risk losing the battle for Gotham's soul in a fistfight with you?" And his fadeout laughter slithers from a chuckle to victorious mockery.
You'll be in a padded cell... maybe we could share one.
They are so a codependent couple.
In arkham origins the joker calls batman his "soul mate "
Hey remember when Batman left Joker in a room full of helpless rich people to jump out of a window and fall hundreds of feet and survive because plot armor and saves Rachael because fuck the audience?
This kind of explains why the joker wasn't just raining old rich people on the street below.
Jokebat Gotham
"Blips and chitz"
Wubalubadubdub!
And that's the way the news goes!
AIDS!
lick lick lick my balls!
Time to take Roy...off....the grid".
It's "Hey everyone, this guy is taking Roy off the grid. He doesn't even have a social security card for Roy!"
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The theory seems pretty solid and I love the provocation. Thanks, u/generalzee, for writing it out! But about the clapping, something struck me, I want to share it with you: In my perception, the Joker is still a cynic. Now, normal cynics at some point just stop giving a single fuck, thats pretty much a working definition of a cynic: an overwhelming lack of faith in the human condition. Going against u/generalzee theory, that's what I find interesting with the Joker: Counterintuitively, he seems to be a cynic with a mission. What you could normally overlook as crazy or some kind of vague anarchic idea just to fuck shit up is actually cynicism raised to a full blown ideology (as in "It's not about the money, it's about sending a message"). The gist of the ideology being: I will fuck you up so bad that you will have no choice but to share my disdain in the human race. I will turn you. You will hate yourself. The better person you are to start with, the more fucked up you will be when I'm done with you. Exhibit A: Harvey Dent.
I fully appreciate what is said about the surprising consequences of the Jokers actions. But I would argue that this interpretation doesn't give full account of the Jokers motivation and the personal consequences for the heroes of the story, and it's with the ambivalence of the clapping scene that you can see it: The Jokers clapping is partly honest and revering. He is looking forward to the battle. He appreciates his opponent, who represents the opposite to his disbelief in humanity, he appreciates this the way a general sees the cunning beauty in the moves of his enemy. But at this point, he still bets on his basic beliefs: the patience of the cautious man will run out at some time, because you can fight extremism of his scale only with extreme measures. He looks forward to having his ideology proven. If he's able to fuck up Gordon, who'll be left to offer him resistance? So, on a twisted level, he is proud of Gordon. He will be his masterpiece. Batman already is fucked up. He practically knows at this point that Batman is a proven point, a played game. But this Gordon, he's as honest as humans come. He's the prototype of a good human being.
But still, the Joker's a cynic to the last degree. He's still a fucking cynic with a sardonic smile: "Among the very ancient people of Sardinia (...) it was customary to kill old people. While killing their old people, the Sardi laughed loudly. This is the origin of notorious sardonic laughter now meaning cruel, malicious laughter." (wiki) That's what he's looking forward to. You can see it in Heath Ledgers smile, it gives me the creeps. And that's what makes this scene so iconic.
tl;dr: Heath Ledger was the greatest Joker ever.
I feel like there's a book to be written about that scene in Gotham Metro. Your interpretation is brilliant in its own right, and I don't even think it contradicts the rest of my theory, just that one line about the clapping. There's so much to Joker's character in this film that I continue to be shocked every time I watch it.
I would go further and say Heath Ledger gave the best performance of an Actor or an Actress in cinema period, I was moved by it and it was sad to see him go.
Idk. He's a hero for blowing up innocent Rachel? And fighting fire with fire instead of water is a fucking terrible lesson. That's just saying whenever bad things happen you can just do an equal amount of bad as long as it overrides the first bad. Have you ever heard the saying "two wrongs don't make a right?" Did the joker potentially do more bad than what was going to happen? I mean his plan was to kill a boatload (if not two boatloads) of people in one night. Not to mention he almost got the swat teams not only killed but almost got them to kill civilians. And as far as we know the Dark Knight starts right after the first movie left off seeing as it ended with the joker's "calling card". For all we know Batman would have done the job more efficiently and not killed innocent people and Gothan would have kept their hero Harvey. he just wasn't given enough time. This just doesn't hold up.
I definitely prefer the following video for a great analysis on the meaning, although not really a fan theory, http://youtu.be/Dqe_feNbPRY
Fireman do fight fire with fire though. They do a controlled burn line that meets an out of control wildfire and it stops it. It's a pretty good analogy for this theory.
Except it falls apart VERY quickly. If the Joker was only out to kill the bad guys then that would be fire vs fire. But he blows up Rachel, bombs a police station, assassinated the mayor, plans to get a swat team to kill civilians, plans to kill the swat team, and plans to blow up two boat loads of people. None of the people in that last would be considered "fire". If he had stopped after he killed the henchmen and batman captured the Asian guy who led him to the other criminals, then the joker would be fighting fire with fire. The joker is a firefighter who after he puts out the initial flame he sets off an even bigger fire.
In end the joker says it's okay to kill all of the people mentioned above as long as it ends up being good. But we know that doesn't last forever. There's always more evil. So what? Just kill more bad guys and innocent people every time and hope your plan involved killing less innocent people even though you probably had at least 600 people in those boats to die in ONE night? Nah Batman is "good" which is why he saves most of those people from dying. The most he can anyways.
The Joker is an "ends justify the means" kind of guy while prior to killing Dent Batman is all about maintaining a code no matter what. Neither is moral.
If the Joker is anything to the fire metaphor, he's just the arsonist who wants burning victims to dance more entertainingly, and maybe draw a mile wide happy face in charcoal.
It takes zero effort to imagine Heath Ledger saying "Everything burns" as this character.
The Rachel/Harvey thing was just the Joker pushing Batman to choose and understand his choices to not kill allow others to do so and that has consequences, Had he killed the Joker it all could have been avoided. The Joker wants Batman to be the Punisher who is essentially Batman and the Joker combined. Remember the Maroney scene, the crime bosses were more afraid of The Joker because he had no rules.
Nullifying Rachel's death still doesn't make up for the lives of the officers in the police station, the hanging, the swat team that almost got killed, the civilians that they almost killed, and the two boat loads of people. And again Batman could have very well done the job himself without murder if this actually was the joker's plan. But he was barely given any time to prove so. So this still doesn't justify Rachel's death. The joker is just a psycho. A smart one, but not a "good" one.
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Heroes can be psychos and many would argue in war sometimes they need to be. A great semi-recent example The Operative in Serenity. He is the good guy in that film. He represent law and order in human society. He is fighting to protect everyone. Mal and his crew may not like him, but they are the criminals why would they like him? The best part about The Operative as the hero is he is self aware in a way that "Serenity's Heroes" are not. Remember this exchange:
The Operative: I'm sorry. If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to. You should have taken my offer. Or did you think none of this was your fault?
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: I don't murder children.
The Operative: I do. If I have to.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Why? Do you even know why they sent you?
The Operative: It's not my place to ask. I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: So me and mine gotta lay down and die... so you can live in your better world?
The Operative: I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. Malcolm... I'm a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.
He knows he is a monster but he knows why he is a monster and what he is fighting for. Batman in many ways is at his worst when he loses sight of this. This is why he is always in and out of the Justice League in comics and cartoons. He is trying to save individual people like his parents. Superman is trying to save the planet which means sometimes people die and get hurt. Batman is fighting thugs in the street and ignoring the bigger picture, sometimes failing to do what needs to be done especially if it means killing.
What is the defining act of "Man of Steel?" Superman kills Zod. Maybe he could have subdued him, but why? Zod was going to destroy Humanity. Why allow that threat to exist? To me same goes for Batman. Why let the Joker break out of jail over and over and kill people even if some of the are bad men? Batman allows his enemies use him a s a play thing and while he plays super hero people die all around him.
Superman runs into the same issue in the comics and cartoons with Lex Luthor, but he eventually kills him in those mediums.
Watching right now. Just commenting to say this is the first time I realized the Joker fucking burned Lau alive on top of that money pile.
WTF just saw a still, you're right. I've watched that movie so many times and missed it every time.
Because they cut the part of him burning out of the movie for rating reasons. It was initially in the film http://i.imgur.com/imVaAMB.png
Lau was the worst kind of villain to the Joker. Not only did Lau not care what kind of chaos and devastation he caused, but he had no principles. He would rat out his friends for a deal, he would weasel his way out (He already demanded immunity, which Rachael seemed happy to give him), and he would switch allegiances based on whoever had power. Burning Lau was as clear a message as burning the money.
I..uh...have nothing to counter against this.... this is actually a solid theory. Nice job.
You're Goldblumming, Jeff.
Goldblumming? I, I - uh, I don't know what that means.
https://youtu.be/Lv6mA0qyOo4
This is far and away my favorite scene in the show. Joel's impression is impeccable.
FTFY
POP POP!
Shut up, Leonard!
I know about your crooked wang
Fan theories, uuuuuh, find a way.
How about the genuine disappointment seen in the jokers face when none of the boats exploded? Why did he put harmless doctors in harms way? Is he antiabortion as well?
I think everyone should watch the movie again before praising this (very interesting) fan theory as FACT.
It actually seems like this thread is filled either with people who haven't seen the movie, don't remember the movie, or are so irrationally desperate to believe this theory that all logic and sense is being flushed down the toilet.
Well there's one minor thing that kinda sinks the theory, which is that the Joker looks utterly shocked that at least one of the two boats didn't explode the others, and then he decided he would blow them both up anyway.
But other than that I still like the theory.
I don't know, I suppose you could reason that the boats actually had their OWN keys instead of the other boats', and in such case, only the group that would be punished would be the one that decided to kill the opposite boat. As for the plan of both boats blowing up, I guess you could say the joker only made that assertion to create a sense of desperation and urgency among all the people concerned. In any case, this scene paints the joker as more of a Machiavellian antihero than anything else
I think that theory works right up until the point when the Joker was straight up gonna blow up both boats anyways. The threat of destroying both boats being used as a ploy and an empty threat only works until it turns out the Joker was planning on fulfilling that threat. Which means he would've punished both boats regardless of whether those boats were holding each other's keys or their own, like you said.
I do have one!!
Bruce was actually in a coma...
oh god please not this again...
Even better, he was just tripping somewhere in Tibet from that flower Raaj Al Gul gave him, and Gotham is already burnt to the ground.
I do. This could be applied to any story ever. Was Sauron and Saruman good since they united all races of LOTR? I am sure someone can come up with a theory of why Hittler actually loved the Jews or Why Voldemort is the best thing ever since he allowed so many people to grow.
It's interesting that people will make those cases for villains in a story, that any villain who unites the protagonists against him or her was purposely doing that, even if that plan required the deaths of any number of people to achieve, thus making them an anti-hero of sorts.
Maybe it's the idea that since evil is more or less a human concept, that no one is truly evil? Maybe I'm putting too much thought into it. Still, it's an interesting concept to study, the de-vilification of villains in movies and literature.
You've got me thinking about the boat situation. If the Joker wanted to show that the people of Gotham won't turn on each other, that means he was still going to blow up both boats. I love your theory but it doesn't discount the fact the Joker was a dangerous psychopath. He was just effective.
Oh, totally. He wasn't in control of himself, but he could control everyone else. Perhaps the penultimate joke.
Found Nolan's alt account.
Yeah, he gets everyone completely in agreement with each other, they're like "we're not gonna do this! We're better than this!" and then he's like "Haha, yeah, but I'm not!"
Or, the actual switch for both boats that he had didn't do shit.
Hell, maybe the explosives were all duds. They hit a switch and a pop bottle shoots out confetti and says "Bang!"
He was just trying to make a point, I think.
I'm personally a fan of the theory that he gave the boats their own detonators.
It would make the situation even worse if a key was turned.
Or the detonators blow up schools, or skyscrapers or something. All the shame of pushing the button, all the scorn of the other boat's passengers, and all the guilt of leading to the deaths of hundreds of people not involved. Really, those buttons had a lot of potential for chaos, and the Joker was keen on misdirection and twist endings.
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Yeah the ultimate joke was the city being saved by a clown
But it sounds so much cooler than just 'ultimate'
This is the penultimate fan theory!
Not as cool as SUPER PENULTIMATE!!!
Which just means third to last...
Well, he's not wrong. The ultimate joke was Harvey.
That is the last joke. That's the joke.
?
!
Wasn't in control of himself? He knew exactly what he did every step of the way. He knew exactly what everyone else would do every step. With your theory he knew exactly what batman would do to the very last note. He took the extreme and didn't miss a beat.
Well he was in control of the situation, but like Dexter (Why did you bring in Dexter, self? Really? Don't you remember how bad that show got? STUPID SELF!) he couldn't control his primal urges to kill and destroy. Much like Dexter, he decided to make an outlet for himself where the destruction and death he caused would ultimately do some good. I think anyone who has seen Dexter would argue that he is in control of almost every situation he gets himself into, but that he is not in control of himself.
Or it was all just a ruse and the explosives would never detonate. That's why he pulls out his own detonator and then pauses to launch into another scar diatribe.
Do we even know the detonators were set as he said? I always assumed he lied like he did with Dent and Rachel. Each group just had the detonators for their own ship.
Nah, if they tried to explode each other I think he would've let it happen, because that way you get rid of citizens of Gotham who wouldn't help it rise from the ashes, you give them another tragedy to unite over and try again to prove themselves against. He's idealistic in this theory, not not an asshole (double negative intended). He just wouldn't have exploded the boats once they decided not to kill each other.
But he does try to blow the boats up. After the time runs out he pulls out his own detonator and fiddles with it before Batman stops him.
This has always been my headcannon, but there's just no way to prove it, sadly. With this theory, it's likely that either detonator would destroy BOTH ships, I think.
That'd be too easy on the rest of the city. "They both got what they deserved" or "The whole thing was a set-up from the get go". The Joker looks like a liar, a bunch of people die, and not a lot changes. If anything, the rest of the city becomes less likely to cross the line if the Joker challenges them, knowing he doesn't stick to the rules.
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but the most devious plot I can devise is rigging those detonators to schools or hospitals nearby. Shame from the public for pressing the button, hatred from the other boat's passengers, and personal guilt for participating in the deaths of uninvolved people. This wounds the entire city's psyche. They know they can't trust each other, they know they aren't safe, and they know the rules don't apply to the Joker. Just my theory though, there's no evidence in the film. I'm just extrapolating on Joker's knack for keeping everyone guessing.
definitely. joker just wanted to push batman to kill him if he could. he didn't need to blow up the boat, he just had to threaten that he would. his job was done at that point, there was only one loose end. turning the batman into a villain in the eyes of the people of gotham. murdering the joker, even if he was a madman would turn most of gotham against him.
IIRC he really expected the ships to blow up.