Spoiler Alert, pt. 1

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE DARK KNIGHT MOVIE. If you didn't read the title, or skipped the last sentence because it was all in caps, or don't know what a spoiler is, I will repeat myself slowly and clearly: in this post, I will be talking about plot details from the latest Batman movie, Dark Knight. If you haven't seen the movie, this will spoil some of the surprises in it for you (hence the term 'spoiler'). Read no further, but close the page, close your browser, even turn off your computer if you fear that the following information will leak out of the internet and hurl itself out of your monitor to get a stranglehold on your brain. Go on. Shoo.

If, however, you have seen Dark Knight, or don't mind listening to me despite the knowledge you won't know what I'm talking about or will know all too well and thus spoil Dark Knight's plot twists, and accept that knowledge and wish to forge ahead of your own free will (I think I might have got lost in that last sentence, but you know what I mean): Read on. Once again, however, THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR DARK KNIGHT, and if I haven't made that clear enough you deserve to have me sit next to you in the theater, stealing your popcorn and telling you what's coming about fifteen seconds before it happens.

Dark Knight raises a lot of questions - ethical questions, social ones, existential ones even - like, How responsible is the Batman for the deaths? Was Albert right to burn Rachel's note? was that even within his rights? Why are the Joker's crimes so heinous? What is the significance of referring to both the Joker and the Batman with 'the'? does it objectify them? Is the Batman a vigilante or an outlaw, or both? should he be doing what he does? Is it right to falsely protect the memory of someone so that others can wrongly see him or her as a hero? And the big one, What will happen to the Batman, his psyche, his morals, now that he's lost Rachel?

These are all very interesting questions, and I'll get to them eventually. Most of them, anyway; some I don't care to try to answer. The question that intrigues me at the moment, however, is this: what is it like inside the Joker's mind? Is it sparkly and deadly, like a shattered mirror? Is it all impossible angles and Escher staircases? "I'm like a dog chasing cars," he says of himself. "I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it." What does that mean about his psyche? Is he scizophrenic? Is he devastatingly sane?

I think the answer lies with something else he says about himself. He tells (at least) two different stories about how he got his scars. He seems equally convinced of the truth of both, although there is no way for both stories to be true. I don't read the Batman comics, so I don't know if one of the stories is true, or if the truth is something else, but I don't think the Joker knows either. He doesn't hear voices; he's not disconnected from reality on a cosmic level; 'scizophrenic' doesn't seem to be the appropriate term. Rather, I would call him scizotypal - he is one who has looked at the very edge of sanity and reactively retreated to a cold, absolute sanity. Why shouldn't he stitch dynamite inside the stomach of one of his henchmen? Really, why not?

The Joker has found that the only way to deal with insanity is to become perfectly sane, and he applies that sanity to his morals. He knows that there is probably no law against teaching a devastated, half-dead man about the attractiveness of chaos with the knowledge that the man will then become a murderous psychopath. It's just something that, well, you don't do. But the rules of society only apply if you let them, and as Vimes* says, the trick in policing is convincing people that there's a little policeman inside their heads. Once they see a copper fall and bleed, the spell is broken. And the spell has been broken for the Joker. Sure, he's committed crimes, but that was incidental. What he really did was shatter the bounds of society, breaking the rules of the old cops-and-robbers game. Some law-breakers have a criminal mind, always thinking about the next heist, and some have a criminal soul, who would steal the humanity from a person. The Joker's criminality, I think, lies in his shiny, jagged psyche, and he would steal humanity and its self-protecting norms from the world.

*His Grace, Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh-Morpork, Commander of the City Watch, husband of Lady Sybil Ramkin, father of the inexpressibly adorable Young Sam, damn good sergeant, and oh yeah, entirely fictional character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, published by Harper Torch Books, available pretty much everywhere.