"I just...DO things..."

This is a scene from the movie The Dark Knight. I don't think it's a great movie, but the Joker is a compelling character. The background for this scene is: the Joker had arranged for Harvey Dent (the guy in the hospital bed, now Two-Face) and his fiance, Rachel, to be trapped in two different buildings rigged to explode. While incarcerated, Joker tells Batman where each of them is, but with only enough time to save one of them. Though Bruce Wayne also loves Rachel, Batman chooses to save Dent, because he believes that Dent (a public figure) is capable of bringing order and justice into Gotham City, thus making his (Batman's) role unneccessary. Well, Rachel dies, and Batman does save Dent's life, but unfortunately not without horrible disfiguration to his face--as well as, it turns out, to his soul. Joker escapes and finds Dent, ultimately recruiting him as a fellow "agent of chaos."

In some ways, Joker reminds me of Gregory, the red-headed anarchist poet in The Man Who Was Thursday. When asked what his ultimate goal is, Gregory answers, "To destroy God!" or something like that. Joker has this difference with Gregory: he does not wish to kill Batman, who is supposed to represent an incorruptible goodness, or at least an immovable code. If Batman were dead, what would Joker have to do? Those of us who follow St. Augustine know that evil is a privation, and not a entity in itself, and it cannot exist without Good. Those of us who have read Milton know also that there's nothing to do in hell, nothing to destroy, nothing onto which a thoroughly corrupted thing may latch itself and tear. So Satan finds Paradise.

Joker is disarming. He says that all the order one may conceive is just a conception by someone or other that happens to be more powerful than you, and by rejecting that order, you may be as powerful, at least in thought, as God. "Better to reign in hell..." and so on. But Joker, I think, is even more depraved than Milton's Satan. In Milton, Satan is a prince. But the Joker does not care for reigning anywhere at all. You might say he is an egalitarian. He doesn't even care if he lives or dies--in this movie, he stares death straight in the face at least three times and is energized by it, by his own defiance of it. Because death is also, "part of the plan." There is no prize to win or lose for him; there is only doing things. And when one believes in nothing, the only thing to do is find people who do believe, and figure them out, and latch on, and destroy their faith. That's the thing. Joker doesn't care if people survive any more than he cares if he survives. Like he says to Dent, "It's nothing personal." And it isn't. The Joker does not hate Dent, nor did he hate Rachel. I wouldn't even call him bloodthirsty--he just despises their faith.

His effect on Harvey Dent is tragic. In Dent's adherence to Joker's creedlessness, he loses the ability to make assessments of good or evil, and justice is doled out at the flip of a coin, because it's the only thing that's "fair." Neither actions nor motivations have any meaning for him any longer, and whether you see the handsome side of his face or the rotting side is simply a matter of chance. Of course, he's ugly either way now.

The movie itself falls victim to this. In the end, it is decided that Dent's misdeeds should be pinned on Batman, because it gives people an ordered illusion--a "beneficent deception" I've heard it called--that makes it easier to get along in the world. The Joker's response to this would be, "See! It's just another scheme," and he would probably try to get the truth out.

Isn't it strange that at this point I am comforted by one of St. Thomas Aquinas's proofs for God's existence? It's the one about possible and necessary existence. Nothing we have experienced or known in creation is necessary. It might have been, and it might not have been. This is where Joker stops. He is obsessed and intoxicated by the might-not-have-been-ness of everything, which is why he loves "dynamite, and gun powder, and gasoline." Fire and ruin. But though it may have existed in a form other than it does, stuff does exist, and it cannot be accounted for by a series of infinite causes. At some point, causation itself is caused by something that necessarily is. I suspect that even were he to meet the Must Be, the Joker would be unable to see it as such. So he would go where Satan goes--to the fire that he loves best.