Man With a Plan: A Character Analysis of the Joker

Spoiler Warning!

“Do I look like a guy with a plan? I’m like a dog chasing cars: I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”

This is what the Joker tells Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent in the hospital scene - or, as some fans like to think of it, the “Nurse Joker” scene. These words, along with the Joker’s self-identification as an “agent of chaos,” suggest that he wants people to consider him a completely random force. He is right about being an agent of chaos, but he is anything but random. In order to pull off such elaborate plans, keeping several steps ahead of police officers and masked vigilantes alike, he has to be an extremely detail-oriented planner.

It takes a lot of discipline to appear this chaotic. But that is what a master performer does. The Joker is pulling a Columbo on us all, appearing unbalanced while maintaining control of the situation, keeping his audience focused on the right hand while the left takes advantage of the situation. He is the archetypal Shakespearean fool.

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence of his meticulous nature is what happens when the Joker is finally captured and placed in jail at Gotham’s Major Crimes Unit. Before he even sets foot in the jailhouse, he has managed to smuggle a bomb into the building via the body of another criminal, not to mention having Harvey Dent and his “squeeze” Rachel Dawes rigged up with enough liquid flammables to roast half the town.

The Joker is a study in contradiction, and he as much as smacks the viewer in the head with that fact repeatedly. “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules,” he tells Batman during the interrogation scene. A man who has no rules won’t necessarily feel compelled to represent himself in a consistent manner. In fact, being inconsistent and unpredictable is a good way to keep people guessing, which gives him the upper hand. The Joker says whatever he has to in a particular situation to get the other person to comply with his wishes.

He is a great liar, which suggests that his stories are actually embellished truths. Take the scar stories, for instance. The Joker’s scars are the result of something known as the “Glasgow smile,” which is a method used by Professional Bad People to torture and kill victims. The Joker’s injuries are likely the result of a professional job that didn’t quite work. When he asks people if they would like to know where he got his scars, he isn’t being completely literal.

The best acting - and hence the best lying - is never actually about pretending to feel a particular thing, but rather a displacement of emotion from a past scenario to fuel the current one. Therefore, the emotion the Joker exhibits when speaking of a fiendish father and a lost love is most likely real. My theory about the scar stories is that, yes, his father probably did butcher his mother right in front of his eyes and a woman did probably leave him once he was firmly on the path toward becoming the Joker. His life is no doubt fraught with betrayal and abandonment. Instead of hiding it, he uses his own human vulnerability, juxtaposed with his monstrous ability to torture and terrify, to keep his victims - and his viewers - off-balance.

So The Dark Knight’s Joker is, after all, a man with a plan. He wants to show the people of Gotham their darker sides, to punish them for their hypocrisy by holding up his own life as a mirror to their souls. The interrogation scene with Batman suggests this desire. “When the chips are down, these people will eat each other,” he says. “I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.”

Ironically, he is pointing to himself as a voice of honesty in a dishonest world.

Why does he want to do this? Again, it comes down to displaced emotion. Using his understanding of his own human weaknesses, he is able to use them when he recognizes them in others. Therefore, we can identify the Joker’s issues by listening closely to what he says while he is taunting a potential victim. “Does it depress you, Commissioner, to know just how alone you are?” he asks the newly appointed Commissioner Jim Gordon when Gordon joins him in the interrogation room.

This issue arises again during the fight scene at the old Pruitt Building near the end of the film, when Batman turns this very tactic on the Joker. “You are alone,” Batman says when the ferries fail to explode. Batman is also using his own issues to understand those of his enemy. Both the Batman and the Joker are lone figures, which is perhaps one thing that draws the Joker to him so persistently. Batman’s comment suggests that he believes the Joker is forcing everyone - including Batman - into his games so that he will have a place in society. Even being despised is preferable to being completely and utterly alone.
When telling the Joker, “You are alone,” Batman intends to deliver a blow to the psyche. Unable to hurt the man physically, Batman is trying to hurt him psychologically. However, the Joker appears to be as invulnerable to psychological attack as he is to physical attack.

I am giving a generic character analysis of the Joker because it is important to understand his overall personality and motivations in order to better understand the impact he has had on his female viewers. As a criminal mastermind, the Joker wants to show the people of Gotham that, even though he is the one behind the clown makeup, they are the ones living their lives in masks. He seeks to point up their hypocrisy, and perhaps to punish them for it. Perhaps he is punishing them as well for making him an outcast, even while appearing to embrace this status wholeheartedly. He is angry because he is alone, and he wants to force people to look at what they are trying to bury.
What better next step than to seduce the viewers?

As a fictional villain, he allows us a relatively safe place in which to take out our fears and play with them, learning about ourselves in the process. Many of those fears are those inherent in exploring the dark side of our sexuality. Perhaps this isn’t exactly what was intended by the team that created The Dark Knight, but it is, nevertheless, what has happened.

My next post will present evidence of the Dark Knight Joker’s sexual popularity among women.


This post is Part 2 of my article series Sex and the Joker: Batman’s Nemesis as Underground Sex Symbol. Read the next post in the series.