I’ll come back to this subject in a week or so, because all the things I really want to talk about in Nolan’s The Dark Knight are going to require a decent number of spoilers, and trust me – this is not a movie you want spoiled. It has nothing (well, almost nothing) to do with the ending, but all the little things Heath Ledger’s Joker does throughout the course of the film.
That said, I can sum up the basics of my thoughts like so: Batman Begins was an amazing film because it showed how a superhero might plausibly be created in real life. The Dark Knight, however, shows us what a real-life supervillain might be like. We hold up Seven and Silence of the Lambs as deeply disturbing, but they have nothing on this. I’m honestly having a difficult time thinking about the Joker’s character in comics or cartoons now, because Ledger’s Joker is that damned unsettling.
Go. Hie thee to a theater. Now. Hie, dammit, hie. We’ll come back and talk this over later.