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.

After researching transmedia storyworlds at MIT, guiding Microsoft in its CTO/CXO's think tank, co-founding Microsoft Studios' Narrative Design team, and exploring the future of entertainment and media as the Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, I'm now the Creative Director for USC's World Building Media Lab, a storyteller, a designer, a consultant, and a doctoral student in Media Arts and Practice at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.

