🧵Thread: The Joker Has Never Been a Villain In The Movies, Actually
By Electrichead, Esq, DDS, MD
1. The Adam West Show - Okay he was just a bad guy in this one, but his crimes were funny and shouldn’t count.
2. Batman ‘89 - Okay, for this one we must first ask ourselves: Who is Tim Burton? Or more specifically, who was Tim Burton when he made this film? He was a weird kid who fancied himself an artist. Within the film there are two forces, represented by characters:
First you have Batman, who is order, restriction, following the rules. There is no joy in being Batman, he’s not able to love or be loved, there is only maintaining the status quo, even if that status quo is Gotham rotting around them.
Then you have chaos, but more importantly, ART being represented by the Joker. Jack Napier is a man who we are explicitly told had an aptitude for art when he was younger, but the realities of growing up in the corrupt capitalist mafia state that is Gotham drove him to a life of crime.
Jack Napier is not happy until he gets dropped in that acid, which allows him to finally embrace being a weirdo freak artist. Just like Tim Burton considered himself a weirdo freak artist. Batman is not Tim Burton’s self insert character: the Joker is.
It’s why the movie is pretty much about him. Is he extreme? Absolutely, but he’s also the natural reaction to the stifling of all creativity and independent thought: art that will literally fucking kill you. Beyond this, consider the Joker’s targets and how he executes his crimes.
He kills the mafia guys, and replaces them with a bunch of goofy dudes in jackets with his face on them. He targets an art museum that’s showing stuffy, boring “classical” shit to bored rich people who all look dead even before he kills them for real, and essentially turns it into a Banksy exhibit.
He even stops his men from destroying the one truly interesting painting there, Figure with Meat, by Francis Bacon. A painting I would bet you anything Burton himself fucking loves. Then finally, he gets the dumbest, greediest people in the city all in one place and gasses them to death.
Christopher Nolan absolutely thinks the Joker is the bad guy, but he also thought George W. Bush was a good guy and they would totally only use the PATRIOT Act if they really needed to you guys c’mon we can trust him, and he is wrong on both counts.
