Why So Serious? - The tragic Dark Knight punchline behind the praise of Heath Ledger's Joker

August 17, 2:40 PMPop Culture ExaminerDominic Patten

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RECEPTION TO HEATH LEDGER'S JOKER IS NO LAUGHING MATTER (WARNER BROS)

I have to admit something.

I don't think Heath Ledger was that great in The Dark Knight.

As I watched the film, I kept waiting for this performance that I had heard so praised by the critics and the actor's fellow thespians. 

It never turned up. 

With the rush to give him a posthumous Oscar nod and maybe even the award itself, with the rave reviews, the mind blowing Box Office and the fact that the actor, who I have liked in other films, died earlier this year, this is not a critical view you are going to hear many places.

But from a cultural perspective, it is something we should examine.

We mourn and we praise the dead, we rarely critique them. It is partially from our culture's obsession with celebrity and partially our cloistered relationship with death.

There is a lot of power in a celebrity death, especially when the star in question is young and talented.

It's sad, but it's true. 

The Dark Knight, which is closing in on Titanic to have the biggest domestic gross of all time, was, months before its release, a pop culture event of huge magnitude. It may have been a slight statement on our times, but the stakes were as real as they get. One of its stars, the one who played one of the most deranged characters in the pop culture universe, had died after filming was done but before the movie came out. 

While Ledger's death in January 2008 was a topic that was everywhere, the effect that it would have on the film's reception was respectfully muted. No one, at least in public, ever explicitly said that in all the hype and the build up to the film's release a month ago, but, like a ghost in the attic, it was there. Warners Bros even pulled a marketing campaign they had started around Ledger's Joker for fear they would be accused of acting in bad taste and bad faith.  No one said it or dared to but the gravitational pull of the lurid attraction was evident. 

I thought Ledger's Joker had some good turns, but on the whole it was a just slightly better than usual two dimensional superhero movie villain portrayal. Nowhere near as horrible as poor bald Jeff Bridges, who is usually good in everything, in Iron Man or Aaron Eckhart as Two Face in The Dark Knight for that matter. Neither as brilliantly deranged as Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in 1978's Superman.

But few seem to want to say that. 

Few seem to want to crack the sheen built up around Ledger and The Dark Knight since his death. Some, like David Denby of the New Yorker, injected their own purposefully prophetic sense of what would happen to Ledger into his performance and their review of that performance. But fear, pathos and tragedy are not on or behind the screen. Ledger was a professional; he wasn't playing out a death wish or a decent into madness.

He was doing his job the best he could.

In his death, Heath Ledger, like James Dean, Kurt Cobain and Marilyn Monroe, has become an immortalized fixed quantity. He will never age. He will never end up doing bad cable movies. He will never squander his talent.  He can never tell we are wrong in how we assess his motivations. He can never say anything again. He will never have a comeback. He will always be that 28-year old Australian from Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight.

He will, in an eternity of untapped potential, be whatever we want him to be.

And that, in the underbelly of the pop culture beast and an industry that eats its young, is far more ghoulish than his Joker.