TGATB Part II: The Knight is Darkest Just Before the Dawn

or, Beyond Cesar Romero & Jack Nicholson

"Evil may entice man, but it cannot become man." --John Steinbeck (I think? and this is paraphrased...)

Why do I like the Joker so much? Less admiration than fascination and pity... Why do I feel that I can relate to him in some way?

The Joker is a person who has been annihilated by nihilism, by a (un-)seed of de-creation from someplace-or-other.

He does not seek personal gain--money, fame... in what terms could he define 'gain'? What good could it, or anything, do him? As the movie suggests, some people just want to watch the world burn.

This inner voice is what I imagine to be the 'accuser' who tempts Jesus in the desert as he purifies his motives for his mission: not a being bent on domination, but an idea--the idea of domination itself. This accuser never questions Jesus' identity, only his motives: must he do good things good ways? What are good ways?

The Joker similarly 'corrupts' another character in the movie simply by nudging him toward vengeful vigilante justice, something that couldn't have been far from his mind beforehand. The unseed is always there; should one dig to sow it, one will find it already planted. There is no need.

The Joker has no identity: no name, no relations, no known history. Heath Ledger may be the only actor (that I know of) to have successfully played the role of Satan, and I mean that as a compliment.

Demons (i.e. evil) will end up in the Abyss (the Chaos?) because it is what they are building. The only thing they want is to destroy God's work. It seems as though being sentenced to such a place as is ordained for them would be the outcome of their success.

This is at first glance a different tack than C. S. Lewis takes, and also John Steinbeck, that most of man's failures are attempted shortcuts to love. In this view, the demon's ideal would be to be loved. Which is more destructive: to tempt someone to seek love in shortsighted and cheap ways, and so to become agents of destruction, or to tempt them not to want to be loved at all, to let their desires be numbed, and so to become Destruction?