“And I thought my jokes were bad.”
The Joker in The Dark Knight
looks different from the other Jokers
that came before.
Other Jokers have fixed
or painted-on smiles --
but Heath Ledger’s Joker
has scars that extend his smile
into a freakish sight.
The Joker gives a few conflicting
explanations for how he got his scars --
first he says he got them
from his abusive father.
“He comes at me with the knife --
‘Why so serious?’
He sticks the blade in my mouth --
‘Let’s put a smile on that face.’”
In his second story, he says
he gave himself the scars
after his wife was disfigured
by loan sharks.
“I just want her to know
that I don’t care about the scars.
So I stick a razor in my mouth
and do this to myself.”
Later he’s about to tell Batman
a third story of how he got his scars,
but he never gets the chance.
“You know how I got these scars?”
“No -- but I know how you got these.”
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It was a calculated move on
director Christopher Nolan’s part
to never give a concrete reason
for the Joker’s scars.
Nolan has said, quote,
“In narrative terms we didn't
want to humanise him,
we didn't want to show his origins,
show what made him
do the things he's doing
because then he becomes less threatening.”
The Joker embodies anarchy and destruction
that can’t be controlled or understood --
so the conflicting stories of how
he was scarred refuse to give us
a resolution to that chaos.
“I try to show the schemers
how pathetic their attempts
to control things really are.”
The scars have multiple symbolic
meanings throughout the story.
The grotesque twist on a clown’s red mouth
visually reflects a sense of humor
taken to a sick, horrifying extreme --
which is the Joker’s trademark.
“Why so serious?”
The Joker likes to toy with his victims
and treat his killings like a game.
“If Coleman Reese isn’t dead
in 60 minutes, then I blow up a hospital.”
Batman is one of the most serious,
noirish superheroes out there,
“You either die a hero,
or you live long enough
to see yourself become the villain.”
so the Joker’s scars mark him
as the antidote to
all of the doom and gloom.
Yet even though the scars
approximate a smile,
“Now I’m always smiling.”
if we look closer,
this is a terrifyingly unhappy face.
The Joker’s scars also represent
a perversion of love.
A key similarity in the two
scar stories he tells
is the relationship element --
both anecdotes describe a twisted
relationship in which the Joker
didn’t get the love he was seeking.
In the first story, his father,
who should have been
a protective presence,
only wanted to hurt him.
“My father was… a drinker,
and a fiend.
And one night, he goes off
crazier than usual.”
And in the second story,
he disfigured himself for his wife,
but his strange romantic gesture backfired.
“She can’t stand the sight of me.”
So through these stories,
the Joker is saying his scars
weren’t just physical --
he’s connecting them
to an emotional trauma.
“I believe whatever doesn’t kill you
simply makes you...
stranger.”
He does the same thing to Harvey Dent --
implementing physical scars
that are tied to emotional ones.
Harvey is disfigured
and his girlfriend Rachel dies
in the accident orchestrated by the Joker.
“He told me that only one of us
was going to make it.
And that they were
going to let our friends choose.”
So we can see that the Joker
uses violence as a game,
to break people both
physically and emotionally.
“He wanted to prove that even
someone as good as you could fall.”
“And he was right.”
Once Dent becomes Two-Face,
he has a tactic of flipping a coin
to decide whether to kill someone.
“The world is cruel.
The only morality in a
cruel world is chance.”
This is exactly like something
the Joker would do --
it’s totally random,
a combination of a lighthearted game
and a terrible violence.
So the Joker succeeds in remaking
the idealistic do-gooder Harvey
in his own image.
“I took Gotham’s White Knight…
and I brought him down to our level.”
At the same time, the idea
that the Joker’s own scars
are tied to emotional trauma
comes only from the stories the Joker tells
--
so this makes that explanation
completely suspect.
The Joker himself isn’t broken
by his scars the way Harvey is.
He takes a perverse pleasure in his scars.
So it seems overwhelmingly likely
the Joker did this to himself --
and not for love,
but to express an identity
that he’s proud of.
What’s funny is that the Joker
is the one who’s obsessed
with telling the stories
of how he got his scars.
He brings it up to potential victims
time and time again.
“Wanna know how I got these scars?”
“Wanna know how I got ‘em?”
“You know how I got these scars?”
So clearly his scars are something
he likes to focus on.
And through his storytelling,
he’s playing with his victims’ human need
for logical explanations and answers,
only to reveal there are none.
He’s mocking the convention
of the traumatic incident
that turns someone into a supervillain --
and he’s rejecting the idea
that anything “caused” him to be this
way.
The Joker’s scarred smile
also comes from some realistic inspirations.
The Chelsea Headhunters gang
in Britain was known for inflicting
these kinds of scars,
which were called “a Chelsea smile.”
The Dark Knight’s prosthetics supervisor
Conor O’Sullivan said he was partly inspired
by punk and skinhead aesthetics.
Punk subculture is all about
being anti-establishment
and not conforming,
but the Joker embodies that sense
of chaos and rebellion
in the darkest possible way.
“Introduce a little anarchy.
Upset the established order
and everything becomes chaos.
I’m an agent of chaos.”
The main thing we know
about the Joker’s scars
is that he sees them as an asset --
a psychological element
in his violent, fear-inspiring game.
The Joker wants to break people,
to convince them that their society
is illogical and meaningless.
“Some men just want
to watch the world burn.”
And these strange, unexplained scars
are his way of proving to people
that their world is insane.
“You look nervous -- is it the scars?”
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