Batman and Joker: They are nothing without each other

By Hank Stuever

The Washington Post

I'VE BEEN THINKING lately. About you and me. About what's going to happen to us, in the end. We're going to kill each other, aren't we?"

That's the Batman talking, a couple of decades ago, to his archnemesis, The Joker, in the opening pages of a graphic novel that changed both of them and made their relationship more wonderfully sick.

Usually The Joker is the one who articulates the nutty co-dependence here. Almost every time they meet, Joker has the gall to remind Batman that they are each nothing without the other, and he usually brings this up as Batman is kicking the heck out of him, in an almost erotic moment of sadomasochism. Joker loves it, laughing his head off with each punch. (And Batman loves it, yes?) The world doesn't quite understand, even though these two have been going at it for 68 years.

"To them, you're a freak," Heath Ledger's Joker tells Christian Bale's Batman in the just-opened "Dark Knight." "Like me."

As if Batman didn't have enough problems, around which entire dissertations have been written. But the problem of Joker, the cruel terrorist with the appalling clown face, has nagged him in one way or another since 1940. Writers and artists (and filmmakers, and actors) adore The Joker because the narrative dynamic is so arresting, as a pure visual: The guy in black is the good one? And the clown is the bad one?

Sometimes, especially in the 1950s and '60s, their tangles were built for laughs. (Oh, that Joker - spray-painting priceless works at the Gotham Museum of Art!) That was about as interesting as going to a cheap circus.

Later, in the '80s, Joker story lines and depictions got scary enough that you didn't want to sleep in the same room with your comic books, but none of his antics ever trumped his infamous calling card: a joker from the deck, left on corpses. Corpses with frozen stares and frozen smiles.

From the first, the makers of the early Batman comic books felt Joker should be a mass killer, and that there shouldn't be any reason why he kills, other than it introduces anarchy into Batman's world. This was awful to think about back in '40s America, when there wasn't a serial killer with a new fetish greeting you in every bookstore and on the screen. A killer clown, imagine!

"Batman" creator Bob Kane and others took their cues from the 1928 silent movie adaptation of Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs," starring Conrad Veidt as the tormented soul with a garishly immobile smile that had been carved onto his face as a child. The plan was to kill Joker off in an issue or two, but, as comic book legend has it, the last panel of Joker's debut story was redrawn on deadline. That way, he could escape death and return sometime later.

Joker came back again, and keeps coming: as an elaborately prankish bank robber in the 1950s, as Cesar Romero's buffoonish baddie on the "Batman" TV series in the '60s; as a deranged post-Carnaby Street dandy with Charlie Manson undertones in the '70s.

Once the best comic books grew up and became graphic novels, the cruelty and psychosis of Joker became fuller and more terrifying. Instead of becoming more of a cartoon, he became quiet and deliberate and that's where he got creepy. There was a lot more blood.

The world has become much more accustomed to anarchy as a form of trendiness, and in a way The Joker is a symbol of that. Also, it helps his case enormously that people have a special, deep loathing for clowns. (Thank you, John Wayne Gacy.)

Batman pays a visit to Joker's cell at Arkham Asylum, that Gothic criminal mental ward on the outskirts of town, in the opening pages of the classic 1988 graphic novel "Batman: The Killing Joke."

"Perhaps you'll kill me. Perhaps I'll kill you. Perhaps sooner - perhaps later," Batman tells his foe, starting to sound like he'd banged bongos in a men's support group. "I don't fully understand why ours should be such a fatal relationship... "

But The Joker isn't listening.

He's just playing solitaire. The Joker isn't listening because it's not really The Joker, it's a jail-cell impostor. Batman grabs him and runs a finger over the face, and the white makeup comes off, and now he knows: Joker is on the outside, escaped again. In every Joker story this is always the best moment. He is not where you think he is, and the joke's on you.

Finally, in this re-evaluation of Joker, there is the obvious matter that the actor playing him in "The Dark Knight" died in January, not long after completing the film.

In all the fretting about whether this would affect the marketing of "The Dark Knight," people found it very difficult to say the awful, Joker-like truth: We like it better because of it.

Batman, the vigilante: so yesterday.

Joker, unhinged, bringing death: so today.

Who needs whom the most now?