“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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