Distinctive Use Of Joker's Costume In The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight

(Costume)
Christopher Nolan’s distinctive use of Joker’s costume is greatly significant to the narrative of “The Dark Knight”; it provides insight to the iconic super villain of “The Joker” and highlights how this portrayal is modernised in comparison to past ones, showing how the super villain role has changed in superhero films. As with Jokers in all media types Health Ledger keeps with classic green, orange and purple attire. This strong, bright colour use is used to contrast with Batman’s black darkness, shows the difference between the characters in a basic physical sense. The strong shades of those colors paired together hurt the eye. The effect is garish, painful, off-putting, and even nauseating. By utilizing
these colors, the Joker becomes someone our eye is drawn to and yet someone we want to look away from. This affects the audience by making us dislike the Joker for his actions but still feel entertained and interested by him. However the most important part of Joker’s costume is his face, white face, black eyes, and overly wide, red slash of a mouth, which makes him look ghoulish and frightening. This also helps determine distinction between Batman whose makeup and cowl mask two-thirds of his face, the Joker’s makeup highlights his eyes and mouth, drawing our attention repeatedly to his expression. While Batman is based upon secrecy and avoidance, the Joker shows he is about emotion and connection, with how close he gets to his victims eg. Rachel, and the black gang leader. This seems very unconventional; Batman is the protagonist yet we feel no real emotional bond but with the Joker we have more of a connection, even if he it is lying about who he is.
We do actually see the Joker briefly without his makeup when he disguises himself as a policeman to assassinate the mayor. Apart from his scarred mouth, which is not as obvious as you would think, the Joker has a regular face. How he chooses to wear the makeup and dye is hair is completely different to the original comic origin, of how he was submerged in acid and his hair is turned green, face turned white, and a permanent red smile. Instead this Joker has only a “Glasgow Smile”, a common gang act of slicing ones mouth open, this infers that there is nothing really significant that differentiates him as a villain. It’s only when he puts on his “war paint” that he becomes a larger-than-life villain suggesting that beneath the surface, every villain was once an ordinary citizen. Or, perhaps, that every citizen has the potential to become a villain given the proper motivation. The connection between audience and villain in the comic book/superhero has always been distant if existent at all, The Dark Knight challenges this conception and accentuates the bond between villain and audience instead of the hero and audience relationship.

(Character Representation/Engagement or Positioning of Audience)
Nolan’s original reinterpretation of the Joker shows that the idea behind him has been altered and modernized to more greatly adapt to the audience. The lack of explained origin in the film and developed maturity of the Joker shows that Nolan is trying to forever change what it is to be a super villain.
The lack of a Joker origin story results in the audience never really gets to know him as a character. The short scene after his jail escape when the Joker is wildly hanging out of the back of a police car and the camera is looking at him from angle of a side mirror is very important. Symbolically it places him in a position of power, in the police car without lead-up although he has just appeared this parallels to how he never tells anyone like Rachel, the black gang leader and almost with Batman the truth about his past and has just “appeared” in Gotham. This absence is a violation of comic book general formulae for characters; in comics they commonly have a beginning, to either becoming a hero or villain. The main reason for this was that it achieves development and motive, with the Joker this was chosen to not be included.
He is then presented as not a character, but a force of chaos that’s purpose is to alter other characters without himself changing, already accepting who he is and what he must achieve.
His actions do not define his own beliefs and emotions, only the actions of others eg. The way he sets up scenarios of conflict: the ferries, bombs on Harvey and Rachel, terrorist threats. This is reflected in our positioning of view when he is in the police car, we don’t see a driver only him hanging out of the back of the car as the car swerves around, showing us that he is in control of others and is ultimately defined by the actions that he brings out of others, like Harvey seeking revenge and that he is just a “passenger” along for the ride, enjoying what he has
created.
The Joker really represents the Dionysian, the underlying savage nature of humanity. However, rather than being a typical villain that simply represents the Dionysian, the Joker is aware of what he represents and seeks to show Gotham City that they are actually all like him underneath it all. Thus, all of his actions in the Dark Knight are actually him trying to show Gotham how evil they truly are when the rules of society are no longer of benefit to them all. The use of the police car in this scene swerving wildly shows how he can bring out the inner chaos and disorder of anything. Due to this, the Joker actually gets defensive when he is called crazy, defending the validity of his views and even getting visibly upset when they are proven wrong towards the end.
However The Dark Knight’s Joker compared with the others eg. Cesar Romero (1966 TV Series) and Jack Nicholson (1989 Movie “Batman”) seem like conformists, they do not reject established laws and institutions, but in ways are polarized villains to Health Ledger as they are crime bosses that perform heists to gain money and wealth whereas Ledger burns his money to “send a message”. Both Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson maintained a very plain sense of evil, that they themselves create it and through use of toxic gases (Joker Venom) and gag-based weapons. They both perpetuate the classic comic book villain that we are all familiar with. Ledger takes a lot of the gimmick and triviality of the Joker character, stripping him down moving from what a villain was and what a villain now and should be, changing one of the most recognizable villains in media. Measuring up Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s portrayals we see Nicholson had a much higher death count, but Ledger was able to corrupt and manipulate the minds of many people, something seen as more powerful than killing.

(Symbol- Recurring images, ideas, messages/Foreshadowing)
Throughout the Dark Knight we see repeated symbols and motifs that carry significance to the narrative of the film. In particular Nolan uses dogs to convey character contrast with Batman and Joker and to show the aspects of human nature that are displayed in the story. We see Batman for the first time in the film when Scarecrow and the Chechen and their gangsters have a meeting/drug deal.
The Chechen says after seeing the bat signal, “…that is why we bring dogs!” Batman subdues everyone but is hit multiple times and is brutally bitten in the weak spots of his armour by Rottweiler dogs. And are used at other times like when the Joker tries to feed the Chechen to his own dogs and when the Joker sets dogs on Batman during the end battle. Batman suffers injuries from the dogs; this signifies how Batman finds it hard to fight an unpredictable, primal beast. In other situations Batman is shown as meticulous and strategic, said to be “the world’s greatest detective”. However when he is meet by something that cannot be calculated and measured he struggles to manage
it. This ultimately relates to this remastered Batman-Joker relationship, the dogs forebode to the future erratic and anarchic actions of the Joker. The reason the Joker achieves so much chaos and terror is how he very deeply conflicts with Batman in his “doglike” ways, which is portrayed when the Joker wildly hangs out of the back of a police-car and when he describes himself as just “…a dog chasing, not knowing what to do if he actually caught one”. The Joker then tries to turn the Chechen’s dogs against him, the way he tries to pit civilians against each other to bring out their primal, violent natures. The dogs are also used again at the end of the film. Batman after being dubbed as a killer by Commissioner Gordon runs from the police while they set police dogs to chase him. By including the dogs at the end and beginning of Batman’s story gives a sense of a re-established equilibrium, the horrific events shown in the middle have been resolved and a ying-yang concept between the Joker and Batman and good versus evil has been created. This tells the audience that development does occur in the superhero genre but a strong sense of balance exists that carries over to other films in the franchise, such as the end of Batman Begins when the symmetry between the Joker and Batman starts to develop. After The Dark Knight ending we can see the classic continuation of a hero-villain complex into the last instalment of Nolan’s trilogy, to the audience Batman is still the hero however in the story it is now the police who set the dogs on him, this is strongly opposed to the start when the criminals set the dogs on him. By use of the dogs as a repeated idea we can see that he is still our hero, not having been corrupted and therefore running from the same radical pursuing animals, just like from the beginning, even if the public see him as a villain we still see him as hero.