The Joker Wins But at What Cost?

Posted on February 28, 2009 in Film Stigma Suicide

I wasn’t interested in watching The Dark Knight until Heath Ledger won the best supporting actor Oscar. I did not read any of the criticism by the mental health community until the film was about halfway over. By then I’d seen enough to entertain grave suspicions.

Watching Ledger play the Joker must be for me akin to what it is like for a black person to watch Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind. You can credit the performance, but at the same time detest the things being said about you and your kind by the larger context.

The Dark Knight said things about mental illness that were calculated to terrify. And the things they said — about most of us — were false. Mental illness is not a fall from grace as the fundamentalist ethos behind this opus contends. The mind of the paranoid, for example, is not drawn to join with senseless experiments in violence as the screenplay avers at one point. I’ve suffered paranoia and the impulse I felt was to hide from others, to distrust, to protect myself by evasion.

One cannot help but wonder what this role with its message of the evil of the mentally ill might have done to the Ledger’s fragile mind. As the two sides of his brain wrestled with each other, did one shout to the other that there was no hope for him, that he was doomed to violent psychosis?

Go tell Hollywood that The Dark Knight is more than a fiction — it is a malignant lie.