On “Dark” Summers, Batman and Heath Ledger’s Final Role

This is cross-posted.

It was a summer of discontent, Bush v. Gore and soul-crushing loneliness. It was also the summer Heath Ledger first came to my attention. I went to see “The Patriot” one afternoon in June and walked away in some kind of a trance. It was love at first sight.

Ledger, the shining young Adonis, with his golden locks and exquisitely sensitive eyes, had transformed Mel Gibson’s otherwise mediocre Revolutionary War drama into high art. Or at least an effective summer tear-jerker.

He was a welcome distraction. A brief crush ensued, primarily involving me pouring over every magazine story I could find on him. (The Vanity Fair feature that appeared in August that year with Ledger in faded blue jeans and a clean white shirt is forever etched in my mind – bless you, Graydon Carter.) My Ledger fixation didn’t last long, but it certainly ranks among the most intense of my silver screen obsessions.

So I suppose it’s understandable that when the news broke in late January of Ledger’s accidental overdose, I was shaken and weepy for days. There’s something profoundly unsettling about the death of a generational cohort – even one you didn’t know. And Ledger was so beautifully alive. The notion of death (with its gloomy finality) didn’t jive with his essential energy and talent. Everything was still before him.

Since then, I’ve been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” mainly because the notion of watching the late Ledger in his final role – the demands of which (it’s been suggested) may have contributed to his untimely death – struck me as an exercise in morbidity.

And on some levels it is.

Ledger’s Joker is so dark, so gruesomely subterranean and freakishly artistic, it’s as if he’s bubbled up from the bowels of hell itself. His lip-smacking scenes, with their all-consuming creepiness, are a film within a film. The other characters drift in and out of the frame, going through the well-choreographed motions necessary to execute a high-throttled action movie (car chases, punchy one-liners, eardrum splitting explosions and firefights), and they do a great job – don’t get me wrong. This is an excellent example of the genre. Yet they never quite shake the flat two-dimensionality of their comic-book archetypes.

But the Joker…you worry he’s coming after you next.

There’s one scene so jarringly bizarre, it would be equally at home in a Matthew Barney video installation. As the Joker stumbles out of Gotham General Hospital, a building he wired to detonate, it erupts into a flaming fireball. Wearing a nurse’s uniform, smeared make-up and wild hair, he clods away from the site of his greatest destruction in a state of ecstatic derangement. After I saw it, I woke up in the middle of the night, struggling to shake the image of that crazy, cross-dressing clown from my mind.

Ledger aside, this latest in the Batman franchise certainly stands out for the extent it explores the nature of darkness and wanton evil. “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) says at one point. As such, the movie seems more theologically derivative than previous installments, with the Joker casting himself as the Satan-like “agent of chaos” and Batman willingly taking on himself the enmity of the world in order to save it. “The Dark Knight” is also heavy on political topicality. The plot involves a Chinese villain, the ethical conundrums posed by civil liberties/surveillance/terrorism issues, and even offers a subtle plug for universal health care. (A cop turned bad blames her mother’s hospital bills for her moral failings. Where was HillaryCare when Gotham needed it?)

Then there’s the film’s most unsettling line – “You either die the hero or live to see yourself become the villain.” I’m not sure Ledger died a hero exactly (the iconic generation-defining role that would have assured his immortality never quite happened), but the recognition he deserved in life will almost certainly now be headed his way. A posthumous Oscar nomination for Ledger’s last picture show would be a good start.