2008 seems more than a decade ago. And in superhero terms, that’s an eternity. Though it wouldn’t take some timey-wimey comic book plot to argue that our current era of superhero movies both began and peaked at the same time.
The summer of 2008 began with Iron Man, and with that came the launch of the current Marvel madness we are still all living through. A few months later came the sequel to a movie which predated all of this caped hero dominance by three whole years. If 2005’s Batman Begins was an artistic and financial success, then 2008’s The Dark Knight was a nothing less than a cultural moment.
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Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was one of America’s first huge, albeit unintentional, cultural reactions to the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Bringing a ground swell of positivity as the public embraced the arrival of an All-American hero, just when they needed him the most. But simmering beneath that surface was an All-American bubble of chaos. Because, ironically, what they really needed was a villain. This villian began to rear his head with the aforementioned Batman Begins, a well done, albeit schizophrenic movie, one which was at its most interesting before Bruce Wayne finally puts on his mask.
But the bubbling chaos finally and tragically burst months before The Dark Knight’s release with the tragic death of twenty-nine year old Heath Ledger, cast as the most famous comic book villain ever. The boots he had to fill were nothing short of huge: they belonged to The Joker, or as far as anybody was concerned, to Jack Nicholson. But Tim Burton’s take on Batman seemed nothing short of a million years ago when the public finally set their eyes on what director Christopher Nolan had in mind.
Christian Bale was the first Batman who would not be defined by his villains. No mean task. The man has too great an on-screen presence to allow that to happen. And it’s a testament to his presence that imagining Michael Keaton or Ben Affleck going up against THIS joker would be, well, simply laughable. The same goes for a very grizzly Two-Face, AKA Harvey Dent, as played by Aaron Ackhart, a tragic character who served as the very antithesis to the last screen version of the character, played by Tommy Lee Jones on seemingly another Bat-planet in 1995’s Batman Forever.
Nolan’s Dark Knight wasn't even the flip side of the same superhero coin his own Batman Begins was minted from. It turned out to be a whole new currency. Ledger’s performance was unforgettable, transcending the genre, His Joker was everything we feared. His psyche impenetrable, his motives unknowable. And so it was to forever remain, as with the actor’s death the joke was on us - we would literally never see his likes again. A posthumous win for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards the following year seemed paltry compensation for all the films we would now never experience from his loss.
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Heath Ledger’s legacy? That it’s so difficult to follow him, we’ll need more than one actor. Jared Leto’s recent turn as the Joker in the otherwise disappointing Suicide Squad was one of that movies few highlights, where he actually managed to distinguish himself and briefly make the character his own.
Next up is Joaquin Phoenix, who will apparently play The Joker as a failed stand-up comic in a 'minimalist' origin movie from Hangover director Todd Phillips. It could be great, because one thing’s for sure, Phoenix does not joke around.
Still, perhaps each era gets the Joker it deserves. Maybe we already have ours, and nobody realises it. Two years ago he started out funny, but every morning I pick up the paper and I’m laughing less and less.
