Played by Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight”, the terrifying Joker sports two abominable scars on each side of his mouth. But what exactly are their origins?
Is Arnold Schwarzenegger dreaming about the end of Total Recall? Does Dom Cobb’s top stop spinning once the credits for Inception start? What exactly does the last FedEx package that Tom Hanks has to deliver in Alone in the World contain?
Cinema has always been full of mysteries, and many films choose not to offer all the answers to their spectators, preferring to leave questions hanging over a more or less important detail of their plot.
Nolan’s mysteries
A great fan of enigmas and mysteries – it is not for nothing that the logo of his production company represents a labyrinth – Christopher Nolan is one of those filmmakers who regularly count on the intelligence and imagination of their fans to fill a gap. empty, deliberately left by the scenario.
Thus, in The Dark Knight, the second part of his legendary trilogy dedicated to the adventures of Batman, the director deliberately chose never to reveal to the public how the Joker got his terrible scars on his face.
Memorably played by Heath Ledger, the terrifying antagonist of the feature film is indeed an extremely mysterious character, about whom we know almost everything, including the origin of his vile scars.
However, twice in the film, he himself provides an explanation concerning said injuries.
Warner Bros.
“You want to know where these scars come from?”
“You want to know where these scars come from?”, he asks a gangster before killing him, at the start of the film. He then explains that it was his father, a drunkard and sadist, who made them to him with a kitchen knife.
But a few sequences later, when he invites himself to the fundraising evening organized by Bruce Wayne, he explains to Rachel Dawes that he himself cut his face with a razor, in solidarity with his woman who suffered the same fate after incurring a huge gambling debt.
In short, two completely different testimonies provided by the main person himself, supposed to blur the lines in the minds of the spectators and bring to the character an even more unstable, elusive, chaotic dimension.
Warner Bros.
“We didn’t want to show his origins.”
In 2012, at the microphone of Empire magazineChristopher Nolan had precisely explained that this uncertainty was necessary to make the Joker even more terrifying:
“Our Joker (…) has always represented the highest degree of anarchy and chaos, indeed. He is pure evil, through pure anarchy. And what makes him so terrifying is the failure to humanize him in terms of storytelling. Heath [Ledger] found all kinds of fantastic ways to humanize him to make him real (…)but narratively speaking, we didn’t want to humanize him, we didn’t want to show his origins, or show what led him to do what he does because that would have made him less threatening.”
Where do you think the Joker’s scars come from in The Dark Knight ?
(Re)discover our video on theories about the character…