The actor:	Heath Ledger
The character:	the Joker
The film:	The Dark Knight
The line:	“You wanna know how I got these scars?”

Do you ever sit around and think about how the blockbuster world was so in thrall to the Joker that Skyfall remade The Dark Knight with James Bond playing Batman? Every time a villain gets caught, to this day, I still hear this little voice whispering, “He wanted to get caught!” It’s not just recent movies. It happens with vintage 1940s noirs, too. It’s ludicrous and I want to be free of it. I’m just a guy who hasn’t made a dime off of motion pictures; can you imagine being a producer or executive whose livelihood depends how well you conceal the “He wanted to get caught!” trope?

We’re fifteen years out from The Dark Knight now, or at least we will be in July; if you have a favorite pop culture site, doubtless they’ll have some retrospective coming up. I guess this counts as mine.

Superhero villainy couldn’t stay with the Joker forever, though even the MCU found itself looking for some kind of Joker-adjacent figure in its early going. Iron Man 2 sets up Malibu Tony Stark against Russian Tony Stark who’s willing to do the stuff that Tony is too Randian to do. (For Pete’s sake there’s even an alternate weapons dealer in Iron Man 2.) Thor sees our hero up against a giant robot, but of course it’s white knight competing against a trickster in Loki that spins things. What stands out in these films, Dark Knight included, is that the villain can only compete against the hero because he’s willing to do things the hero doesn’t really want to do. Who thinks that Thor is weaker than Loki? If you put Bruce Wayne and Jackanapes McTerrorism in the octagon, is there really any question who’d be able to beat up the other? The comic book movies of the early 21st Century didn’t invent the character foil, and neither did Jack Kirby or Stan Lee (or, most effectively, Chris Claremont) when they wrote those specific character foils in the first place. But there’s a massively influential period where the character foil villain is not merely ascendant in blockbuster film, but generally conceived of as the primary signifier of quality in such pictures. Thanos changed things; heck, he broke things so much that comic book movies are still trying to figure out how to recover short of “if he cracks his knuckles, 75% of all living things disappear.”

I’d wager that for most people, it’s what the Joker says in The Dark Knight that sticks out even more than his summer birthday party appearance or his appropriately shifty movements. I’m not quite there. As much as the quips have lingered with me, the image that I always come back to with Ledger’s Joker is that shot where he sticks his head out the window of that cop car, cooling himself down, releasing terminal levels of grease into Gotham’s air supply, being the dog that’s in the car rather than chasing it. The reason why I’ve gone with this line rather than another of the several that I could have picked from the Joker is because this is the most dehumanizing of the bunch. At first, it seems like this will be the most humanizing thing that he does. Here he is, sharing an intimate childhood memory! The stars are just like us! Of course, it’s not that easy. How he got those scars is purposely unknowable, because the Joker is not a human being. He’s transcended Bruce Wayne; he’s transcended all of us except the worst of us.