Framing Monsters: The Joker
A prophet in greasepaint
The Clown Prince of Crime has always been a fan favorite.
For many of us, it started with the voice,
Mark Hamill, laughing through the static of Batman: The Animated Series.
He was charming. Abusive. Toxic.
And we welcomed him into our homes.
We laughed.
We cheered.
We gave him room.
I’ve always loved a good villain.
Not just the costumes or the chaos, but the moment they say something true.
The kind of line that sticks in your spine longer than any monologue from the hero.
Because villains get to ask the questions no one else will.
They don’t have to protect the frame. They get to shatter it.
So I wrote this.
Four jokes. No punchlines.
Just the long silence after the laugh fades,
when you realize the mask didn’t come off.
It just changed hands.
Welcome to Framing Monsters.
If you’ve ever paused the movie right before the villain speaks,
just to really hear it.
This one’s for you.
I. THE JOKE WAS BATMAN
They thought the boats were the punchline.
Two detonators. Two floating cages.
Push to live. Wait and die.
But the Joker wasn’t waiting.
He already knew.
The wires didn’t matter.
The passengers didn’t matter.
The boats weren’t bombs.
They were mirrors.
This wasn’t about Gotham.
It never was.
“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy.”
— The Killing Joke (1988), Alan Moore & Brian Bolland
But this wasn’t about sanity.
It was about ethics.
Elastic ones.
He didn’t want Batman to snap.
He wanted him to bend.
To become reasonable.
To make the worst choice sound righteous.
And he did.
Batman turned the city’s phones into a weapon.
Not a gun. Not a trap. Something worse.
A system.
A surveillance web tight enough to strangle truth itself.
He told himself it was temporary.
Lucius didn’t believe him.
Batman created Brother Eye to monitor metahumans. It was hijacked. Turned on him.
— The OMAC Project #1–6 (2005), Rucka, Saiz & Lapham
It happens again and again.
Every timeline. Every myth.
Even in Kingdom Come:
“The humans are more than capable of policing themselves.”
— Superman to Batman, Kingdom Come (1996), Mark Waid & Alex Ross
But Bruce never listens.
Not when fear calls him useful.
The Joker didn’t need to destroy Gotham.
He just needed Batman to protect it poorly enough.
Lucius recoiled.
He saw what it meant.
Batman flipped the switch anyway.
He found the Joker.
He saved the boats.
And then?
He buried Dent.
He rewrote the truth.
He called it peace.
The city cheered a lie.
Because it was easier than mourning the truth.
Joker didn’t win because someone pushed the button.
He won because someone almost did.
Because they thought about it.
Because they looked around and wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was better to strike first.
That was the point.
When the Joker said “one bad day,” he wasn’t offering madness.
He was offering permission.
The fact that the debate happened at all, that we heard it, watched it, weighed it, proved him right.
Morality, it turns out, isn’t a code.
It’s a negotiation.
Joker poisons Gotham. Not with gas. With choices you can’t walk back.
— Batman: Endgame (2014–2015), Snyder & Capullo
The boats didn’t need to explode.
The crack had already formed.
Batman called it a win.
Joker didn’t need to argue.
He already knew what fear sounds like in a crowd.
II. THE GOD IN THE CAMERA
He said he had rules.
By the end, he had a grid.
A lattice of blue light, thin lines across a city that never asked to be seen like this.
Every phone. Every room. Every breath.
Wired. Measured. Justified.
It’s beautiful, in a way.
And cold.
“You always wanted control. Now you’ve got it.”
— The OMAC Project #5 (2005)
He’d done this before.
In the comics, it was Brother Eye. A satellite.
Built to watch the metahumans.
Built to protect.
It turned.
They always do.
Here in Gotham, he builds something smaller.
Closer.
More personal.
The sonar grid.
A map of trust, rewritten in fear.
Nolan doesn’t whisper this. He shows it:
Blue lines etch themselves across the city like veins under glass.
Batman’s face flickers in and out of shadow, the screens glowing cold against the cowl.
He isn’t triumphant. He’s alone.
“This is too much power for one person.”
— Lucius Fox, The Dark Knight (2008)
That line cuts through the static.
While the soundtrack swells with voices, overlapping, distorted, unmoored, Lucius’s voice is still. Firm. Final.
He won’t stay.
Because even if Gotham survives this, Bruce doesn’t.
The cameras close in. Batman, surrounded by monitors.
Claustrophobic. Trapped by the very system he built.
It’s not a command center anymore.
It’s a confessional.
This isn’t heroism.
It’s ritualized surrender.
And the Joker?
He’s not in a cage.
He’s not in a shadow.
He’s above it.
Framed in open space.
Grinning. Waiting. Knowing.
“You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with.”
— The Dark Knight (2008)
He’s right.
Because Joker’s victory was never about death.
It was about method.
He turned Batman into a man who believed safety was worth silence.
That control was cleaner than compassion.
That watching everyone might hurt less than losing anyone.
It wasn’t a decision.
It was a drift.
Nolan shows it in the edit:
Joker’s chaos.
Lucius’s resignation.
Bruce, frantically switching feeds, dissolving into the grid itself.
Even Alfred knew.
“You crossed the line first, sir. You hammered them. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.”
— Alfred, The Dark Knight (2008)
The grid glows.
Lucius walks away.
Bruce watches the screen, but the city’s already gone dark.
This wasn’t Batman adapting.
This was Batman absorbing.
And that rewriting didn’t arrive like fire.
It arrived like function.
Transformation isn’t some violent shift.
It’s a quiet absorption into a structure that was waiting for you all along.
The Joker didn’t steal Gotham.
He turned Batman into its warden.
III. The Lie That Lived
Before the myth was built,
Joker made sure no one would be watching the truth unfold.
Harvey didn’t fall.
He was pushed.
But not by Joker.
By Bruce.
Not with hands.
With silence.
The Joker didn’t kill Dent.
He cleared the room.
The hospital wasn’t a massacre.
It was a curtain drop.
He walked through it untouched
because he knew how to build panic that moved like fire.
Evacuate the weak.
Confuse the strong.
Leave space for the real work.
He just nudged Dent into contradiction.
It was Batman who finished the burial
by telling Gotham a story it could swallow.
“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
— Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight (2008)
The line was both prophecy and curse.
But it wasn’t meant for Harvey.
It was meant for Bruce.
Dent was Gotham’s white knight.
Hope made flesh.
And when he broke, the people would’ve followed.
Lost faith.
Turned inward.
Let the scars show.
So Batman stopped that.
He didn’t fix the city.
He fixed the narrative.
He made Dent the martyr.
Made himself the monster.
And called that sacrifice.
But it wasn’t sacrifice.
It was containment.
The Joker said he was “an agent of chaos.”
But chaos was never the goal.
Collapse was.
Not of buildings.
Of belief.
The Joker didn’t want Dent dead.
He wanted him remembered wrong,
to prove the system didn’t care about truth,
only performance.
And Bruce gave it to him.
The statue of Harvey rises.
Gordon recites the lie.
Batman runs.
Not toward justice.
But toward the one thing Joker truly created:
A city comforted by myth,
not healed by truth.
We’ve seen it before.
In the comics, Joker leaves corpses.
But what he really poisons is memory.
— Batman: Endgame (2014–2015), Snyder & Capullo
— The Killing Joke (1988), Moore & Bolland
Every time, he asks the same thing:
Who controls the story when the blood’s been washed away?
In this film, the answer is Batman.
But only because the Joker handed him the brush.
The myth of Dent survives.
The man is erased.
The Joker loses the fight.
But wins the authorship.
IV. THE LAUGH THAT OUTLIVED THE BODY
Jack Napier wanted to be remembered. Ledger’s Joker wanted to be irreversible.
Napier loved the spotlight.
He danced in art galleries. Killed to music.
Painted the town with gas and nerve.
Wore purple like royalty and posed like a saint.
Every entrance was a curtain call.
Every crime, a performance.
“Have you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?”
— Batman (1989)
Burton framed him like an oil painting.
Centered. Dressed. Lit for eternity.
His cathedral death wasn’t an ending. It was a finale,
Wide-angle, operatic, shadow-drenched.
Arms outstretched like a gothic crucifix, laughing for the ages.
Even his music, Prince’s brass-laced, pop-art groove, refused to let you look away.
Jack Napier didn’t just kill.
He curated.
He left calling cards.
He defaced paintings not to destroy beauty, but to replace it with himself.
He wanted the city’s gaze.
He wanted credit.
Napier shoots the Waynes.
He gives Batman pain, and then names it.
“I have given a name to my pain. And it is Batman.”
Legacy was the joke he told himself.
And the audience clapped.
Ledger’s Joker never gives a name.
He’s filmed like a virus: unstable, handheld, off-center.
His makeup is cracked. His stories contradict.
He doesn’t want to be known.
He wants to be unreliable.
Burton gave his Joker symmetry.
Nolan gave his Joker distortion.
There are no grand entrances.
No climactic score.
Just drones.
Strings drawn tight until you can’t breathe.
“You didn’t think I’d risk the battle for Gotham’s soul in a fistfight with you, did you?”
— The Dark Knight (2008)
He doesn’t want to win.
He wants to be irreversible.
The Joker in 2008 doesn’t kill the Waynes.
He kills the meaning behind them.
Visually, it’s everywhere:
Napier is bathed in neon and spotlight. Ledger lives in fluorescent rot.
Napier falls from a cathedral, arms wide. Ledger hangs upside down, calmly laughing.
Napier wears the Joker like a crown. Ledger wears it like a wound.
Even their soundtracks speak:
Napier’s crimes dance to Prince.
Ledger’s collapse hums with Zimmer’s low, quivering dread- “Why So Serious?” is not a theme, it’s a tone shift.
Napier builds spectacle.
Ledger builds instability.
One wants applause.
The other wants no encore.
And Batman?
He survives both.
But only one makes him a storyteller.
In Burton’s world, Bruce broods.
In Nolan’s, Bruce narrates.
He becomes the one who shapes the lie.
Crafts the myth.
Preserves the image Gotham needs, Dent as saint, Joker as glitch, himself as ghost.
Napier dies as art.
Ledger lives as disruption.
Napier asks, “Remember me.”
Ledger asks, “What were you before I showed up?”
Only one Joker wants to be seen.
The other wants to make sure you never trust your eyes again.
THE MONSTER WAS THE FRAME
He was supposed to die.
April 25, 1940. Batman #1.
A man with a grin. A knife. A line about retirement.
He kills two men. Almost dies. Escapes.
He was meant to be forgotten.
But something happened.
Not on the page, behind it.
Editorial instinct. A hesitation. A rewrite.
They saw something in him.
Not just violence.
Utility.
A villain who could come back.
From the beginning, Joker wasn't just a threat, he was a test.
A character written to expose what the story could not yet admit:
That Batman’s order would always need a counterweight.
That the hero would eventually betray his own code to preserve his own myth.
That chaos doesn’t kill the story, it finishes its sentence.
“He’s shrewd, subtle and above all ruthless. Mark my words, the Joker will return with a vengeance!”
— Bruce wayne Batman #1
And so Joker stayed.
He grew.
Twisted.
Changed shapes.
A prankster in the Silver Age. A sadist in the ’80s. A nihilist in the 2000s.
A virus in Ledger’s hands. A ghost in Phoenix’s. A myth in Moore’s. A wound in Snyder’s.
Each one different.
Each one still him.
In time, he became the archenemy, not just of Batman’s body, but of his narrative.
He stopped being a criminal.
He became the question at the heart of every arc:
What does it cost to preserve order?
And who’s willing to lie loudest to keep the city quiet?
A Yahoo piece I found while researching this puts it clearly:
The Joker's survival marked the beginning of a symbolic antagonism, chaos to Batman's order, laughter to Batman’s grief.
But it’s more than symbolism.
The Joker is what stories invent when they run out of safe answers.
When the hero isn’t enough.
When the myth starts to crack.
He enters.
Smiling.
Uninvited.
Necessary.
Jack Napier was spectacle. Ledger’s Joker was ideology.
The first one was a knife that smiled.
Now he’s the pen that rewrites the myth mid-sentence.
Batman’s greatest villain never needed a plan.
He needed a story desperate enough to keep him around.
And once the Joker survives the page,
the story never fully recovers.
This wasn’t a story about madness.
It was a story about memory.
Not about burning the city.
About deciding which parts to rebuild.
And who gets to write the plaque.
This wasn’t about chaos. It was about authorship.
If the Joker won anything, it wasn’t Gotham’s soul. It was the last word.
If this breakdown hit something true, or made you look twice.
Subscribe to stay in it.
More monsters are coming.
In Memoriam
Rest in peace, Heath Ledger (1979–2008).
You didn’t just play the Joker.
You gave him edges the myth never recovered from.
Thank you for the silence behind the laugh.
Rest in peace, Kevin Conroy (1955–2022).
For a generation, you were the voice of Batman.
Steady. Haunted. Human.
Thank you for showing us that strength could sound like grief held together.
If Joker was the disruptor they couldn’t absorb, Killmonger was the heir they refused to acknowledge.
FRAMING MONSTERS: KILLMONGER
I’ve always been drawn to villains who don’t just oppose the hero, but unravel the story’s comfort zone. The ones who refuse their role. Who make the camera flinch. Who force the narrative to earn every silence.
If this lens on Joker struck something deeper, I broke down the entire system that builds men like Bruce, and needs men like him to break just enough.
Caped Crusader, Captive System: How Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy Exposes the Myth of Heroic Reform
The Dark Knight Trilogy isn’t Batman’s hero’s journey, it’s his death march into the machine. By the end, the cowl doesn’t conceal a vigilante; it disguises another enforcer for a system that eats idealists alive.
Work Cited / Acknowledgments
Comics Referenced
Batman #1 (April 25, 1940) – Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson
The Killing Joke (1988) – Alan Moore & Brian Bolland
Batman: Endgame (2014–2015) – Scott Snyder & Greg Capullo
The OMAC Project (2005) – Greg Rucka et al.
Kingdom Come (1996) – Mark Waid & Alex Ross
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (2005) – Ed Brubaker & Doug Mahnke
Films Referenced
The Dark Knight (2008) – Directed by Christopher Nolan
Batman (1989) – Directed by Tim Burton
Visual Source
Still of Batman's sonar grid (used under fair use for critique) from:
The Dark Knight – VFX Breakdown of Batman’s Sonar
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the ongoing archival efforts of comic scholars, VFX professionals, and fan historians who preserve the subtext often lost in IP repetition.
Special thanks to readers who engage not with allegiance, but with curiosity. Gotham’s myth survives only because we keep asking the hard questions.
Disclaimer
This essay is a work of critical commentary and educational analysis.
All referenced images and media fall under fair use for the purpose of cultural critique.
Batman, The Joker, and associated characters are copyright DC Comics and Warner Bros.
No ownership of source material is claimed.
If you are the copyright holder of any referenced image and would like it credited differently or removed, please contact the author.
Brilliant as always. You've inspired me to rewatch Batman. This led me on a journey indeed. I think a big part of me would side with the joker. I'm always sounding a little crazy reminding people that we don't actually ever know what's going on and the systems we think we know are built with ulterior motives. Bringing chaos to order feels so right.