The Joker's Dichotomy In The Dark Knight

In the film The Dark Knight, many of Friedrich Nietzsche concepts are shown throughout the film. He reconceptualized ethics by questioning the foundations of good and evil dichotomy, which is shown by The Joker and Harvey Dent. Also, Harvey Dent plays the role of having bad conscience. Throughout the film ressentiment plays throughout the film and characters, from the heart of Gotham City, Harvey Dent, and finally Batman. Cruelty is played throughout with the character of The Joker.

In The Dark Knight the Joker describes himself as a man of action: “I do not have a plan…I just do things,” (The Dark Knight, Health Ledger). The things he does include robbing a bank, kidnapping a fake Batman and killing him, attempting to kill the mayor, chasing

Complete. Me.” If there were no Batman there would be no one Joker would fight against since he knows that the police department will not be able to stop him without the help of the Batman. Batman and Joker are two sides of the same coin, the coin that Harvey Dent uses, at first, to “make his own luck,” and then later in his acceptance of chance as destiny. The reason why I say that Batman and Joker are two sides of the same coin is because he becomes, to society, an uncontainable force in very much the same way of Joker was, even though he is doing good. But the fact that he let 5 or so people die because he “did not” want to turn himself in the same level as Joker. The people believed that Batman couldn’t be controlled, that he has lost all respect for societal norms and the rule of law. But Batman never succumbs to his own dark, like Joker did. In the movie, Bruce Wayne says the line, “I’ve seen what I have become to fight men like him,” and he basically rejects the path he has to take to stop Joker, a man who has no rules whatsoever. For example, in the scene where Batman and Joker had a showdown and Batman was going towards Joker in his vehicle, Joker maniacally screams, “Hit me!” but as much as Batman wanted to annihilate the Joker, he knows he cannot violate his own moral code and almost sacrifices himself to prevent this from happening. Batman does not want to kill the evildoers, but to bring

Many things that we see throughout the day can potentially be connected with many of the concepts that political theorist explain in their books. Comparing Nietzsche concepts of the function of the ascetic ideal, ressentiment, bad conscience, the “good” versus “ evil” dichotomy and cruelty can reality to a film that I truly enjoy watching and have watched many times. Knowing that in the film people can be portrayed as good but society will still see them as chaos and seeing that good people can change to bad people because of a traumatic incident is astonishing. Also, seeing that bad conscience is in play in our daily lives and just with a push we can fall into