Who really is the Joker and why we don’t need his origin movie

The most recent depiction of this supervillain by Jared Leto in Suicide Squad did not find much traction with critics and audiences and now it seems Warner Bros and DC want to eventually dump Leto and get a better actor to play the role. A while ago, Leonardo DiCaprio’s name popped up, but now it is Joaquin Phoenix who is rumoured to play the character in an origin movie. However, this Joker will not be in DC Extended Universe.

Phoenix is a great actor, and I think he would do justice to the role, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why Joker’s origin movie is even being considered. Let me explain why I think so. As I already said, the Joker has seen numerous iterations in different media, but it is Heath Ledger’s interpretation that is the gold standard now. So I will consider his version only for my argument.

The Joker in the video-game Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Usually, audiences like villains to be complex with solid, poignant backstories to explain their current motivations properly. It needs to be told in a satisfactory manner the reason why the bad guy is doing bad things. Being bad just for the sake of it makes for boring, generic villains. Take Justice League’s Steppenwolf, for instance, who I consider the masterclass in how to write bad villains. That CGI behemoth was being destructive because that is what alien warlords supposedly do. His personality was like dozens of other superhero villains with no unique trait to speak of.

But Heath Ledger’s Joker was, as he said it himself, an agent of chaos. Explaining his backstory and things like how his face was disfigured and how he went mad, and so on, would have been counter-productive. For the most part, in The Dark Knight, Batman, that world’s greatest detective, struggles to understand the enigma that is the Joker. He desperately seeks for a rationale, and is horrified to discover that there is none. The Joker was an unstoppable force (as he says at one point), and not simply a man. Can something as primal as a force have an origin?

Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

“Do you wanna know how I get these scars?” the Joker asks thrice in the film. And save for one instance when Batman prevents him from answering the question, he gives different answers in the other instances. Once, he says he gave them to himself to please his scarred wife, and the second time, he says it was his father who blemished his face. This was dashed smart writing. Christopher Nolan and David S Goyer, who together wrote the story, realised that Joker’s charm lay in the mystery itself. When it comes to this singular character, over-explaining leaches away his frightening charisma. It makes him less scary, less interesting, and less evil. So, no soppy, tragic backstory, please. I, for one, do not give a flying fig about how he got his scars.