In fact, Nolan and the actor dole out the character with impressive restraint: first as a masked Mephistopheles who is primarily a sing-song-y voice until he unmasks at the end of a bravura bank robbery. This is of course just a fleeting moment in The Dark Knight a brisk tease before Ledger’s shown his makeup-encrusted face or uttered even a word. He’s come to claim Gotham’s collective soul, but he’ll settle for any individual with delusions of virtue who crosses his path-including you.
Within our first breath next to Ledger’s clown, one senses a malevolent spirit has been summoned, and he’s chosen to manifest out of thin air at this exact moment, on this exact street corner. Even its greatest villains were slaves to the need of rationalizing everything in cold, utilitarian logic. Before this moment in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the director’s Gotham City functioned with clocklike precision. He seduces the IMAX camera, which is still capturing vast amounts of Chicago’s cityscape around him, and draws it closer to his sphere of influence, and by extension us. Standing with a slight hunch at the center of a massive 70mm image, Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker not so much dominates the frame as he commandeers it. It’s one of the great villain introductions in cinema history.
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