A Necessary Evil: The Dark Knight and the Art of the Antagonist

by K.M. Weiland @ Wordplay

I had decided this week to share some thoughts on crafting a compelling bad guy. Not surprisingly, one of the first bad guys to pop to mind was Heath Ledger’s much buzzed portrayal of the Joker in this summer’s blockbuster The Dark Knight. The more I thought about The Dark Knight and its swarming antagonistic forces, the more I realized that this movie has crammed into its own nutshell the strengths and pitfalls that surround the art of the antagonist.

The Dark Knight provided me one of the most moving movie experiences I’ve had in a long time. It inspired me on both moral and intellectual levels. And as was everyone else who viewed it, I was stunned by Ledger’s transformative performance as the heinous Joker. Indeed, he utterly stole the show.

However, I’m about to fly in the face of popular opinion by arguing that he was not as powerful an antagonist as he might have been.

Dark Knight director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan explained that he wanted the Joker to represent “pure anarchy.” The character was without redemptive qualities, without a backstory to help viewers understand his motivations, and without a character arc. The Joker was just plain bad.

Did he hold viewers attention? Inspire their repulsion? Was he scary? Was he occasionally charismatic and even amusing? Absolutely. The Joker accomplished almost everything demanded of a good antagonist:

1. He was a constant and seemingly insurmountable foil for the hero.
2. He was interesting on his own merits.
3. He was ruthless.
4. He was unpredictable.
5. He was intelligent.
6. He was relentless.

As I watched Ledger onscreen, I was captivated by his performance and appropriately horrified by the chaos and violence his character wrought in Gotham City. But something didn’t completely click for me. I didn’t hate him.

And why didn’t I hate him?

I think it boils down to one simple reason: He wasn’t human. He was a force of nature: unstoppable, unconvertible, unemotional. Just as I couldn’t hate a tornado or an earthquake in a natural-disaster story, I couldn’t hate the Joker. And hatred is undoubtedly the single most important attribute of a good villain. Just as love of a protagonist will keep a reader reading, so will hating the guts out of the antagonist. They’ll keep reading just to watch the baddie receive his just retribution.

So how does one go about creating a hatable villain? Personally, I believe it comes down to just one thing in addition to the Joker’s attributes listed above: a human element.

The bad guys I’ve hated most in literature, and in film, are those who have strong reasons for their actions, those who have had the chance for redemption and spurned it, those who somehow make me love them even as I hate them. After all, hatred, as they say, is simply love turned on its head.

Sharing the screen with the Joker was a bad guy who, I believe, might have produced a much more compelling antagonistic force had he been given the opportunity of more screen time.

District Attorney Harvey Dent (portrayed by Aaron Eckhart), alternately referred to as “The White Knight of Gotham” and the portentous “Two-Face,” became an antagonist only in the final quarter of the movie. As a result, his turn to evil and his short-lived reign of panic were unfortunately rushed. Had Dent’s character arc been given more time to develop, he would likely have given us a character worthy of both our compassion and our hatred.

So how come Dent had at least the potential to be a better bad guy than the maniacal Joker?

1. He possessed a backstory. His fall to perdition was foreshadowed throughout the movie with references to his dual nature and illustrations of his violent capabilities.
2. He possessed a character arc. A good bad guy, just like a good good guy, must follow a character arc. He must grow (or perhaps change would be the better word) as a person throughout the story. Unlike the static Joker, Dent was plummeted into his homicidal rage by the tragic death of a loved one. He wasn’t always bad—he turned bad—and he didn’t turn bad for no reason.
3. He possessed at least a spark of the viewer’s commiseration. Even as the viewer watched Dent’s transformation in horror, he also felt compassion for the man. Dent’s transformation to evil (unlike the Joker’s, which is never explained) is one we can all relate to on some level. After having his face mutilated and his fiancée blown to pieces, his rage and drive for revenge is understandable, if not condonable.

So, in another nutshell, I think this is what the art of the antagonist all comes down to: bad guys have to be real people. Psychos like the Joker are frightening and fascinating but ultimately not compelling. For the second week in a row, I’m going to end by quoting William Saroyan:

Remember to be good-humored. Remember to be generous. And remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic, there is always the comic, and in the midst that which is most evil, there is always much good.