I’ll come back to this subject in a week or so, because all the things I really want to talk about in Nolan’s The Dark Knight are going to require a decent number of spoilers, and trust me – this is not a movie you want spoiled. It has nothing (well, almost nothing) to do with the ending, but all the little things Heath Ledger’s Joker does throughout the course of the film.
That said, I can sum up the basics of my thoughts like so: Batman Begins was an amazing film because it showed how a superhero might plausibly be created in real life. The Dark Knight, however, shows us what a real-life supervillain might be like. We hold up Seven and Silence of the Lambs as deeply disturbing, but they have nothing on this. I’m honestly having a difficult time thinking about the Joker’s character in comics or cartoons now, because Ledger’s Joker is that damned unsettling.
Go. Hie thee to a theater. Now. Hie, dammit, hie. We’ll come back and talk this over later.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
