(No spoilers, promise.)

Which makes him his character in The Prestige, doesn’t it? That means he was, for a time, always in the character of a character always in character. (No wonder he verbally abuses people from time to time. I would too were I so confused.)

Not in the movie.

Which is why I specified I was speaking (1) geekily, as a reader of comics, and (2) obviously, in an everyone-has-a-backstory fashion. If you assume (2), you can at least look at what he does and doesn’t say as indications of interest, perverted though it might be.

He did this for interviews when Batman Begins came out, too. IIRC his explanation was that he thought the contrast between clips from the film and his normal accent would be jarring.

Christian Bale conducts nearly every interview with an American accent partly for that reason; he doesn’t like to break character. I’ve also read speculation that Bale never truly stops acting; his entire public persona is another character for him.

Not in the movie.

He did this for interviews when Batman Begins came out, too. IIRC his explanation was that he thought the contrast between clips from the film and his normal accent would be jarring.

And, eventually, President. Maybe there’s something to these presidential parallels after all?

We needn’t. I’m a good modernist. The difference is one of scale and scope, though: we recreate ourselves privately, for the betterment of, well, our self-images. We don’t normally share it with the rest of the world via tabloids.

If Batman suffers from anything regarding his past, it’s the sort of bad faith that perceives the past as immutable and impossible to transcend, and sticks a never to be revised narrative thereon.

Self-fashioning and immutable pasts aren’t mutually exclusive: he can continually reinvent himself with regard to a single moment, altering as required by the present condition, i.e. when he’s too old to jump off buildings, he’ll still do something to continue to avenge his parents.

And I really don’t know what you mean by the Oceania/Eurasia point

Just that the reinventions are back-dated, such that we’ve always been who we currently are, we’ve just expressed ourselves differently. So, old Batman is just like young Batman, despite the delegation, because he still orbits the same primal tragedy, &c.

Yeah, right, we aren’t told what’s there, but it would remove a lot of interest from the Joker if he even had a backstory of which we aren’t aware of that sort.

He does have a backstory — a few of them, actually, each considered by its writer definitive, which says more about comics as a medium and staple characters than the Joker — and we know that, no matter how much misdirection he engages in. The question isn’t whether he has a backstory, but how he deflects attention from whatever it is. In short, he tries a little too hard to be a cipher, and when people point vigorously in the other direction, it doesn’t hurt to see what they’re pointing away from. (More in fiction than in life, esp. with regards to post-Freud works.)

The Joker seems like just the sort who’d take some fortuitous facial feature into account in his act, especially if he finds out it plays well.

Can’t argue with that.

And, for that matter, what is meant by this claim about the Joker’s being more or less called into existence by Batman?

Ra’s al Ghul tells Batman he “took his advice about theatricality a bit literally,” an act which compels others to do likewise. “I’m a sadistic sad clown, so I’m the Joker.” “My name is Edward Nigma, so I’m the Riddler.” If Wayne takes the advice about theatrically literally, he’s turned the world into a stage and crime into a performance.

Anyway, I don’t see where you’re getting this.

The transference of faith from his father to Dent? Well, 1) he tells Dawes as much, saying he can retire with Dent as DA, 2) he starts to behave like his father, throwing balls on instead of thugs off roofs, and 3) his willingness to retire, to stop avenging his parents’ deaths, isn’t just a pragmatic decision based on the fact that he can’t take this sort of beating forever. It’s an indication that, somehow, he’s come to peace with their death; now, it may be a coincidence that this coincides with Dent’s rise and Wayne’s decision to support him, but I don’t think so.

This is explained (for some value of explained) at the end of Batman Begins, when Gordon ponders what the next step will be for crime in Gotham. It’s an arms race: cops get armor, thugs get armor-piercing bullets. Cops get a bat-masked vigiliante, and Gordon is finding murder scenes decorated with a Joker card.

I’d have to see The Dark Knight again to be certain, but aside from the arms-race paradigm, the Joker’s slipping into the major crime syndicate so easily seems to depend on the fact that Batman & Gordon have arrested so many.

Batman flipped the truck.

now he wants to destroy not Wayne, not Batman

One too many “not”s there, I think, otherwise the emphasis doesn’t make sense. Anyway, you don’t need to assume that the Joker wants to get Wayne out of the way to keep Batman going because Wayne’ support of Dent &c, and that he comes to this conclusion when he learns that “Wayne” and “Hesperus” corefer, if all you want is to conclude that there’s a there there from the fact that he wants to keep Batman going. The Joker says that as much outright, more than once.

he is as much a creation of extraordinary circumstance as the Joker. Had he not been a billionaire scion; had he not fallen into a well as a child; had the well not been full of bats; had the feature not had bats; had his parents not been killed; had he shot Chill; had he not run away; &c. He incorporates the circumstances responsible for his transformation into Batman into his self-fashioned self, but in the same way Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. He is his own perpetually revised narrative of self.

We don’t really know what created the Joker, though. Saying the Joker was created by the situation prevailing in Gotham is a lot different from saying that Batman was created by the conditions you identify in the excerpt supra. And I really don’t know what you mean by the Oceania/Eurasia point (many might say that the claim about perpetually revised narratives goes for the majority of normal people, and I don’t see why the Batman impersonators aren’t self-fashioners, but we’ll let that slide). If Batman suffers from anything regarding his past, it’s the sort of bad faith that perceives the past as immutable and impossible to transcend, and sticks a never to be revised narrative thereon.

I don’t see why we should think that anything like what happened with Wayne (ie, some more or less understandable events in his past combine in such and such a more or less understandable way to give him his present psychological shape) happened with the Joker, and thus I don’t see why we should think it’s just the focus of the series that makes the Joker inscrutable and Batman not, with the thing potentially being reversible. Yeah, right, we aren’t told what’s there, but it would remove a lot of interest from the Joker if he even had a backstory of which we aren’t aware of that sort. (And you moved awful fast from “just because we don’t know that it’s there, we can’t conclude it’s not there” to “therefore it’s there”, and to assuming that whatever is there is related to his scars. The Joker seems like just the sort who’d take some fortuitous facial feature into account in his act, especially if he finds out it plays well.)

His rage may be inscrutable, but it’s not baseless: he can tailor his formative myth to fit the fears of his victim because, it seems, he’s not invested in it.

Say more about how the scar-story fits the fears of his victim (aside from the fear that, holy shit, this freak is about to cut my mouth open). What does Dawes fear, that makes the story he tells her so apt? Would a different nubile woman have gotten a different story? And how does his lack of investment in “his formative myth” (the two versions we get are, aside from their domesticity, pretty different) keep his rage from being baseless? Wouldn’t giving it a base make it easier to scrute, anyway?

The Joker, however, is the unique product of a society whose stability is guaranteed by a man in a giant bat-suit. He is not, as Nezua would have it, a stand-in for terrorism writ large so much as a figure for the Malkin-esque fear that the bell that calls for prayer tolls for her: irate mullahs, public fatwas, endless caliphate, &c.

The second sentence (and the claim that the Joker is a stand-in for conservative fantasies of terrorists) seems to have nothing to do with the first, but I would like to know why the unique product of a society whose stability &c also happens to be what conservatives imagine terrorists to be like. And, for that matter, what is meant by this claim about the Joker’s being more or less called into existence by Batman? You see it a lot, and it’s attractive from afar and all, but I’ve never seen it brought into closer view.

This post became unwieldy nine graphs back, so let me cut to the chase: Dent’s mental collapse shocks Wayne because he borrowed the faith he invested in Dent from his father’s stock, such that he sees what might have become had his mother died alone that night. In short, in Dent he sees the potential for rot everywhere, in everything, even his father’s cartoonishly unambiguous good

Of course, he had already seen Dent (for all he knew) prepared to kill a prisoner at the flip of a coin, and that’s when Dent was still the golden boy of Gotham. Anyway, I don’t see where you’re getting this.