an ancient review of "The Dark Knight"

Here's an old 2011 review of "The Dark Knight" by a much younger-looking Jeremy Jahns, who makes the same point I did about why I don't see Christopher Nolan's Joker as a trickster figure: the Joker claims to be an agent of chaos, but he meticulously constructs a series of Rube Goldbergesque schemes designed to cause people to hurt and kill each other. To use the old terminology from Dungeons and Dragons: far from being chaotic evil, the Joker is lawful evil: orderly, precise, almost mechanistic.* He's also thoroughly saturated in bloodlust and an active seeker of carnage and ruin. Lawful evil for sure.

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*Sticking with the D&D perspective for a moment: from my understanding, tricksters are generally chaotic neutral, not actively evil. They have a lot in common with hurricanes, wreaking havoc on the righteous and the wicked alike. In "The Dark Knight," the Joker tells Harvey Dent that the thing about chaos is that it's fair. That may be true of chaos, but it's not true of the Joker himself. The Joker is more of a devil figure than a trickster figure: his fixation on pain, fear, and suffering—plus the way in which he constantly traffics in lies—should set off all sorts of alarm bells in the heads of Christians familiar with their satanic lore.