Essay: "That One May Smile and Smile"

When Christopher Waltz won the Oscar for best supporting actor, it marked the second year in a row the award went to a "smiling villain" (after Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight).



The relationship between Batman and the Joker has always been interesting; Batman, dark and associated with a frightening animal, is the hero, while the Joker, although a murderous villain, is a permanently-smiling clown.

In the Joker's first appearances, he is a calculating villain who holds Gotham City hostage by killing prominent citizens. In the 50s and 60s, the character grew more light-hearted, like Cesar Romero's performance on the campy television show, a novelty villain who drove a clown car and committed themed crimes, colourful and essentially harmless.

But the darker side of the character re-emerged in later interpretations. In Steve Englehart's memorable tale "The Laughing Fish", the Joker uses a chemical to imprint his face on the fish in Gotham City's waters, and then begins to butcher the bureaucrats who refuse to allow him to "trademark" them. This "plan" makes no sense; the Joker is a murderous lunatic whose actions follow no discernable pattern. He is someone who might at any moment act against his own interests; he is as likely to kill one of his own men or a patent clerk as the Mayor or the Police Commissioner. He is uncontrollable and unpredictable, like a force of nature.

This gradual darkening continued as the Joker shot Barbara Gordon (Commissioner Gordon's daughter and Batgirl) through the spine and beat Jason Todd (the second Robin) to death with a crowbar. In the 1989 film Batman, Jack Nicholson and Tim Burton interpreted the character as irrational and dangerous, with a mission to "make art until someone dies."

The Joker's darkness (seemingly) reached its nadir with Ledger's performance last year. Ledger's Joker shucked off the character's traditional origin story (a petty thief who fell into a vat of chemicals) without inventing a new one. The Dark Knight's Joker only wears makeup as "war paint" and he tells conflicting stories about how the smile got carved into his face. He is an agent of chaos, but an oddly rational one, with well-thought-out plans and a well-thought-out agenda, as far removed from the maniac who wanted to trademark "Jokerfish" as the light-hearted Romero portrayal.

Interestingly, for a smiling villain, Ledger's Joker doesn't seem to smile very much. In fact, despite (or perhaps because of) the grin carved in his face, he rarely smiles at all. When he does smile, or when he laughs, he looks and sounds less happy than enraged. This is all very terrifying, of course, and it makes for a compelling character. But, personally, I can't help but think that the incongruity that the character is founded on, the jarring contrast between a happy clown and a murderous criminal, has been lost by turning the Joker into such a menacing freak.

Quite the reverse is true with Colonel Hans Landa, the smiling villain from this year's Inglorious Basterds. Viewers and reviewers alike have struggled to define exactly what it is that makes Landa such an unusual villain; to me, the answer is simple. Landa spends the entire movie doing horrible things and smiling; however, unlike Ledger's Joker, he is smiling quite pleasantly. Waltz resists the temptation to inject his smiles and laughter with menace, to play up his role, to be the villain. Instead, he is courteous, friendly, worldly, civil. He smiles and smiles, when he confronts a farmer sheltering a Jewish family, when he interrogates the sole survivor of that family over dessert, when he cordially negotiates the terms of his defection with the psychopathic American Lt. Aldo Raine. His character does evil things, but he always acts as pleasantly as possible. This incongruity, I think, is the quality that makes the performance so memorable.

It was Hamlet that was astonished that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. I think that's the true horror of a smiling villain, and I think that's why Waltz's performance is unsettling, while Ledger's is only frightening. The thought of terrible monsters who explicitly flout all that is good is scary, but the thought of people who, while they may smile pleasantly, are in fact capable of anything, anything at all, is horrifying. And it's why I think, in all the one-upsmanship to see who can be the "darkest", that the character of the Joker has strayed from the tension that makes it so compelling.

What is unnerving about Landa (and what drives Raine's actions in Inglorious Basterds' last moments), and what ought to be unnerving about the Joker, is that villains do not necessarily have their villainy carved into their face.