I recently saw “The Dark Knight” and although I didn’t think it was such a “dark” movie, I did come away with some interesting thoughts about exactly what makes Heath Ledger’s Joker so scary. After all, the bulk of the praise you will hear in regards to this movie is for Heath’s final performance. Heath’s portrayal of The Joker is worth watching the movie for, even if you’ve heard that the movie itself is not that great.

It annoys me intensely when Hollywood movies give back-stories to characters who don’t need them. This is especially true in movies that have come from books or other source material where no back-story previously existed. Case in point: Tim Burton’s hideous and nauseating attempt at “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, which gave Willy Wonka a dentist for a father who wouldn’t let him eat sweets. Why do we need to know this? Can’t someone just be eccentric without us needing to know his childhood woes?

Which brings me to the latest incarnation of The Joker. In “The Dark Knight” we never find out who he is, where he came from or any of his history at all. He even tells two different versions of how he got the scars around his mouth, and we’re left suspecting that neither is likely to be true.

I began to think about what kind of criminal The Joker is; he’s not after money, he wants chaos, disarray and fear. In short, he’s a terrorist. Every criminal act he performs in the film is an act of terrorism; blowing up a hospital, setting explosives on boats filled with civilians… he even manages to terrorise mob bosses. His crimes are motivated by the desire to cause fear and panic.

Some of you will have worked out where I’m going with this by now.

So then I thought, what kind of criminal is most likely to scare western (and particularly American) audiences today? A terrorist. And if we know his background, or what caused him to become a terrorist, we are forced to identify and sympathise with him, if only a little. He makes a much scarier, and therefore effective, villain if we have little to no sympathy for him.

Yet thanks, in part, to a rather wooden performance by Christan Bale, it’s hard not to be drawn to and fascinated by The Joker. That’s not to say I want to know his back story, I just wanted to see what he’d do next.

I don’t know if this was the thinking behind the development of this character. For all we know, there might have been more to reveal in the next instalment. However, now that Heath is gone, I can’t imagine that they’ll try to replace him in any future Batman movies. Replacing the nauseating Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal was a good decision, if only because no one likes the taste of vomit with their popcorn. But replacing Heath would be a disaster. The Joker will just have to disappear somehow.

So how does Heath Ledger’s Joker stand up against Jack Nicholson’s Joker from the (here he is again) Tim Burton invention of the last Batman series? Well, they’re actually a little too different to compare. Jack Nicholson’s Joker was the one that made clowns scary (or scarier, depending on how you already felt about them). He was driven by vengeance, and was something of an artist in his insanity.

Heath’s Joker was harder to fathom. You could write him off as simply being insane and getting his kicks from chaos and destruction, but to my mind there is more to him than that. He wants power and control, but seemingly only so that no one really has it.

The Joker is what makes this film worth watching, and is the one and only aspect I found myself thinking about afterwards. Without him, it would have been just another super hero movie.

If Heath had to go, I’m glad he could go out on top of his game. At least this way he’ll never suck.