Ledger’s Role Reminds Us of Dark Loss

By The Fresno Bee, Calif.

Jul. 20–We filled the seats, that we did, to send Heath Ledger off in style.

By Thursday, a day before “The Dark Knight” opened on a massive 9,200 screens across the country, studio analysts were saying that 90% of the weekend’s available tickets already had been sold. Gone are those days when folks brought camp chairs and ice chests to line up the night before a blockbuster movie. Now the deft among us secure their seats with a click and a credit card.

All that was left was for the masses to turn out in force, like a surge of mourners packing a cathedral, with the overflow spilling out into the narthex and the steps outside.

I’m always fascinated with the phenomenon of movies as a communal experience.

“The Dark Knight” isn’t a funeral, of course, but there’s no denying that Ledger’s untimely death has made it into more than just another summer blockbuster. In an age of viral video and breathless blogging, his performance is already being touted as a sure Oscar winner.

Indeed, when Ledger first reveals himself as The Joker on screen — taking off a rubber clown mask to reveal his eerily painted face beneath — his flesh-and-blood appearance smacks us for an instant. He isn’t here anymore, one part of our brain reminds us. Yet he is here, right in front of us: frightening and psychotic, his character’s reedy voice pitched high with menace, rolling his eyes skyward at every fourth beat and licking his smeared, painted red lips like a boozed-up prostitute.

Is it a powerful performance? Sure, in the showy, mannered, angst-fixated way that marks a good actor carving out a compelling comic-book villain. In “The Dark Knight,” Ledger wrings every psychopathic ounce that he can out of The Joker. He skips along the line between civilization and savagery in a way that mirrors the film’s dark exploration of that theme.

“I’m not a monster,” he says. “I’m just ahead of the curve.”

Now that’s creepy.

But I’d argue that Ledger’s far more introspective turn in “Brokeback Mountain,” say, was a far greater testament to his talent. It’s Ledger’s mortality, and not his technique, that frames his performance in “The Dark Knight” and gives it an added visceral impact.

Film’s power to cling to the past — to give us huge images of people no longer with us, in immense detail before our eyes — always has the potential to move an audience. We look at older movie stars or politicians today, and then see clips of their younger days, and an inevitable wistfulness sets in. Indeed, many aging celebrities shun the camera with a recluse’s passion when they enter the advanced stages of their declining years, not wanting to replace the forever youthful images that the public retains with ones closer to reality.

Think of what a recent development this ability to freeze one’s youth is when considering the arc of human history. Before photography, the deceased were memorialized in portraits, perhaps, or marble busts. Once they were dead, all that was left was a representation of them, with their actual visual memories inevitably fading with time.

But movies freeze a moment. Celluloid “immortality” is a given. We’ve trained our brains, of course, to separate the corporeal, flesh-and-blood person from the image. If the first moviegoers were so overwhelmed by the view of a train chugging toward them that they screamed in the theater, we’ve grown far more jaded over the years. Now we watch computer-generated effects and yawn if they don’t push the envelope.

With Ledger’s untimely death, of course, his very youth adds to the impact. There are no images of him as an old man, and there never will be. Like James Dean, Bruce Lee and Natalie Wood, he’s been frozen in time. And we are drawn, as audiences, to that youth, and we celebrate it. And, yes, we gawk at it a little.

Actually, all the hoopla over Ledger’s posthumous performance is probably premature. When he died, he was in the middle of filming Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,” and there’s little doubt that the producers of that film will capitalize on that fact.

But my guess is that “The Dark Knight” will be the major chance to mourn. And for this weekend, at least, it’ll be a full house for his service.

The columnist can be reached at dmunro@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6373. Read his blog at fresnobeehive.com/donald.

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