The Joker was/is right

It’s been almost two months since I initially watched The Dark Knight.  Since then a quote toward the end of the film from has been bouncing around in the back of my mind.

“It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

This comes at a crucial point in the film when Harvey Dent, with the help and prodding of The Joker, begins to assume his alter-ego of Two Face.  But I’m not really interested in that as much as I am the implicit critique of the established Order; not order in a sense of complete lawlessness and immorality, but Order in the sense of coercion and the artificial creation of consent to the violence of power.

This sort of oppression of the plan and colonization of the public mind is interesting.  When I saw the movie the second time I immediately made the connection between the blind submission to the established plan and the events that transpired immediately following 9/11.  A plan was made and set into motion.  And nobody questioned it.  Partly because everyone was in shock that such an act could happen inside the empire instead of on behalf of the empire elsewhere.  But an even larger — and much more destructive — reason is because we had all been conditioned to go along with “the plan,” even if, as The Joker notes, the plan is horrifying.  The plan was indeed horrifying, but most everyone went right along with it because the establishment said so and  had, in effect, manufactured the consent of the masses beforehand.

It seems to me that unless this hegemony of thought is somehow subverted, not necessarily by complete chaos, but by intentional anarchic acts of liberative resistance and inquiry, the established Order will continue to see that everything goes according to plan.

Now that I think about it, maybe Jesus has more in common with the Joker than we are willing to admit.  Indeed, perhaps Jesus goes even further than the Joker by actually taking on the violence of the established Order and unmasking it for what it is — and the best part is that he, unlike the Joker, refuses to play by the rules of the Order, that is, by participating in violence.  Thus, Jesus is the ultimate villian of the established Order.