It’s one of cinema’s greatest mysteries: where do Joker’s scars come from in The Dark Knight?

Is Arnold Schwarzenegger dreaming of the end of Total Recall? Does Dom Cobb’s top stop spinning as soon as the Inception credits roll? What exactly is in the last FedEx package that Tom Hanks has to deliver alone in the world?

Cinema has always been full of mysteries, and many films choose not to offer all the answers to the audience, preferring to leave questions about more or less important details of their plot.

Secrets of Nolan

A big fan of mysteries and mysteries—no wonder his production company’s logo is a maze—Christopher Nolan is one of those filmmakers who regularly relies on the intelligence and imagination of his fans to fill in the gaps. Empty, intentionally. left with the script.

Thus, The Dark Knight, the second part of his legendary trilogy dedicated to the adventures of Batman, the director deliberately chose never to reveal to the public how the Joker got his terrible scars on his face.

The terrifying antagonist of the feature film, memorably played by Heath Ledger, is indeed an extremely mysterious character about whom we know almost everything, including the origin of his hideous scars.

However, twice in the film, he himself explains about the said injuries.

“You want to know where those scars come from?”

“You want to know where those scars come from?”he asks the gangster before he kills him, at the beginning of the film. He then explains that it was his father, a drunk and a sadist, who stabbed him with a kitchen knife.

But a few sequences later, when he invites himself to a fundraiser hosted by Bruce Wayne, he explains to Rachel Dawes that he cut his own face with a razor in solidarity with his wife, who suffered the same fate after incurring a huge gambling debt. .

In short, two completely different testimonies given by the main man himself, which should blur the lines in the viewer’s mind and bring an even more unstable, elusive, chaotic dimension to the character.

“We didn’t want to show his background.”

in 2012, at the microphone of Empire magazineChristopher Nolan accurately explained that this ambiguity was necessary to make the Joker even more terrifying:

“Our Joker (…) It has always represented the highest degree of anarchy and chaos, indeed. He is pure evil through pure anarchy. And what makes it so terrifying is its failure to humanize it in terms of storytelling. Hit Found all kinds of fantastic ways to humanize him to make him real (…)But narratively speaking, we didn’t want to humanize him, we didn’t want to show his background, or show what drove him to do what he does, because that would make him less of a threat. “

Where do you think the Joker’s scars come from? Dark Knight ?

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