Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," the acclaimed middle chapter of his Batman trilogy, asked its viewers to consider whether it might sometimes be permissible to promulgate blatant, factual untruth as a means toward achieving a righteous end.
That film sicced Heath Ledger's harrowing Joker on audiences, portraying the perpetually grinning clown-villain not merely as a venal and murderous criminal (a la Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman"), but rather as a kind of festering human plague with no discernible agenda except to foment general chaos and expose the mass of humanity as essentially loathsome, their proclaimed morality and ethics a mere hypocritical veneer beneath which lurks nothing but a repulsively bestial core.
That film sicced Heath Ledger's harrowing Joker on audiences, portraying the perpetually grinning clown-villain not merely as a venal and murderous criminal (a la Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman"), but rather as a kind of festering human plague with no discernible agenda except to foment general chaos and expose the mass of humanity as essentially loathsome, their proclaimed morality and ethics a mere hypocritical veneer beneath which lurks nothing but a repulsively bestial core.
