First thing first, I apologize for what I imagine is a late response. We all know this site is coded by two stoners on their lunch break and I only saw this because I was clicking around looking for something else.
Now to your question, which I argue about on a semi-regular basis… Neither. I have a problem when it comes to Batman movies (they cast him too old for any story they want to tell, mischaracterization of both Bruce and Batman and his relationships with others, oversimplification of the rogues gallery etc) but my issue with Ledger!Joker and Leto!Joker is that they don’t fit their movies.
I don’t like the Dark Knight trilogy because they aren’t actually Batman movies. They’re action movies with an off-brand masked guy. It’s like they were trying not to get sued. The premise of “Batman in the real world; deconstruction of typical Batman moves” doesn’t work. You can’t have a deconstruction of something that hasn’t been fully constructed yet, or not properly at least. Instead of breaking the rules, like it wanted to, all TDK did was write them, and very badly as far as I’m concerned and now, for a lot of people, future Batman movies will be compared to it and judged unfairly.
If you don’t have the right characterization for Batman, you lose key parts of what makes his villains interesting and lasting foes.
But they’ve seem to forgotten that Batman is a DETECTIVE with COMPASSION. He’s not some genius twat who needs long-suffering friends to be his bridge to relate to other people. He is smart and clever and disciplined and traumatized. How he interacts with his villains has to work in tandem to the characterization of the villain to inform the audience of what kind of world Gotham is.
That includes Joker. Joker is also smart and clever and disciplined and adaptive. That’s what makes him scary. But TDK and Squad didn’t want him silly like Romaro but they don’t want him too creepy and disturbing like Nicolas. So they made Ledger!Joker a anarchist who inhaled too much turpentine and Leto!Joker an unhinged mob boss. Where’s the brains to manipulate people who otherwise know better? Where’s the dark showmanship to make even the most voracious attention hogs want to hide? Where is the thorn in Batman’s side, forever poking at his pain and the pain of every single person in Gotham City who has the misfortune to run into him? They don’t have it. But the wannabe edge-lords of the world adore them so I’m stuck seeing them.
When you understand that kids and teenagers being salty about literary symbolic analysis comes from a very real place of annoyance and frustration at some teachers for being over-bearing and pretentious in their projecting of symbolism onto every facet of a story but you also understand that literary analysis and critical thinking in regards to symbolism is extremely important and deserves to be not only taught in schools, but actively used by writers when examining their own work to see if they might have used symbolism unintentionally and to make sure that they are using symbolism effectively:
