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Who Killed The Joker?

Now before you people scream ‘spoiler’, it’s not.

That said, after seeing The Dark Knight, all I could think of was how very much I hate Mary Kate Olsen. I’ll be the first to admit - when Heath Ledger was cast as The Joker, I bitched and moaned about the decision. I was wrong.

So beautifully, wonderfully, wrong.

What Ledger did for The Joker was amazing. He gave more to the character that made me a comic book reader than anyone else. His laugh - and I love Mark Hamil’s laugh in Batman: The Animated Series - is incredible. The level of violence and pure insanity is incredible. Ledger has become a gift to Batman fans, a gift that Hollywood culture has taken away.

Hollywood train wrecks have always been a kind of spectator sport for me. I keep the Lindsay Lohan downward spiral watch. I have Amy Winehouse on my death pool. I tivo Dirt like it’s the last show on earth because it feeds my gluttonous need for bad celeb behavior, even if the celebs are only imitations of the real thing. But Hollywood drug culture has gone too far when it messes with my Joker.

For those of us who went to the midnight screening, tonight is a dark night, because we have seen something brilliant and know we will never see it again. And this, indeed, is the only fault I found with The Dark Knight: there will be no more Heath Ledger Joker, and that, truly, is a tragedy.

So who killed the Joker? As the court of pop culture, I, reluctantly, lay the blame at the ever-cliched Hollywood drug culture. So until someone figures out how to use Ra’s al Ghul’s Lazarus pit, I sentence Mary Kate Olsen, for her crimes against the Batman franchise, to star in porn with her twin until her debt to entertainment is paid in full.  If she has any problem with that, I hear cocaine helps.