Here are some brief insights into certain psychological elements of two
Dark Knight characters:
Harvey Dent
Love; intellect; financial stability - for most, these are compound sums that cooperate to form the composite entity know as "happiness". Happiness seems best described to me as freedom - freedom from want. Freedom as balance.
Want as an extension of insecurity - I have no food. I need food. I must earn money/steal/etc to get food. Yet, even as we work to satisfy our desire for a lifestyle absent from want ("happiness", if you agree) many become so incensed with the ideology of acquisition, we lose sight of our original goal to achieve balance.
Rewards - an expression of success - often evolve into an element of greater value than our fundamental goal. Happiness as not only an abundance of food, but a wealth of materials. A storehouse of personal knowledge. A piggybank of distractions.
Harvey Dent is a brilliant representation of our (human) insatiable desire to fill our lives with things we believe will make us happy.
Dent's food is justice. His decorum is the penal system. When a disconnect appears between what he expects (to achieve happiness/balance), he becomes desperate. He makes decisions that betray his need for good. He chooses the path of quickest resolution - he drops his principles and becomes an agent of insatiable desire - after Rachel's death, revenge consumes him. Makes him forget who he is.
What was once aligned to inspire justice and community now functions to service his desire to reintroduce balance (happiness - Rachel) into his life.
Distractions can destroy.
So can the pursuit of happiness.
Jack A. Napier
Meaning is an iceberg. What motivates us to find purpose is always built on layers of emotion and/or instinctual obligation (towards upholding community and ourselves).
The Joker is similar to Johnny Ringo. A blackhole in place of a heart. Hopelessness is sometimes the result of genetic chance; other times it is inspired.
Like the Joker, we seek balance. We work to establish identity within this balance inside our immediate environment (where we work; who we talk to; how we behave...).
The Joker represents Void - darkness without meaning or form. Chaos as a way to sensibly live - a world "without rules", as he states.
Yet, his rules remain firm. A world without rules is a world
governed by rules.
When we lose sight of ourselves, we find but chaos and uncertainty. Light leaves us and darkness infiltrates. What we once loved can become poisonous to us.
The Joker is unchecked desire. Imbalance. Chaos. He is less a villain than a horrifying
demiurge. His desires are absolutely uncompromising.
An analogue to The Joker is Judge Holden. A (real) serial killer, popularly chronicled in Cormac McCarthy's
Blood Meridian.
Intelligence is not enough to survive.
No man is an island.
No angel/demon an orphan.
We must choose. Choice is our only hope. It is choice that destroys.