Comp Lit, Revisited: A Brief Analysis of ‘Joker’ and ‘The Dark Knight’

I’ve been out of the broader academic realm for over three years (when I graduated from business school) and out of the literary academic realm for over 7 years (when I left college with a degree in comparative literature, which was eminently unemployable out of undergrad but unexpectedly useful in my longer-term career). But I haven’t quite given up being a student of media and storytelling, and I have been hungry to dive into an exploration of different themes, genres, and characters and analyze something more profound and esoteric than e-commerce metrics.

The topic on my mind in the month of October, with everyone dressed in costume for Halloween, is that of heroes and villains. Over the course of the month, I binge-watched ‘The Boys,’ re-watched much of ‘Breaking Bad,’ and thumbed my way through ‘Watchmen’ for the tenth time. But the piece of media that stuck most with me in the month of October was a film I saw at the beginning of the month — and merits every bit of its zeitgeist: ‘Joker.’

Growing up, one of my favorite things to do was read the borderline-literary movie reviews and television show recaps on Entertainment Weekly. Indulging the temporary dream I had of writing those reviews, I wanted to write about ‘Joker’ and all its inevitable comparisons to ‘The Dark Knight.’ While both movies are well-made, entertaining, and do well in distinguishing themselves from the bloated, overwrought, dime-a-dozen comic book movies, I’d argue that ‘Joker’ is scarier…