So all this talk of Scott Snyder giving Joker a origin has got me thinking about a trend that rankles me: having to give every important character a backstory, particularly villians.
It seems like fans nowadays want to to every faucet of an important character's life. When you really think about it, Darth Vader didn't really need to have his backstory painfully expained to us over three two and a half hour films. Every single thing we needed to know about him was stated by Obi Wan in the original movie: Jedi Knight, good friend, seduced by the dark side. Thats all that we needed because that is what his character was when you boil it down. In fact, many would agree, that knowing so much about the character takes away from their mystique.
Another example is Freddy Kruger. I recently binge watched all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. And everything we needed to know was stated in the first movie. Kruger was a child killer. Thats all we needed. The sequels added useless backstory onto the character. Who really cares that his mother was a nun that was raped by a bunch of lunatics or that he was beaten by his foster dad (Alice Cooper-dad). All of it doesn't really matter.
I'm not against backstories. Yes heroes need backstory because we need to sympathize with them and we need to understand where they come from and what pushes them. But, many villians don't need their life story told to us. And, in fact, some of the time we don't even need to know what their motivations are.
And that brings us back to the Joker. What is the Joker's motivations? To cause choas, to mess sh!t up, to topple the order of things. We don't need to sympathize or understand him because he is so divorced from normal humanity that we wouldn't be able to. Can't we just accept that he is a fundamentally broken person who could have lived any amount of different lives and would still have ended up a villain.
Log in to comment