SCABS ARE PART OF THE HEALING PROCESS, SOMETIMES THEY'RE BETTER LEFT UNPICKED:

Peering Into the Abyss (Maria Hsia Chang, October 2008, New Oxford Review)

At the time of his death, Ledger had only recently completed his work for The Dark Knight, which was in post-production. Reportedly, the Joker role had taken a decided toll on the actor's health. For weeks, he was unable to sleep, averaging only two hours a night. He told a New York Times reporter in November 2007 that even after taking two sleeping pills, "I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."

What is less known are Ledger's film roles both before and after The Dark Knight. Before he assumed the Joker persona, Ledger was already emotionally drained from playing a heroin addict in the Australian film Candy. To make matters worse, after the Batman movie, Ledger immediately went to work on another dark-themed film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, without taking a break. The latter is a retelling of the Dr. Faust story, wherein the leader of a traveling theater troupe makes a compact with the Devil and takes audience members through a magical mirror into a fantastic universe of limitless imagination. Ledger's part was that of Tony, a "mysterious outsider" who joins the troupe.

An Oscar nominee for his portrayal of a homosexual cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, Ledger was known for his total absorption into his film roles. He told a reporter that "the only way that I can act" is to climb inside the skin of the person he was playing. To prepare for his part in Candy, Ledger had spent time with a real-life junkie in the dark, troubled milieu of Sydney's red light district. For The Dark Knight, he spent a month alone in a hotel room to work on his character and voice, perfecting an unhinged cackle that sends shivers up the audience's spine. But by immersing himself in the role of the Joker, Ledger might well have gazed too deeply into the abyss.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." This famous but cryptic quote by Friedrich Nietzsche is understood to be a warning against too close a contact with evil. As one interpretation has it, if a person gazes too long at evil, it will become a part of him. Did Ledger fall prey to this mysterious phenomenon?

Nietzsche's adage is not our only warning about evil. Aldous Huxley opined that "No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected…. The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous." Similarly, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck cautioned that "an exclusive focus on the problem of evil is actually extremely dangerous to the soul of the investigator…. The dangers exist…for anyone who becomes preoccupied with the subject of evil. There is always the risk of contamination, one way or another. The more closely we rub shoulders with or against evil, the more likely it is that we may become evil ourselves."

Like Heath Ledger, the brilliant historian and journalist Iris Chang, who wrote The Rape of Nanking (1997), seemed to have been another moth that flew too close to the flame.

At the time of her death I told the similar story of one of my profs at Colgate.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 8, 2008 7:23 PM