TDK was insane
Legitimately, it didn't even understand itself.
>https://youtu.be/SIYkhb2NjfE
Alfred tells Bruce that in Burma, the government was "bribing" tribal leaders with jewels. He and his commando buddies were sent in to find the jewels and the thief. They were unsuccessful, but discovered the thief was tossing the jewels. Alfred concludes that some men are illogical and just want to watch the world burn.
>https://youtu.be/16Zx9zTXeS0
Later, Bruce asks Alfred if they ever caught the thief and he said yes. How? They burned the forest down.
>...
In telling Bruce the story, he intended to describe Joker as illogical and wanting to burn the world down. But was it illogical that the thief wanted to prevent the bribery of the leaders by what was clearly a corrupt government, and that he had integrity enough to not profit from doing so? He meant to describe Joker and failed utterly, yet mistakenly described Joker perfectly as Joker was fighting the corruption of the government and also wasn't interested in profiting off of bribery riches, which is why he destroyed the mountain of money. The jewel thief and Joker were heroes. "Some men just want to watch the world burn," but it was Alfred, the Batman analogue of the story, and his cohorts who set fire to the world and watched it burn so that they could catch the man with integrity who was fighting corruption. It was Batman who violated the rights of everyone to catch the hero, his own act of setting the world on fire.
But the movie didn't understand what it was saying. It didn't realize that it accidentally made Joker the good guy and Batman the bad guy, or that it confirmed it with that story.
It's sincerely insane. The whole movie is baffling.
