I’ve done a lot of movie-watching recently, including the movie that seemingly everyone else has seen: The Dark Knight. It’s a good film with something extra: an unforgettable performance. Ledger’s Joker is going to remain in the cultural lexicon for a long time, longer certainly than his predecessors in the role. He managed to bring something uncanny to the screen, a sort of Loki-esque chaos which appeals to the id and is deeply unsettling because of that.

If Nolan’s second Batman film has a message, it is that anyone can be corrupted. The best “need a little push;” the rest are already there. The Joker’s last, failed gambit feels tacked-on, as if the studios said: “This is too dark. It needs to leave the audience feeling that good will win.” It didn’t work. One of my friends, who isn’t the most analytical when it comes to films, said it was “too depressing,” and when you’ve gone right past all of us intestine-gnawing English majors to hit the pragmatists in the gut, well, your attempt at lightening the film has failed.

That said, The Dark Knight may as well be a Judd Apatow comedy when compared to Werner Herzog’s classic Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), which I finally finished watching today.

Aguirre is the story of a mad explorer with delusions of grandeur and a mean streak which appears to have enveloped his entire being. It’s a minimalist film—a “tight” film, in my own personal lexicon of film analysis—whose dialog would fit in a twenty page book and whose cinematography is breathtaking. The strength of the movie is Aguirre himself, played by Klaus Kinski, whose one-sided gait, thousand-yard glare and tortured grimace give the entire movie an atmosphere of dread.

I can’t help but think that Heath Ledger and Christopher Nolan watched the performance at some point. Although the Joker and Aguirre are drastically different characters, watching them in proximity makes them seem almost like two sides of the same coin. The Joker is outward-directed chaos, breaking order down around him and acting on whims; Aguirre crushes people and their plans because they don’t happen to conform to his will. Neither is someone you’d want to invite to dinner, and both characters have particularly dark exits, for different reasons.

I have more to say about both films, as well as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but it’ll have to wait until later—Aguirre is still swimming around in my head at the moment.

Oh, and D.K.—watch Amélie. You won’t regret it.