Of all the possible villains to cross from the DC comic world to the Hollywood movie screen, very few have the ability to be taken seriously in the “real” world scenario that Nolan has created. To have a realistic approach to survive in the Batman franchise, a villain must be unique, with a purposeful intent to disrupt the ideals of Gotham and challenge the Dark Knight to endless limits. We can all agree that Legers performance was short of perfect and will be nearly impossible to replace, but even Ledger had inspiration to form his take on the Joker.
This leads me to dissect the psychology of the Riddler and find reasoning for surviving in the Nolan universe. Edward Nigma has been wreaking havoc in the comics for over sixty years and so it only seems fitting to find influences in bringing him to the big screen. The character has a compulsion to develop life and death intellectual challenges against his enemies. Here are some people who I thought would be a good insight to the Riddler.
My first example is Alex from A Clockwork Orange. No other character in the history of film has been more electrifying as a sadistic madman with intentions of random violence referred to as “ultra violence”. Even though the Riddler is not an overly aggressive or cruel villain, there are some similarities to the characters. For example, the Bowler hat has a striking resemblance and the hat mixed demonic eyes can intimate those who dare to question the Riddler. The cane also could be used, primarily because the comic book character carries a trademark question mark cane. Inside of the cane would be a knife that could quickly be used as a surprise attack against an unknowing victim.
Another influence would be Vincent Van Gogh. Surely most of you are thinking about painting, but in real life, this famous artist was quite complex. Illness included bipolar disease, hallucinations, nightmares, absent mindedness, insomnia, and anxiety. Any combination of these is surely able to result in insanity and similar diagnoses have been linked to the eccentrics of the Riddler.
Howard Hughes developed debilitating symptoms of social avoidance behavior and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) which shares behavior similarities with Nigma. The Riddler sometimes views handicaps imposed on him by his anti-social behavior as maddening most likely resulting from his father unable to grasp the brilliance of his son and beating him out of envy during his childhood. This invariably lead to his obsession for showing off his intelligence, creating life or death riddles for other to solve thus feeding his ego.
One of my favorite comparisons is to the character of Dr. Perry Cox from Scrubs. Like Nigma, he very skilled at what he does. Intelligence sometimes clouds judgment of good faith. This results in excessive drinking to further away from those around him. Dr. Cox constantly jokes or creates long narratives about how he doesn’t care about others because they don’t live up to his high standards (resulting from high intelligence.)
Edward Nigma has an intellectual comparison to Bobby Fischer, the American chess player. Fischer had one of the most gifted minds in recent history. His IQ was an astonishing 187 and used his brilliance to play the master game of strategy and puzzle solving. Chess is essential a high level game of placement, tactics and deception; all traits that can be easily incorporated into Nolan-land.
Due to his skinny physique, he relies on intellectual superiority to prove his power over everyday citizens. This leads to the conclusion that should the Riddler become the next choice of villain, another character will be introduced to take on the physical aspect of the movie. Here’s to hoping that the next villain will have the complex issues that make these movies so much fun to watch and talk about.