America loves its villains. We love them so much that often they are more interesting to us than the heroes.

Take The Dark Knight, the movie that has the whole country riveted right now. The central attraction of the film is the Joker, played chillingly well by the late Heath Ledger.

The Joker is more entertaining than Batman in The Dark Knight. His lust for chaos, his piercing laughter and his wry smile are the very things that attract us to him. His sadistic pathology is what makes him unforgettable. Here’s a criminal that doesn’t want $1 billion or revenge on his detractors. He wants to have fun in his own sick way, and we love him for it.

Roger Ebert once said, “Each film is only as good as its villain.”

This rings true in an age where heroes are a dime a dozen. Most mainstream comic books have been made into Hollywood blockbusters. Batman has received the silver screen treatment many times, as have Superman, the Hulk, Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, to mention just a few.

But I for one have grown sick of leotard-clad bodybuilders proclaiming truth, justice and the American way.

Give me a hero with scars and a chip on his shoulder. Give me a villain with disturbed, self-deprecating humor. Give me a city that I wouldn’t want to walk through at night. Give me a conflict that’s more complex than a showdown between the cliché forces of good and evil. Make the villain toy with the hero and the audience at the same time.

Heath Ledger’s Joker was both a showman and a menace. With his scraggly green hair, running makeup and shifty dialogue, he was almost loveable. He was charismatic one moment and a raging lunatic the next.

I found myself laughing at his jokes and mannerisms, which disturbed me a little. If a real-life criminal made you laugh, would you forget his wrongdoing?

The rest of the theater was filled with uproarious laughter whenever Ledger’s character filled the screen. I saw the movie twice during its opening weekend, and the result was the same both times. To see an evildoer portrayed so perfectly is awe-inspiring in a strange way.

Thankfully, criminals are only loveable when they’re on a big screen and you have a mouthful of popcorn.

By the end of the movie, it still felt like the audience was on the Joker’s side. Or that at least in some way they understood him even though he escaped a simple explanation. It seems a fictional raving psychopath can earn throngs of admirers.

I wonder about the psychology of this. Do we like the Joker because he reflects some hidden desire in us to do evil? Or do villains win us over with their charm?

Maybe that’s how we’re tricked, and how the lines between what’s right and wrong are blurred to such tremendous effect in The Dark Knight.