Demon King vs. Clown Prince

Randall Flagg and the Joker on Chaos, Power, and the Human Soul

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kinds of dark-arc characters we (and by we, I mean writers and cultures) choose as villains. Crafting a worth villain is one of the hardest parts in plotting out a good story – it turns out a story is only as good as the bad guy. This essay (actually, series of essays, there are three in all) is really just me putting thoughts together about story development. I’m in Las Vegas this week at a writer’s conference, and being in Vegas means a writer’s thoughts turn naturally to…Randall Flagg. The Walking Dude.

Picture a split-screen nightmare. On the left: a man in faded denim strides across the cracked neon desert of Las Vegas, boots crunching broken glass, a crow perched on his shoulder like a living epaulet. On the right: another man dangles upside-down from a grappling line above Gotham's canyon of skyscrapers, purple coat flapping like a broken kite, greasepaint smeared into a permanent scream.

One is Randall Flagg, Stephen King's multiversal devil—smiling "like the last light of sunset," voice honey over broken glass. The other is the Joker, Heath Ledger's scarred id—voice switching from carnival barker to funeral director in the same breath.

Flagg builds hierarchy from ruin; the Joker tears off the mask and makes you watch. If Flagg is the CEO of the abyss, the Joker is its brand ambassador.

Both are apostles of the end. Both see civilization as a house of cards. But here's the difference: Randall Flagg wants to rule the ruins. The Joker wants you to admit the ruins were always home. One is the dark architect of empires; the other, the dark mirror of the soul.

Let's walk through the ashes together.

Shared DNA: Agents of Chaos

Flagg and the Joker don't predict the fall of man—they accelerate it. They're not prophets; they're catalysts. And they share a remarkably similar toolkit for bringing about the collapse they crave.

Start with their philosophy. In The Stand, a superflu called Captain Trips wipes out 99% of humanity. Flagg doesn't mourn the dead; he salivates over the survivors. The remnant is clay in his hands. He rallies the wicked in Las Vegas, crucifying dissenters on telephone poles, building a city where fear is the only law and his word is gospel.

In The Dark Knight, the Joker doesn't need a plague—he has Gotham, which is already diseased. He sneers at Batman, "these civilized people? They'll eat each other." And then he proves it. Televised executions of fake Batmen, their bodies hanging from bridges like grotesque piñatas. Bombs hidden in hospitals. Mob bosses turned into informants. Every scheme designed to show that order is tissue paper over an abyss.

Both see morality as performance art. Flagg's crucifixions and the Joker's public murders are just different fonts for the same message: your civilization is a costume, and I'm here to tear it off.

But destruction alone doesn't satisfy them. They need converts. They're evangelists of the end times, and their sermons are surprisingly effective.

Flagg's gospel is power. He finds Lloyd Henreid starving in a prison cell, half-mad, surrounded by the corpses he's been eating to stay alive. Flagg materializes like a desert mirage: "I'm giving you a second chance, that's all." The voice is reasonable, almost kind. Weeks later, Lloyd is Flagg's prime minister, overseeing public executions with a grin, grateful as a kicked dog finally given a bone. Flagg wants the throne; the Joker wants you to realize the throne was always a joke.

The Joker's gospel is truth—or what he calls truth. In a burn-unit hospital bed, surrounded by the smell of antiseptic and charred skin, he whispers to Harvey Dent, Gotham's White Knight, its incorruptible district attorney: "Madness is like gravity—all it takes is a little push." One monologue about chaos and fairness later, Harvey is flipping a scarred coin to decide who lives and who dies. The transformation takes only minutes of screen time.

Flagg promises dominion. The Joker promises clarity. Both deliver damnation in a gift box.

And neither stays dead. Flagg reincarnates across King's multiverse—Walter o'Dim in The Dark Tower, the Walkin' Dude in The Stand, even a shadowy agitator in Hearts in Atlantis. He's less a man than a recurring glitch in reality, a virus in the code of existence itself.

The Joker dies, maybe, in a tangle of cables and laughter at the end of The Dark Knight. But Batman can't kill the idea. "I'm not a monster," the Joker hisses from the interrogation room earlier in the film. "I'm just ahead of the curve." His legend metastasizes: every copycat with a painted smile, every punk who scrawls "Why so serious?" on a wall, every troll who burns it all down for the lulz—they're all his resurrection.

Flagg lives through succession, passing through bodies and centuries. The Joker lives through infection, multiplying in the cultural bloodstream.

Divergent Scales: Empire vs. Experiment

But here's where they split. For all their similarities, Flagg and the Joker operate on fundamentally different wavelengths. Flagg thinks in empires. The Joker thinks in experiments.

Flagg doesn't just want chaos—he wants a throne in the middle of it. Las Vegas under his rule becomes hell's capital: neon crosses, military salutes, a nuclear football in his war room. He drills his followers like an army, executes spies with medieval flair. His ultimate allegiance isn't even to Vegas itself, but to something larger and more terrible—the Crimson King, a malevolent entity from the Dark Tower series who's trying to topple the Tower itself. Think of the Dark Tower as the axis holding all realities together, the lynchpin of existence. The Crimson King wants to bring it down and let the multiverse collapse into howling chaos. Flagg is his lieutenant, his advance man, softening up one reality at a time.

Watch Trashcan Man's pilgrimage in The Stand: a pyromaniac hauling an atomic warhead across the Nevada desert, muttering "My life for you!" like a monk with a rosary of dynamite. This isn't anarchy. This is devotion as terror. Flagg wants to be worshipped as the architect of the new dark age, with cathedrals built of bone and prayers offered at gunpoint.

The Joker, meanwhile, has no capital. No army. No five-year plan. His schemes are self-contained proofs, mathematical equations written in blood and gasoline.

The bank heist that opens The Dark Knight: a symphony of masks and double-crosses ending with a school bus vanishing into traffic as if it had never existed. The hospital detonation: a countdown synced to a nurse's heartbeat, the building collapsing in a cascade of glass and fire. The ferry dilemma: two boats, two detonators, one moral equation with no good answer.

He burns the mob's money pile—millions in crisp bills going up in flames—while laughing that it isn’t about the money, it’s about messaging. He doesn't want to rule Gotham. He wants to stress-test it until it cracks, to prove his thesis about human nature with the rigor of a sadistic scientist.

The ferry scene is his masterpiece. Two groups—civilians on one boat, convicts on the other—each holding the detonator that will blow up the other vessel. The Joker's voice crackles over loudspeakers: you have until midnight to decide. He expects mutual destruction, each group choosing survival over morality.

Instead, a convict in an orange jumpsuit throws his detonator overboard. A civilian, hands shaking, refuses to press the button. Grace interrupts the experiment. The Joker's only reaction is a disappointed shrug, almost petulant: "Can't rely on anyone these days."

He didn't want the boats to explode—not really. He wanted proof. And when he didn't get it, he moved on to the next experiment.

The Joker does have meticulous plans, just not in service of a larger empire or ideology. His schemes are like perfectly timed fireworks: brilliant, destructive, and self-contained. Each one is a self-proving theorem: "See? Told you people are rotten." The bank heist, the ferry bombs, the hospital explosion, all are engineered with surgical precision, yet they don’t build toward a throne or a regime. They’re performance art with a body count.

That’s the key tension in the Joker’s character: he’s a master planner who claims to hate plans. He says, “I’m a dog chasing cars—I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one,” but then executes multi-phase operations involving corrupt cops, rigged explosives, and psychological timing that would make a chess grandmaster sweat. The contradiction is the point. His denial of structure is his structure. The chaos isn’t random; it’s curated.

Moral Mirrors: What They Reveal About Us

This difference in scale creates a difference in function. Both villains hold up mirrors, but the reflections they show are radically different.

Flagg is external evil—the devil you can fight. He's the tyrant, the dark messiah, the thing that comes from outside to corrupt and destroy. And that means he can be defeated from outside, too. In The Stand, the forces of good literally march on Las Vegas with Molotov cocktails and prayer. God intervenes with the subtlety of a nuclear bomb—a glowing hand appears in the sky and detonates the warhead that Trashcan Man has delivered to Flagg's doorstep. Flagg's body explodes in a pillar of fire. His soul slinks off to reincarnate elsewhere, but in that moment, in that timeline, he's beaten.

You close the book feeling righteous. Evil had a face, and you punched it. The world is saved, or at least saved enough. The forces of light can rebuild Boulder and start again. There's catharsis in Flagg's defeat because he represents something outside yourself—a force you can unite against, organize against, pray against.

The Joker doesn't give you that satisfaction. He's internal evil—the devil you already are, the darkness that lives in the space between what you claim to believe and what you'd actually do when pressed. Harvey Dent's fall isn't spectacle; it's a mirror held up to every rationalization you've ever made. His coin flip lives in your pocket every time you tell yourself a white lie is justified, every time you cut a corner because the system is broken anyway, every time you choose expedience over principle because the stakes are too high.

The ferry passengers' refusal to press the button is genuinely noble. That much is true. But did you spend those minutes watching the film wondering what you'd do? Did you consider pressing it? Did some part of you understand the civilians' anger at being held hostage by the choices of criminals? Did you think, just for a second, about the utilitarian calculus—more innocent lives on one boat than the other?

That's the poison the Joker injects. You leave the theater not feeling cleansed but complicit, carrying his questions home like shrapnel you can't quite dig out.

In the interrogation room, Batman snarls at him and punches him in the face over and over. The Joker leans forward, voice dropping to something almost intimate as he tells Batman that there’s nothing he can threaten the Joker with. He's not trying to kill Batman. That would be boring. He's trying to make Batman kill him—to break the "one rule," to prove that the code is just a costume that comes off under enough pressure.

Batman doesn't break. Not in this film. But the question lingers: what if he had? What would that say about every principle you've ever staked your identity on? The Joker wants you to consider that the distance between hero and monster is one bad day, one impossible choice, one moment of pressure applied at exactly the right angle.

Flagg offers a fight you can win, at least temporarily. The Joker offers a question that never stops asking itself. That's why Flagg is the antagonist you can exile from the story once he's defeated. The Joker is the question you carry home in your coat pocket, ticking like a detonator you forgot to disarm.

Which Apocalypse Scares You More?

Flagg conquers worlds. The Joker conquers the viewer.

I've met men who'd follow Flagg to Vegas—charismatic sociopaths with manifestos and AR-15s. Or calculators and laptops. I've met men who laugh like the Joker in traffic—cursing the system, burning bridges, daring the universe to notice.

One is a nightmare you wake up from. The other is the mirror you shave in front of every morning.

So send me a comment: which villain keeps you up at night?

Next up: how the Joker turned St. Paul's diagnosis of human brokenness into a punchline without a resurrection. Bring your scars.