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Let's Get Strange| | "Let's Get Strange," or why the Joker is our hero
Preface
This essay spawned from late-night beer discussions with Michael, Stefan, and Adam.
I don't pretend that it doesn't have structural problems.
Also, I never dealt with how to interpret his face. He masks his own face just as Batman hides his and as Harvey gets half of his destroyed. Thoughts? Add a comment, yo. (See The Cedar Room's "We Go Unhidden" for some ideas about this.)
Introduction
“I believe…whatever doesn’t kill you…simply makes you—stranger.”
—The Joker’s motto
If we cared, we all saw the explosive welter of adulatory, encomiastic orgasms from bloggers and critics after Nolan and Ledger’s new interpretation of the Joker hit screens last weekend. Whether it was “pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment” (Dargis, The New York Times) or a visceral exploration of something “raw and elemental” (Travers, Rolling Stone), everyone and his mom knew that something was up, even if he couldn’t ascertain exactly what was keeping him up at night, what was penetrating his soul with some kind of archetypal dread.
Dargis of The New York Times had something great to say about current society’s proclivity for liking such a dark portrayal of a superhero, such an ambiguous take on traditional DC comic book justice: “Apparently, truth, justice and the American way don’t cut it anymore.” The old-fashioned simplistic heroism of the Golden Age is gone; this salt lost its flavor long ago.
And why shouldn’t it have? Contemporary relativism is catching up with John Dewey’s double-minded “nicely socialized” nation of citizens. Our baby, this postmodern condition, this spawn on Foucaultian destruction, can no longer brook foundationless paragons of cartoon virtue. From whence did that stuff come, anyway?
Okay. Let’s dance.
I. The Joker is not insane.
Almost every major review that I’ve read just has to throw in some line about the Joker’s being “crazy” or “insane.” Flatter him up all you want, but when it comes down to it, the guy’s nuts. He’s a lunatic.
Spare me. The easiest thing to do when confronted with an unpalatable truth is to call it madness, to call its mouthpiece drunk. Society forges its own manacles when it constructs baseless parameters of sanity without ever delving into itself. What, after all, is the point of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground if not to expose (borrowing from Kierkegaard) the imaginary constructions of society’s self-protective shadowboxing—the “forever indestructible crystal edifice” (Dostoevsky) or “self-commanding, imperturbable, ornate riddle” of man (Kierkegaard), just waiting to be dissolved into nothing? Let me quote a few sentences from this novel’s crucial seventh chapter:
“Oh, tell me, who first announced, who was the first to proclaim, that man only does nasty things because he doesn’t know his real interests; and that were he to be enlightened, were his eyes to be opened to his real, normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real profit, he would see his own real profit in the good and nothing else [. . .]? [. . .] Profit! What is profit? [. . .] Profit for you is prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace, and so on and so forth; so that a man who, for example, openly and knowingly went against this whole inventory would, in your opinion—well, and also in mine, of course—be an obscurantist or a complete madman. [. . .] The fact is, there may well exist something that is dearer to man than his very best profit, or that there is this one most profitable profit, which is chiefer and more profitable than all other profits, and for which, if need be, a man is ready to go against all laws, that is, against reason, honor, peace, prosperity—in short, against all these beautiful and useful things—only so as to attain this primary, most profitable profit which is dearer to him than anything else. [. . .] This profit is remarkable precisely because it destroys all our classifications and constantly shatters all the systems elaborated by lovers of mankind for the happiness of mankind. Interferes with everything, in short.” (emphasis added)
And while Dostoevsky was responding to Enlightenment science’s attempt to classify all things into systems—including the systemization of the human will in logic, thus eviscerating his soul—, Dostoevsky’s conclusion about the masked emptiness of humanistic societal structures and institutions masquerading as veracious pillars of civilization is a sempiternal ideal, going back even to the escapee of Plato’s cave whose fellow prisoners martyred upon his return for being—you guessed it—insane. Sound familiar? In the third scene, where the Joker meets the mob for the first time, various mobsters call him a "freak” who is “crazy” for thinking he can flaunt the rules as he does—to which he replies with marked assurance, “No, I’m not.” The Joker, like the Underground man and like Plato’s escapee, is not deceived. The Joker can, with Dostoevsky’s narrator, smile and assert with marked sangfroid: “I have the underground.” They see things in a similar fashion. If we wanted to place this theme in the realm of objectivity, we would say that they see things “as they really are,” but I don’t pretend that this film has any interest in such. Regardless, the Joker shows effete society’s proud inculcation of supposedly autonomously existing values, for the truth is that no value can exist or have any smattering of an ontological foundation save by reference to an eternal and objective standard of morality—something contemporary society forbids and anathematizes with its high-handed relativistic pluralism—and, coincidentally, something that the Joker probably doesn’t want any more than the city’s heathen vulgus and corrupt government officials.
Thus, what is there to forbid the Joker from doing what he wants? Social acceptability? Common sense? Being nice? “Sanity”? These incentives lack teeth, not to mention the self-deriving, self-sustaining existence their exponents pretend they possess. True justice is nowhere to be found in a society “grounded” on such fatuities, such chimerical suggestions for “getting along.” And so…frolic and play, mock and spit, ignite and explode, murder and steal—and laugh. Because it’s damn funny.
“But now I see the funny side,” he tells Rachel Dawes. What is “the funny side?” The realization, the epiphany of a foundationless universe—but also the dark laughter suffusing it all, the insidious cachinnation arising from a world without rules, yet populated by people who still want to play nice. Such an enormity that anyone could have taken it seriously in the first place! As the Joker himself says in the comics: “Any other response would be crazy.” Compare this with what he tells Batman during the interrogation scene: “You have all these rules, and you think they’ll save you. [. . .] The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.” You can’t eat your cake and have it too. If we want postmodernism, then the Joker’s words are the only truth we’ll ever have. And he tells Batman as much when Batman, in very Pontius Pilate fashion, asks the Joker what “the truth” is. These “rules” certainly won’t kill the Joker any time soon, and in turn, he’s become a whole lot stranger in this “funny world we live in.”
Thus, the Joker, given his perspective on reality, is privy to the depravity of human nature in a way that all the other characters in the film are either ignorant, naïve, or apathetic about, hence his monologue in the interrogation room: “They need you right now. But when they don’t…they’ll cast you out…like a leper. You see, their morals, their code—it’s a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these uh…these civilized people…they’ll eat each other” (emphasis added). And so does the whole city of Gotham turn on Batman at the Joker’s first beckoning. And so do dozens of citizens (including a cop) try to kill Coleman Reese. And so do two key police officers turn on Dent and Dawes. And so do the people of each ferry decide to destroy the other. (We could add the self-eliminating bank robbers at the beginning, as well as the punks from the “tryouts” scene, but then again, those aren’t the “good, civilized people” of whom the Joker speaks.) Significantly, it is this last line of the Joker’s that provokes Batman to more anger than we have ever seen him, finally pushing him over the edge (exactly what the Joker wanted, of course), because Batman, no more than your average good, hard-working patriotic American, didn’t want to hear it. The truth hurts. Especially when it’s about you.
[Thought experiment: Many of the people I talk to about this don’t buy my argument. As a thought experiment, compare Nolan and Ledger’s Joker with Nicholson’s. If you haven’t seen Burton’s first film in a while, watch it again. Perhaps you will be shocked by the a more manifest insanity of the latter: laughing maniacally at absolutely nothing (something the former never does), jumping up and down, dancing like an idiot to 80s pop music, telling all sorts of bad jokes, using huge freak-animal hot air balloons, tangoing on the top of Gotham Cathedral (again, for no apparent reasons), and relying on absurd and cartoony toys to do his work (much like the original comic book version)—and all this without any meaningful character portrait. We get few glimpses into his mind, if any. He is without a raison d’être. This is the exact opposite of Nolan and Ledger’s Joker.]
II. The Joker is an eminently postmodern symbolic creation.
“Since signifiers by their very nature can never settle into stable meaning but rather dance about constantly in a freeplay of signification, our only choices are to join the dance or skulk forlornly about the philosophical punchbowl.”
—Alan Jacobs
This new Joker of Nolan’s and Ledger’s creation has very little in common with the Joker either of Burton or of the long, complicated, and endlessly retconned DC history; and his creators have modified him to suit and challenge today’s viewing audience in a particularly poignant manner. He is both a devastatingly accurate symbol of and response to today’s postmodern condition.
Firstly, mark his appearance. Gone is the white plastic mask, perfectly pressed purple suit, garish yellow button-up, and suave fedora of Nicholson. The new Joker’s slapdash makeup job is as sloppy and desultory as it is representative of a man “with no rules”—“an agent of chaos.” He even gets the white gunk all over his hands and joshingly applies a perfunctory hand-sanitizer to his cosmetically blotched skin in a private jest to which only the audience is privy. The viewer can see the imperfectly distributed green dye in his hair, the muck all over his suit, the unmasked and even pronounced, accentuated grooves of the savage scars tearing through his cheeks. His eyes are wild, his hair unkempt, his clothing daring. He observes no guideline of personal appearance, and yet still emerges attractive and alluring.
Secondly, the new Joker is not a product of science—one of the many modernistic and fatuous darlings of the comic book universe (that and outer space). Falling into a vat of chemicals—oh my!—and getting bleached white all over with green hair and red lips? Tragic. Marvel is particularly bad about this: Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Sandman—just some of the villains from the past three Spiderman flicks—all byproducts of scientific accidents. While perhaps stimulating to a junior-high crowd, such shallow character genesis can only ineptly and vainly grasp at the human element in contemporary mythology. Instead, the new Joker is a product of himself and his own destructive impulses. The two stories he tells about his scars’ origins have few facts in common and thus maintain a connection to the endless confusion of the Joker’s “accident” in the comics; at the same time, however, the two stories both illustrate different aspects of the “lunacy” of contemporary society, and not of the Joker himself: a father using a symbol of the home—a kitchen knife, used for the preparation of family dinners (union) and such—as a murder weapon and disfiguring instrument, physically destroying his household with something that should ordinarily bring it together; and a wife—a symbol of true, honest, visceral, and romantic love; the foundation of true sentiment; the sacrosanct completion of both spouses; a symbol of sweetness, strength, and life—not only ruining her family with a libertine gambling problem, but deserting her husband for his self-mutilated appearance which was spawned out of empathy. Comme ça, we arrive back at the funny side.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the Joker, unlike any other hero or villain in recent memory, has no objective or goal but to destroy all attempts at controlling a world that, despite a certain Pelagian faith in humanity that Batman indulges in, is, within the world of the text, ungoverned and thus ungovernable. A typical response to such a postmodern motto, such as one I overheard in a theater the second time I saw the film, might identify a contradiction in the Joker’s philosophy. “Well hey! ‘There are no absolutes’ is an absolute statement!” Again, spare me. Such a gimp retort showcases a frightening ignorance of postmodern practice (for it is not ideology). Much as Michel Foucault cast down institution after institution, all while perfectly cognizant of and apathetic about his own lack of an epistemological framework from which he could “justifiably” operate, and much as deconstruction in poststructural literary criticism only acts to upset and destroy “illegitimate” prescriptive semiotic relationships without giving too much attention to its own epistemological dependency, the Joker simply overturns everyone’s idea of “normalcy” by pulling the veil off their eyes to see the ugly realities swept under the social blanket of Joycian “niceness,” instigating chains of action that, no matter the outcome, do not go “according to plan”—a plan which is in and of itself groundless and far-fetched in the first place. (In this way, even though the Joker fails to kill the mayor, he still succeeds.) So, if there is a contradiction in his philosophy, he doesn’t—and, in fact, mustn’t—care. With no attempts to control any sequence of events, but only to upset them and bask in the fright, panic, and fear that blights those who foolishly believe in the stability of human action in a world devoid of objective standards, the Joker becomes a non-existentialist symbol of pure, authentic act: “I—just—do—things. [. . .] I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. [. . .] I just did what I do best: I took your plan and turned it on itself.”
III. The Joker is the hero of this film.
We have outlined the function of the Joker. Now it’s time to examine his particular desires, dissect his actions, and witness his success—and our failure. We’ll do these hit and run style.
A) Justice
The Joker forces Gotham City to consider its unique perspective on justice and highlights the dark and twisted ambiguity inhered by Batman’s seemingly hypocritical character in the process. Within the world of the film, the people of Gotham are given three options: the perverted justice of a corrupt government; the anarchism of a man who understands human nature and the consequences of society’s presuppositions; or the obscure, unjustified vigilantism of a man who has just decided to act as some sort of lawless judge—equipped with his “one [arbitrary] rule," proceeding out of nowhere and whose moral foundation pretends no necessity.
And yet, as the film shows in the beginning, the city only respects the third option; perhaps they are convinced that the Batman represents true justice. Hence the Joker’s tactic: destroy the falsehood that the Batman symbol dissembles with its subfusc affectation, show the city that their conception of justice is grievously diseased, and ask the Batman where he gets his vindication.
[As one of Batman’s copycats asks in the film’s second scene, “What gives you the right? What’s the difference between you and me?”—to which Batman retorts with the trite and Hollywoodesque jest, “Because I’m not wearing hockey pants.” Hmm. Joshing around at something you either can’t or don’t want to face and answer—where have we seen this before?]
Before being humiliated by the Joker to such a point that he’s ready to admit defeat at the hands of someone more genuine than he, the Batman lets five people die—and not with a clear conscience. He’s tormented by his own actions: he “can’t endure” it, he tells Alfred, evincing a murky understanding of his own self and function in the world. If he were absolutely convinced of the rectitude of his own person, no unclear conscience would result. Instead, the Joker wins, forcing him to reconsider where he derived his “misplaced sense of self-righteousness," where he got the authority to crown himself potentate of the night in the first place, and forcing the city to reject an outlaw who wants to eat his cake and have it too.
B) Authenticity
Save for his switching of the addresses, the Joker tells no lie in the whole movie. That’s saying a lot when Batman and Gordon conspire together to lie to thirty million people with the justification that “truth isn’t good enough” and that people “deserve to have their faith rewarded [even with falsehood],” when Fox and Batman disingenuously use technology to Patriot Act the whole city (without a warrant, of course), and even when Alfred conspires to hide the truth about Rachel from his master and friend—not to mention all the institutionalized mendacity in Gordon’s unit and Dent’s office.
The Joker’s total disregard for fractured metaphysical concepts clears his judgment in a way Batman could only dream of. For example, the Joker could have easily killed Batman but he chooses not to: making Batman destroy himself, his own symbol, and what’s left of his own character suits the Joker’s purpose much more than the simple forced elimination a masked vigilante. Upturning, overturning, and deconstructing value structures—this is his function, and he’s authentic to the core in this regard. Mark how, equipped with a submachine gun, he shoots every obstacle between himself and Batman, but doesn’t actually shoot Batman; subsequently, he ferociously mumbles over and over again without moving a muscle: “Come on, come on. I want you to do it, I want you to do it. [. . .] Hit me. Hit me!”: i.e., “Break your one stupid, arbitrary rule which you think will save you and run me over; I dare you. I’m a sitting duck out here, and I’m not even shooting you when I could mow you down without a problem. Destroy yourself (symbolically and morally) by destroying me (physically).” Batman takes the bait but can’t commit, for he executes de mauvaise foi (Sartre), and ends up knocking himself out by crashing the Batpod into the Joker’s truck. Secondly, consider the Joker’s hysteria after being thrown down off of the scaffolding. If he falls to his death, he knows he will have won; for once again, he will have gotten Batman to kill him, to break his one rule, to publicly self-destruct into true anarchistic and autonomous vigilantism, which Batman does anyway. In like manner, the Joker was ready to die at the hands of Harvey Dent in the hospital; it served the same purpose. How does this unadulterated ardor compare with the Machiavellianism Batman resorts to in grand style by the end of the movie? The Joker doesn't even bring a gun to the last fight.
C) Destruction
If we have correctly diagnosed the Joker’s philosophy, let’s tally all the things he succeeds in exposing, destroying, or deconstructing:
1) Honor among thieves. (Talk about cake!)
2) Materialism.
3) Relativism.
4) Any/all symbolism predicated in any way on the above.
5) Vigilantism and all other forms of “fake justice.”
6) Pelagianism (faith in man).
7) Benevolent Machiavellianism.
This list could go on forever. Wayne was right when he naïvely and myopically tells Alfred: “I’ve seen now what I have to become to stop a man like him”—i.e., I have to become a villain: someone who “wiretaps” a whole city, stealing the privacy of thirty million people; someone who, much to the Joker’s glee and approbation, capitulates to the whims of pragmatism and covers up Dent’s crime, lying to the same thirty million people in full cooperation with Gordon; someone who kills Harvey Dent and almost kills the Joker himself. (Remember Batman’s words in the interrogation room after the Joker told him he’d have to break his one rule to know “the truth”?: “I’m considering it.”)
You just can’t eat your cake and have it too. If relativism governs the world, there can be no dubious attempts to ape true justice with a straight, albeit masked, face. Paraphrasing Dent and the Joker, such an indecent time forbears no decent men—including Batman—, for men are only as decent as the world allows them to be.
Alexandra DuPont of Ain’t It Cool News picked up on this when most other reviewers didn’t care to delve into it: “By the film's end, pretty much every major character is dead, insane, disfigured and/or morally compromised. And that's just the good guys. If they're breathing, they've made plans to lie to the public and each other, and they're mostly convinced they're doing the right thing. But as Batman scampers into the night, it doesn't feel like justice. It feels like something that's going to blow up in their faces down the line. It feels like failure.”
And that’s exactly what it is. The Joker emerges powerful, attractive, authentic, destructive, and victorious. We, like Batman, have “nothing: nothing to threaten [him] with, nothing to do with all [our] strength.”
Conclusion
But that’s not the way it has to be. While the Joker is right within the confines of the world of the text, we do not live in a relativistic world, and true justice, while never a human possibility, does indeed exist. The immovable justice of providence, God’s domain, never enters into the picture of The Dark Knight, a perfectly understandable omission in an image and product of our society—the same society that falls to ruin in the film. But God does judge, and his justice is perfect. The Dark Knight is a brutally honest depiction of what happens when we forget that.
Thanks to Michael, Vanessa, Stefan, Adam, Rachel, Curtis, Dave, and Phil for listening, fighting back, and educating. | | | Posted 7/30/2008 8:57 PM - 92 Views - 4 eProps - 4 comments
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