What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stranger: Heath Ledger’s Joker
(x-posted to The Valve)
Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers.
***
It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is useful but not explanatory, and Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker has already become legendary despite the fact that we don’t really know what is legendary about it. An attempted discussion at The Valve died out amidst cries that comic books are kids’ stuff (or maybe FASCIST!), and our friend Scott at Acephalous showed wonderful enthusiasm tinged with unmistakable vertigo. Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.
I’m going to start from the premise that Batman’s acting and psychology in this film aren’t very interesting. Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion, and he doesn’t develop because he did all that in the first movie. Instead, it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film — he is the fixed quantity, the “immovable object,” with which the Joker dances. Furthermore, the secondary plot of the film, involving Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face, falls way short of Batman’s chemistry with the Joker. (This is partly due to Aaron Eckhart’s limitations as an actor, which are considerable. He appears to get his ideas for characters from their summaries on Wikipedia.) Thus everything revolves around the Joker. The film forces us to return to him obsessively.
In an interview with Fear.com, Ledger announced that he and Christopher Nolan had “the same idea” about the Joker, but refused to elaborate.
What is the meaning of what Ledger has left us?
***
I advise you to hire a poet.
–Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust
First, it must be said that the Joker is much, much smarter than Batman. Not only does he guess every move that Batman will make throughout the film, adjusting his own actions accordingly, but he shatters the fundamental assumption of any superhero film, which is that superheroes don’t kill supervillains because they (the heroes) are finally so dominant that they have the luxury of mercy. In The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill The Joker because the nature of the separation between the Joker and himself is just too tenuous, and he has to enforce that separation by refusing to kill. The Joker happily calls his bluff, leading to three scenes where The Joker wins by showing no concern for his own life (four if you count the grenades in his jacket).
The reverse is also true, though — The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other — I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people — Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.
That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.
Insofar as we can untangle the Joker, the story goes something like this: It is the nature of the self to be melancholic, and thus to long for a return to a critical point of origin, which, if lost, would leave a void threatened by madness. As a result, the individual tries to go back to a point of origin that he has (for all practical purposes) invented, lacerating himself in the process, and so actually becoming the scarred, exiled creature. At the same time, the individual, despite his scars, gradually is able to come closer to the illusion of being identical with his fantasy. Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown. The main thing enabling Batman to remain both people without a psychotic breakdown is the Janus figure of the gatekeeper, Alfred, whose two-facedness in this film (part butler, part CIA scorched-earth man) earns him the name in all its fullness.
The role of time in this psychological process is pretty confusing, but there are lots of examples that can help us see our way forward. For example, in the film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character Jack is trying to recover the manhood that he’s lost to consumerism and the working week. This desire splits off into a persona of its own, named Tyler Durden, who Jack imagines to be Brad Pitt. In order to be Tyler Durden, and thus to recover his own primordial self, Jack has to put himself through physical ordeals (mostly savage fistfights) that smash him (and his life) to pieces but make the Durden aspect of his personality, still represented as an unharmed Adonis, more and more totalizing. In The Dark Knight, the Joker shows up at a meeting of crime bosses from whom he has just stolen $68 million. One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled: the two things are one and the same, except for the split between the logic of insanity (the Joker as Adrian Brody’s pianist, performing at gunpoint) and practical thinking (the Joker defends himself against an immanent threat). The fantasy of innocent “magic tricks” is realized at the precise moment when it has utterly failed and been replaced by calculating violence. It is a version of what characters experience in Jean Genet’s novels: when the drag queen gains enough aesthetic sense to become, at last, an elegant jeune fille, he is a middle-aged man. When Harvey Dent truly becomes Gotham’s patron saint, he is a dead murderer.
The Joker would like to be completely mad, and so feel no cognitive dissonance at all; when he is accused of being mad, and replies “I’m not — no, I’m not,” his voice is heavy with regret. Even the stories that he tells to Gamble and Dawes are lucid in their very ridiculousness. Consider the story he tells to Gamble: while his father is beating up his mother, the mother defends herself with a kitchen knife, which then inexplicably causes the father to take the kitchen knife and begin ritually carving up his son’s face. What is supposed to be a story about torture and abuse turns into a story about the envy of the excluded: the little boy re-writes the story to make himself the center of attention, introducing a twist that has its own horrible fascination but actually doesn’t “fit.” This is precisely what Batman has done — turn the selfless work of upholding the law into a spectator sport with him in the middle. The second story not only features the Joker scarring his own face rather than trying to undo the damage to his wife’s face, but involves the Joker getting what are clearly external scars by sloshing a razor around inside his mouth. The union of the internal and the external is what Batman wants out of fighting crime, at Hancock-like cost to those around him.
***
In the first film, Batman fought human agents of totalitarian order; here, he fights an anarchist in love with the fireworks of chaos and the excesses of image. My sincere hope for the final installment is that Batman will face off against something inhuman, by which I certainly do not mean campy monsters. It seems to me that the inhuman is also the best possible lead-in for Batman’s conflicted relationship with the person who shares his denatured humanity — Catwoman, invoked slyly here by petitpoussin. (Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.)
That said, what we make of Nolan’s trilogy will be greatly affected by whether we continue to overvalue films like Iron Man. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland existed to make Americans believe that the rest of America was real; by the same token, risk-free parables like Iron Man and Harry Potter, towards which we feel genial disbelief, disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives, and which comprise the glistening heart of The Dark Knight. I mean our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares, our faiths. It is because we are having trouble dealing with Ledger’s Mephistopheles, his tongue snaking around his lips, that we hear so many empty words about his “great performance” in a genre where “the movie is only as good as its villain.” Nolan thinks we deserve a better class of superhero movie: not the kind we need to preserve us in our delusions, but the kind we deserve.
“Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.”
I have enjoyed reading all of the Joker comparisons so far. I think the most entertaining ones have been: The joker as the death drive personified, the joker as a Heideggerian terrorist, and the Joker as a Rortian ironist who drops the liberal democracy bit in a wild attempt to reveal the contingency of moral beliefs.
Excellent post.
Kugelmass,
Totally agree with most of this. But I have one quarrel: the Joker definitely does NOT “wish he was mad.” The only times his blithely psychotic facade evaporates–the only times he shows real anger and vulnerability–are when people dismiss him as crazy. He calls himself the Joker, but above all, he wants people to take him seriously.
And another thing. Easy on Iron Man and HP! Just because they promulgate a less complicated philosophy of good and bad doesn’t mean they aren’t grappling with questions like “How to live?” And the fact that they let us escape doesn’t make us any less capable of grappling with “the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives;” they just give us a vacation.
pm Busis makes my post obsolete, ty all.
Joseph:
First, in the name of all that’s holy (laugh), I am *not* attempting to denigrate or offend you (or shame the species) with the following comment, as strong an opinion (on my part) as it is; it’s still just my opinion, as we know. Fair enough?
So, in the name of concision, let’s divide my argument (as I import it from that quarantined Valve thread) into its “Childish” and “Fascist” components (despite the fact that they dovetail), and address the former first (whether or not we ever make it to part two):
“That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes.”
Joseph, I’m afraid that doesn’t follow; it’s a bit like claiming that it’s ridiculous to criticize Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible as a sickeningly violent film because *it’s about sickening violence*. Having one’s cake and eating it, too (or is it called biting the hand that feeds the auteur?) is far from an uncommon pop tactic in a puritanical-yet-porn-addicted culture. Even a film that supposedly investigates infantility can (and will) use infantile (actually, we could have a side argument parsing “juvenile” vs “infantile”; my theory is that pop culture is infantilizing adults, politically, by means of juvenilia) hooks to put asses on seats in mass quantities.
Further, I think I have nothing less than the expertise of Hollywood’s studio accountants behind me when I argue that no film project designed and executed to even remotely resemble the film you project in your Dark Knight fantasy could ever have been green-lighted (certainly not with a budget of more than a few million dollars), shot and wide-released.
The Dark Knight’s success mitigates against your reading of its chief effect, it’s chief effect being a juvenile power fantasy. Unless you’re claiming that Nolan has pulled off what Kubrick, Godard, Scorcese, Wells, Cassavetes, Antonioni, Fellini, Truffaut, Visconti, Kurosawa, Bergman, Hawks and Allen, et al, have thus far failed to pull off, which being: an adult-oriented film with such broad appeal to the modern 10-35 (male, largely) viewing demographic that the film is a certified *blockbuster*.
I’m not saying that an academic with a softspot for popular culture (at the magnitude it currently presents itself) can’t find something to justify the guilty pleasure of fanning (is this a neologism or am I not up on my Rotten Green Tomatospeak? laugh) the film: tossing some diamonds into the coal pile is an old practise (check out the adult allusions in the Cold War era Flintstones; Bullwinkle and Rocky). I’m also not claiming that it’s the fantastical nature of super hero films that make them juvenile: Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, are all fantastical, adult-oriented films.
What renders the super hero films juvenilia is the *nature* of the fantasy they present: the liberated revenge scenario underwritten by cartoonish magnitudes of power.
Without having seen Dark Knight (but, having audited tons of Batman product in my life; I was a serious collecter of comix as a young man, my favorites being the Berni Wrightson-era Swamp Thing and Jim Starlin-era Captain Marvel), I nevertheless know that the franchise presents a fantastically rich and very buff man who has mastered exotic fighting techniques and combines this martial arts expertise with an array of fantasy gizmoes (power toys) in order to battle whomever, driven by the need to avenge his parents’ deaths whilst dressed up like… a bat.
This fantasy, strikingly, is liberated from the common real-world constraints of money, law, technology, Newtonian physics and fashion sense. Would a ten year old boy feel ridiculous dressed up like a bat? Not necessarily. The amusing paradox: would a ten year old boy, liberated, by the death of his parents, to dress like a bat (and otherwise do as he pleased) really dedicate his life to avenging the act that freed him?
For an “adult” take on the Dark Knight armature as you sketch it, consider Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with Randall McMurphy fullfilling the Joker role, and nurse Ratchet, obviously, as Batman (forgive all proper noun spelling errors, as it’s been years and I haven’t the time to fact check); maybe the Indian “Chief” is Alfred.
What makes Cuckoo an *adult* meditation on Batmanly themes are the *limits* imposed: McMurphy’s triumphs are not of super strength but of wit and cussedness; the struggle between Batman/Ratchet and McMurphy/Joker doesn’t involve a Chinese Opera of thrillingly improbable mega-violence; the cinematic technology (lighting, camera angle, editing) is used to glamourize wit, the triumph of the imagination, the curative value of empathy… rather than sell us on a juvenile fantasy of kevlar sixpacks, etc.
Further, Cuckoo presents the McMurphy/Joker as juvenile (McMurphy refers to himself as “fifteen going on thirty five) in a politically valid (then-au currant), anti-authoritarian way… without the bells- and-whistles (or tics-and-whistles) of madness-glamourizing lunacy.
To claim that the psychological (and acting craft) niceties that you cite in Dark Knight define, rather than enhance, the chief effects of the film, is to, again, flout the financial lore and thematic essence of the Hollywood blockbuster as a committee-controlled artifact to serve the needs of your own fandom.
Again: to claim that I need to see Dark Knight in order to categorize the genre it springs from is as disingenuous as claiming that the film invents its own genre. I’m not “concerned” with Dark Knight, per se: my comment is about how current masspop has seduced, coopted and infantilized an entire generation of intellectual fandom (as I see things).
When you write:
***One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled***
….it’s the hint of relish, or admiration, I perceive in your response that makes me think your sober powers of analysis are short-circuited by the fandom; the scene you cite is silly; a ten year old boy’s *power fantasy* that peaks the Cool-o-Meter. In real life, as know, a couple of teenagers with kitchen knives would merely kill the guy. Likewise, when you write:
***The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.”***
Anyone really familiar with the conventions of the genre recognizes this quippy panache not as deep pdsychology but as an authorial trick: it’s used for explaining why one’s nemesis doesn’t merely sneak up on one with a handgun and put the tale to a simple conclusion about ten minutes into the book/film/cartoon. Even Bruce Lee used such crypto-exposition in Return of the Dragon (handguns, apparently, were banned from the island; therefore, 90 minutes of numchucks).
But this “debate” is pointless if I can’t get you to agree that the terms “juvenile” and “adult” are ever, in any sense, useful or capable of making real-world distinctions between products/behaviours/attitudes. Do you think these words are ultimately just *too* contingent to use in a rational argument?
Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion….
Almost sounds like a description of Patrick Bateman.
And…whatever doesn’t kill you will only leave you with a very big hospital bill.
Steven, it was previously funny—even impressively audacious—that you were mounting such a fervent critique of a movie you haven’t seen. Now it’s just annoying.
I admit that I’m impressed by the devil-may-care circularity of this argument: the Hollywood system could never produce an interesting summer film, because the Hollywood system would never produce an interesting summer film. If The Dark Knight didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. You take that even farther by arguing that the movie gets worse with every ticket it sells:
This is so asinine. As if the Beatles’ massive commercial success was due entirely to people who fully understood their musical and lyrical innovations. Incidentally, hate to tell you, but The Godfather did really, really well.
As someone who has seen both films, my opinion is that The Dark Knight is better and more original than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which shaved off the rough and disturbing edges of Kesey’s novel, leaving a well-acted but more or less forgettable cash-in on the nonconformity fad. If you’ve gotten to the point where a coffee-mug phrase like “15 going on 35” is more meaningful than anything Heath Ledger could possibly, hypothetically do in a Batman movie, it’s safe to say you’ve been blinded by a particular baseless prejudice.
“Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.”
And now no one ever will. In this case I think it’s the character (I couldn’t remember her name until you wrote it out) rather than the actress. I thought Gyllenhall’s death scene was well done, but in a way that’s just a morbid twist on the observation quoted above.
Tomemos:
Do you know how to argue a point without spraying spit ‘n vitriol? And do you think your wild swings at softballs that obviously floated right by your angry little bat mean much to me? No one wants to take your precious comic away from you, son. Relax. K?
Steven, you’ve found a winning formula: make a critique involving the highest possible stakes (the decline of the American left-wing intellectual; the mass-marketing of fascist propaganda; academia’s culpability in the Iraq war), but then scoffing with an ironic insouciance at anyone who reacts strongly. I think I’ll opt not to play that one.
Busis,
First of all, wanting to be crazy is not the same thing as being willing to be dismissed as “crazy.” They’re almost two different things. When other people call the Joker crazy, they mean that he’s misjudged the practical realities around him. When I say that he wants to be crazy, I mean that he’d rather burn money than use it to bribe Oldman’s second in command.
As for taking it easy on Iron Man and Harry Potter, the good news is that I don’t have to because the rest of American society already does, and aggressively at that. In any event, I’m not trying to escape from life, I’m trying to live it.
Steven,
As a prologue, two comments:
1. Thank God, I’ve been blogging long enough that at this point you really can’t offend me or make me get into arguments I don’t want to have. This was not true a year ago.
2. Why not put comments like this up at the Valve? Guaranteed to get more readers, meaning more people watching us fence and making hilarious forays into the discussion. Personally, I’d be very unlikely to shut down comments on any thread, as you know from past experience. I’ll complain about them, sure, but I won’t actually unplug the comment box.
Steven,
Let’s take this one point at a time.
First of all, you are claiming that the film couldn’t possibly be as good as I think it is because it did well. Even if we were to limit the field of possible comparisons to Hollywood blockbusters, the incredible intricacy and pathos of Casablanca would be enough to make this a priori assumption untenable. If any of the directors you mention (other than Scorsese) were still making films today, some of them would benefit from the powerful marketing channels available and produce aesthetically valid blockbusters. Films like Apocalypse Now or Seven Samurai did perfectly well at the time of their release.
I totally agree with you, but just because your statement is generically true (say of a film like Black Snake Moan) doesn’t mean it refutes the claims I’m making here about a specific film. Spider-Man 2 is not about infantility in a self-critical way, and neither was Iron Man.
I think it’s safe to say that nobody is liberated by the murder of their parents except in a very conflicted and paradoxical way. To me, it is psychological realism that the price Batman would play for retreating into his private fantasy is the expiatory job of fighting crime.
The Fellini films that you valorize as an alternative to Batman are not just fantastical — they’re ludicrous. They’re great art, but to claim that Juliet of the Spirits is an inherently more adult film than Batman is to claim that sexual fantasies involving buxom mother figures or lithe Ganymedes are somehow inherently more adult than violent power fantasies. They aren’t; the only possible difference is that one turns your crank more. With that, we have certainly left the realm of objective aesthetic or political evaluation.
Because you haven’t seen the film, you can’t picture in your head why “a couple of teenagers with kitchen knives” wouldn’t have been able to defend the Joker in the scene with the disappearing pencil, but that’s besides the point. You can’t make an objective argument based on what kinds of stylization you’ll accept. In fact, in “real life,” nobody would disappear like the woman in L’Avventura, nobody would play invisible tennis like the people in Blow Up, nobody would hold a lungful of smoke for the duration of a john’s kiss as the prostitute does in My Life to Live, and so forth. Batman is fantasy violence, true, but every film is a fantasy.
The way you are thinking about genre and convention here misses the crucial difference between genre classics and genre exercises. The Maltese Falcon and Snake Eyes are both mysteries, and both follow genre conventions, but one is a classic and the other is a bore. Above all, good genre films provide convincing reasons for the necessities of the genre narrative, just as Shakespeare provided convincing subjectivities for stock characters.
The differences between the Joker and Randall McMurphy, as well as between Batman and Nurse Ratched, are so enormous that the analogy just can’t survive them. The Joker isn’t a liberator, he’s a provocateur. McMurphy isn’t a satanic orchestrator of moral theater, but rather a blunt instrument of rebellion. The Joker is inventive, whereas McMurphy sticks to a very well-established plan of drinking, screwing, and brawling. He’s a conformist who happens to follow a different code than Ratched.
Nor do the supposed differences between the films really hold up. McMurphy certainly does have improbable powers, mainly his ability to withstand various forms of torture and intentional brain damage (until the lobotomy does him in). The situation isn’t realistic — the vast majority of the inmates are there voluntarily? Really?
Alfred and Chief Broom are utterly dissimilar, as are a moral code (The Dark Knight) and a local handgun ban (Enter the Dragon).
I do understand your frustration with juvenilia and infantilism, so don’t misunderstand me. But to use The Dark Knight as a platform for these criticisms is to miss the subtle things that add up to divide art from trash. Most sentences in most novels look vaguely similar to one another, but that’s not the way to look.
You know, we’ve got aesthetically sophisticated treatment of thematic material dredged up from infancy and early childhood (e.g. Shakespearean tragedy). And we’ve got unsophisticated treatment of adult material (e.g. all those myths Levi-Strauss went through in The Raw and the Cooked). What’s DK? I for damn sure don’t know.
Joseph:
“First of all, you are claiming that the film couldn’t possibly be as good as I think it is because it did well.”
I qualified that one by saying it wouldn’t have done well with the “10-35” demographic. Obviously, decently made films do well from time to time. The age qualification is key to my argument.
“Alfred and Chief Broom are utterly dissimilar, as are a moral code (The Dark Knight) and a local handgun ban (Enter the Dragon).”
Dramaturgically? With the former issue I’d say that foils, sidekicks and secondary characters in general have a mechanical function we can detach from the specific realities of the film (it’s useful to give the protag a character he or she is close to, though not romantically, to fullfill the same function that stream of consciousness does in novels, if a dominant voice-over isn’t an option, as one example); the moral code and handgun ban perform the *same mechanical function* (plugging a particular logic hole, as I mention above, if they explain why characters aren’t very simply eliminated at the first convenience), though they diverge on the level of the specific realities of each film.
“The Maltese Falcon and Snake Eyes are both mysteries, and both follow genre conventions, but one is a classic and the other is a bore.”
But by belonging to the same genre, they become, on the level of mechanics (vs execution) indistinguishable, and I can make general statements that will cover both (or they don’t really belong to the same genre; that’s the point of “genre”).
“Because you haven’t seen the film, you can’t picture in your head why ‘a couple of teenagers with kitchen knives’ wouldn’t have been able to defend the Joker in the scene with the disappearing pencil…”
Sorry, I wasn’t myself clear enough: I meant that such teenagers could easily have killed *The Joker*: that he survives the cited encounter by means of a magic trick with a violent twist gives us a clue to the nature of the fantasy the genre fulfills (and that the movie fulfills so well, apparently, that it’s a blockbuster). The Joker would be dead in a minute, cavorting around Brooklyn… which is one of the realities the genre is there to reject or “heal”. (Sidebar: Are super hero films generally bigger among white males of a certain class, or blacks of a certain class that many white males fear)?
“The Fellini films that you valorize as an alternative to Batman are not just fantastical — they’re ludicrous. They’re great art, but to claim that Juliet of the Spirits is an inherently more adult film than Batman is to claim that sexual fantasies involving buxom mother figures or lithe Ganymedes are somehow inherently more adult than violent power fantasies.”
The thing about fantasies about buxom mother figures and/or lithe Ganymedes, is that they are fulfillable, possibly, in the real world. I’m defining an “adult” fantasy by the scale (limits) imposed on it, not the pathos (or whatever) it may signal, as originally stated.
Again, Joseph, my question: when can we safely use the terms “juvenile” and “adult”?
I never heard of this film, and never even heard of Heath until they had headlines about his death. I didn’t even know who he was! In any case, this doesn’t sound like my type of movie.
WOW. You said a mouthful. An entire
thesis paper could be written on this
film. Or on “The Joker” alone. And
still, there would be more to say…
I feel the death of rachel was just
a “gimmick”. To make the film more
“dark”. The comics started the trend,
introducing more “peril” to accommodate
an older audience. Batman and his
friends couldn’t get hurt. So after
a few hundred comics, they had to
change things up a little bit. The
hero CAN get hurt. Who wants to read
a story where you KNOW the good guy
will come out on top EVERY time ? (Other than little kids with faith in
good guys) ? Sigh… LOL ! Don’t get
me wrong… I love this movie. It is
what it is, and there hasn’t been much
like it before. A cultural phenomenon.
I loved the comments about the Joker.
In my opinion the Joker is Super Sane thus the comment when he is confronted with being insane. His reply is, “I’m not…no I’m No..’T'” This is the fact that the Joker Knows that he is not insane. The conflicting story’s about how he got his scars are not lies or meant to confuse people. Every morning the Joker has to reinvent himself, his story’s are truths, he is “A man of his word”, he is not a lier, but honest.
He is just a Dog chasing cars, he really wouldn’t know what to do if he caught one, He is Chaos, the closest thing to the beast, but just having fun.
In the comic book the joker realizes he is a comic book character he has self awareness, sees himself as people see him, feels their feelings, his ability to read people and his understanding of his own being make him the most dangerous of batmans Bad Guys. I am going to see the movie again and see if there is a part where the joker turns to the audience and acknowledges that he knows the people in the theater are watching him.
just don’t F%#k with him.
“Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown.”
I love this statement, and it’s well-put. Have you put any thought into the many stories on the web and blogs that claim Ledger himself had this very same problem in reality– distinguishing between “oneself and the fantasy?” Or does this not interest you? People say that Ledger had kept a diary of Joker-isms on set so as to get into character, and that he himself became the character so fully that he didn’t step out of the Joker’s skin until the film had wrapped. Some even claim that it caused his depression, as if becoming this part took everything out of him, though this is clearly melodramatic and overstated. Still, interesting, no?
I also am surprised that a lover of politics like yourself failed to notice the conservative (or possibly not, but certainly political in some obvious ways) agenda of the film and some of its undertones. Check out my review if you feel like it by clicking my name… in fact I actually mentioned you (to disagree about Eckhart).
Although I must warn you that my review is vastly more basic and superficial than yours, since I could never hope to wax as intellectual on a comic book movie as you have here. Although the Mephistopheles comparison is not at all lost on me (though a lot of the other things you say are, like the bits about Jean Genet and Thomas Kyd).
Anyway, long story short, I love your post here, and would be intrigued to see your thoughts on Ledger’s real-life battles with the Joker’s character seeping into his own personality, and your reaction to the presence (or lack, if you wish) of politics in the movie.
it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film
Couldn’t the same be said about the Joker? It’s said a few times (by Alfred once IIRC) that Batman’s stranglehold on crime in Gotham essentially created the Joker like a kind of photo-negative. But then, the idea that Batman can become (or remain) an empty “idea,” as you say, onto which Gotham projects its loathing ends rather than motors the movie, in a way I found really unsatisfying. In a way, Batman asserts to Gordon that he can effectively stand in for the Joker as the object of the city’s fear; are we really supposed to believe that? Can Batman be the alpha and omega of the social order, both “himself” and his opposite? Why not just root for the Joker in the first place, especially since, unlike Batman, he actually wants to fail & fall victim to his project of total annihilation? Whom would you rather root for–the agent of Order At All Costs, or the Anarchist who wants nothing more than to participate in his own destruction at the hands of the unswerving punctuality of chance?
It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other—I mean, isn’t that wonderful?
Actually, I’ll take you one farther: I thought the ferry set-up as “race against the clock/anonymous murder” was not Joker’s m.o. at all. Really, when the ferry-riders don’t blow each other up, the Joker seems well-vindicated. In other words, are the ferry-riders surprisingly good people, or are they just operating according to plan, as the Joker claims in Dent’s hospital room? It seems to me that putting bombs on two boats isn’t injecting anarchy into the system; but bringing along a third detonator to blow them up anyway, awesomely, is.
“That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes.”
Exactly. Hence, I’ve grown content with my reading (and also grown suspicious why Zizek hasn’t YET given the film the gaudy, easy Lacanian treatment) that the Joker is a terrorist of text – a vision, or rather, polemical mercenary of Nolan’s war on the canon’s previous ‘insincerity.’ The constant, parodied references to “a man that dresses up like a bat” prove this point: the Joker is their only to disrupt Nolan’s fabric. Perhaps, the greatest fascist reading is not that everybody scoffs at the proletariat revolution, but that they’ve become so insular with the glossy promises of a New Gotham that they’ve forgotten it can shelter “the comical” in the first place.
I have a compelling question.
What if the Joker is actually not crazy?
I think in most portrayals of psychopaths they [the psychopaths] are also narcissistic: they need attention (whether it is admiration or fear).
What if Ledger’s Joker is really just a pure psychopath, with wounds bare, devoid of the fancy narcissistic cover-up that imho defiles most potrayals of psychopaths.
That would make Ledger’s portrayal spectacular ofcourse. (I think it does.)
What We Know About The Joker
The Dark Knight might easily have been called “The Clown Prince.” Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker, already hailed as Oscar-worthy, owes more to Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice than it does to previous Batman malefactors. Ironically, Keaton was the first film Batman and could have played off against himself as both the Caped Crusader and the Prince of Fools.
Like Keaton’s Beetlejuice, The Joker in this latest Batman-iteration is the ultimate trickster: a destroyer of worlds and a slayer of men, whose word cannot be trusted and whose motives cannot be divined.
The Joker’s wild success throughout The Dark Knight’s dark nights depends on a script which constitutes a stacked deck in his favor. For most of the two hours of this latest Batman saga, everything goes The Joker’s way. He knows where mob kingpins will be meeting and gains access with impunity. He easily defeats the defense mechanisms of a high-security bank. He cannily manipulates good guys and bad guys alike seeking both a higher class of criminal and a lower class of law enforcer. He survives high speed truck flips, Kevlar-armored right crosses and highrise bungee jumps.
Though he is painted up to be an enigma wrapped in a riddle (or was that someone else?), based on evidence from The Dark Knight, we do know the following things about The Joker:
*He is a munitions expert. He is equally at home with C4 suppositories and oil barrel chemical peels.
*Though he is an expert project manager, at least in the bank-robbery field, he is prone to waste his resources.
*He is empathic. He knows just what to say to push anyone over the edge of madness, and then leap in after him.
*He is a man ahead of his Timex. The Joker can take a lickin’ from Batman and keep on tickin’. He may once have belonged to a fight club.
*He obviously was involved in covert ops in the past. He knows how to anticipate scenarios and plan alternatives. He knows where to acquire esoteric weapons and how to use them.
*He moonlights as a Mary Kay agent.
*He has had access to Jack Benny’s joke vault.
Omigod! The Joker is Jason Bourne!
I’m Batman.
Have I got a few comments for you little lot! (I’m glad this thread appears to be still going.) I’ve just been having a look at the comments on Batman on thevalve – impenetrable postmodernist tosh, I would say most of them were.
(How COME men – most of them were men – of letters and intellect could write perfectly clearly a century or more ago – G B Shaw, Bertrand Russell – whereas now all they seem to do is blow obscurantist smoke in language one *can* sort of understand – only it takes half an hour to do so, for a few little paras, as it would when deciphering a lawyer’s contract!)
Stephen Augustine, you’re one of the worst offenders on this. To wit(this being one example out of many): your off-the-wall notion of “teenagers with kitchen knives”. HUH?? WHAT would teenagers with kitchen knives be doing in this sort of movie, (don’t you mean teenagers with Uzis??) and why would they want to (on behalf of the Mafia?) slay the Joker? Or would they, as tomemos seems to think – be likely to want to *defend* him?
(Interestingly, the Joker as a charismatic “anarchist” (and the very fact that kugelmass, who I’ve pegged down pat as well-meaning, and others on here and Valve don’t seem to challenge that sort of caricature of an “anarchist”, tells me that none of you have the slightest IDEA of what political anarchism IS.).. as I was saying, it’s interesting that the Joker as charismatic “anarchist” doesn’t seem to *have* any real followers *in* this movie, teen or otherwise… he seems to be able to control dupes, but unable to find himself real followers/accomplices. Obviously Chris Nolan didn’t want to give him the luxury of a groupie, his “Harley Quinn”!!)
That’s one, no make it TWO, points I have made thus far. (Possibly three if you work in my criticisms of pretentious post-modern-speak.) Hmm. Anyway, for what I really want to tell you, you’ll have to wait till my second post, but I’d just like to say that I didn’t come here or to the Valve out of the blue, I was linked to it in an article by a young guy whose much more incisive insights I’ve been a fan of for a few years, namely John Pistelli, originally published on dissidentvoice.org. (He linked to a post on the Valve but the link just went back to the header, so destroying the trail back to the original post, annoyingly for me, as I’d read his article before but wanted to dissect it at leisure… it can be a pig, linking to blogs. I Googled but I didn’t know what it was on Valve that had attracted his attention.)
Anyway, I preferred his article, “Hollywood’s Terror Dream”, to anything on the Valve. (Stephen Augustine, you are the most pretentious “liberal” I believe I have seen anywhere for an age! Going on about “growing up in the aftermath of WWI”!! **** me, you’re not THAT old – if you were, you wouldn’t know how to use a computer keyboard! Even if you were a) alive and b) free of Alzheimer’s!)
Anyway. Bah. Wait till my next post for my next grouse – a pox on all your houses!
Hello Liz, I read some of your comments on Kugelmass’s blog post from 2009 and thought they were interesting. You said in your comments that people should email you if they were interested in your views and I’d like to take you up on the offer. If your sentiments have changed since then I understand, I simply wanted to drop you a line.
@ Steven Augustine, again: IF the Joker would be “dead in a minute”, he could hardly be “cavorting around Brooklyn”, as you append after your next comma!
THINK MAN THINK! (I’ve never seen a use of such bad English in such “sophisticated” discussion surroundings!)
That would have got you a 0/10 from my old English teacher. (Like the old canard: Charles II walked and talked, half an hour after his head was cut off!!)
Anyway, I thought the template for the movie’s cityscape was Chicago??
So what’s the deal, Kugelmass?? Don’t you want any more comments on this thread? (Though I see it hasn’t been closed.) Or do you just want stupid stuff by people saying “I’m Batman”?? Like the above poster?
I placed a couple on here – and would have placed a couple more, only my computer had a fit (as usual) in the middle of a long post. I don’t have very good broadband. Like a lot of people in UK.
I (would have) felt that I needed to explain quite a lot about my point of view, because I certainly don’t share any of the usual “conservative/liberal” (pseudo) contrasts or ideology. In fact, I think that the way most Americans do fall into either of those samish camps, limits their scope of movie criticism, social criticism and all other criticism – however educated they may think themselves.
However, if you don’t want to know – I shan’t tell you! (But if only you knew – then you’d see! And yes, religion too has a lot to do with the sorry state of American culture. D’you want to know why? You’ll have to ask me. It’s not for the usual reasons people give! And no, it doesn’t have to be religion *you* subscribe to (if you do, and I’m not concerned there) – the cultural background is all.)
Note to/about Steven Augustine: Yes, I DO dislike his posts! I think he *is* a dislikeably smug liberal and if we met at a party, we’d probably fight! I saw a lot of stuff on here and The Valve by him, which I thought should be pulled apart.
Otherwise, you’ve got a good blog here. (I didn’t say I disliked YOUR posts.) But yes, I do prefer John Pistelli’s radical viewpoint. He doesn’t seem to have ventured over here – yet. I daresay he has plenty of other posting places to keep him busy.
Still – if you want this blog to be restricted to the Batman-related comments of postmodern libruls and a few of their conservative so-called adversaries – go ahead and put a rolling banner across the top! “Yank Libruls and Conservatives only! Special Offer for Born-Again Christians!”
E-mail me if you have anything interesting to say.
Hmm, that’s odd. Your blog doesn’t work properly. I looked for my previous comments and they weren’t there – until I made another post! Odd.
OK, let’s cut to the chase. I won’t try and repost the post that went wrong, as I explained above.
This is the deal: I’m a pagan Brit (and a socialist.) I was trying to explain the other day WHY this movie – and most modern culture (including comic books (though no, Augustine, I *don’t* believe they were originally fascist, unless you believe that there were a lot of fascist working class lads wandering around 1930s Brooklyn – I doubt it) – why this movie is so fundamentally wrong, in its presentation, of everything. Its basic view of the world. It’s not alone – it’s symptomatic of a wrong-headed culture.
I was/will be trying to explain this to a US Christian friend of mine who is also a postmodernist (in religion terms – he’s what dey call emergent) and a writer. There’s much that I privately have to say to him, via e-mail. But I will try to explain a bit of it here. For public edification.
One of the things I was trying to convey to my e-pal was that, for my money, anyone who had paid reasonable attention in their English Literature classes or creative writing classes at ‘O’ level (Junior High in your terms), let alone at more senior educational levels, would have a pretty good idea why such “writing” as to be found in TDK simply doesn’t work.
I don’t know what all the overblown postmodernist people in the States teach their pupils, and I can’t say whether I was unusually fortunate in my allocation of English teacher. (He was good, though. Never over-intellectual – with THAT class, at that level? Must be joking! But plain and down-to-earth.)
Well anyway. When it came to creative writing, we were told to write “rounded” characters, no cardboard ones. And when it came to Eng. Lit. (taught by the same person, as they usually are at this level) he rubbed in the message by always going on about what made a particular character so three-dimensional and believable. We were given examples: Billy Casper, the child antihero in “Kes: A Kestrel for a Knave”. Milton’s Satan was cited once or twice at us, as an example from epic fiction (though I had to read it for myself as it was an ‘A’ level text) and in the drama we had the example of Shylock from Shakepeare’s A Merchant of Venice. (I loved that play.) The teacher, Mr Hubbard, seemed particularly keen that we wrote believable antagonists, and didn’t go around satisfied with cardboard pantomime villains.
(Sometimes old Hubbard could take it a bit far, in my opinion – like he said he didn’t like Star Wars because it didn’t have rounded enough characters! (Yeah but they’re archetypes.) Well either he hadn’t heard of those, or he didn’t want us to copy them because it would impair our attempts at realism.)
But anyway – the ROUNDED character was the thing – particularly when we were talking about “villains” – the antagonist(s) of a particular piece. This approach appealed to me as a young person, as much as anything because I always wanted to be fair! (Back in the days when I cared about such niceties.)
But – do you think that Messrs. Nolans could give a HOOT?? About said prescriptions? Obviously they don’t. Goodness knows what their old schoolteachers must think of them. I always find it… jarring, though, when people like that think they can break elementary rules, of all “good” literature – and still have all sorts of literati, chatterati and other seemingly educated types discussing their product as if it were Shakespeare. (I’m not referring to the format, medium, or genre – I really am referring to quality standards, I believe.)
ANYHOW. This is what I further told my pal:-
“They’ve all got it wrong, I’ll tell you: all these modern writers! Just as Shakespeare’s instinct was to make his villain (a Jew originally out of a medieval melodrama) more interesting, and believable – by giving him real motives and emotions (that’s late 16th-century humanism for you) – the modern writers’ instincts, looks like all of them – eg, Alan Moore, Sam Hamm, Jonathan Nolan – is to make the Joker LESS interesting, by making him a totally one-sided personality! ‘Pure evil’, etc etc, ‘bad seed’, as I remember Jack Nicholson saying about his version of the character. WHAT could possibly be interesting in THAT?? No *wonder* a refined person like myself found all these versions stupid and unsatisfactory! a) They’re not in keeping with humanism b) there was nothing in the original comics
to suggest the Joker *was* that one-sided… yes, they were like modern fairy tales, were the old rags, in many ways, but still I felt that they did quite a good job of keeping their villains interesting and “human”, and as I’ve said, I think they had more in common, with for example, Adlerian psychology, than post-modern obscurantism/moral superstition! c) On the subject of superstition – I DO NOT BELIEVE IN DEVILS!! As I’ve already explained, pagan thought rejects such concepts as contrary to Nature. So. There!
So why should *I* be fooled/convinced?!
Alan Moore – thinks himself a good writer! Humph! Well – why didn’t he create a ‘villain’ out of the Joker, that was at least as believable and sympathetic as Shakespeare’s Shylock, then?? (He bloody well didn’t. He didn’t because he can’t write very well!)
You’re telling me A. M. was trying to achieve something different – are you?? Well, OK, you TELL me what he was trying to achieve – and what’s good about it??
Apart from drowning in pretentious pseudo-philosophizing, as the later movie also tries to do to us!!
THIS IS, why I would literally like to BURN books like “The Killing Joke” – because they are such useless rubbish – and such a bad influence, on future producers of pop culture!! (The same goes for anything Frank Miller or Grant Morrison or Chuck Dixon produces, BTW.)
NO, Alan Moore *couldn’t* have done a ‘Shakespearian’, humanist, interpretation of the Joker, for his supposedly ‘mature’ comic. THAT would have just been SO much trouble for him! (And, of course, not in keeping with the ideological concerns of his political/financial masters.) And – and – he didn’t LIKE Shakespeare, did he?? Probably because Al thinks it’s ‘elitist’, because he got chucked out of school, probably for bunking off or selling drugs!! (One person got expelled from my sixth form college for just that reason, so Alan needn’t whine, if he found himself unable to ‘follow the rules’ for a few short years! I’ve read some of his whiny biographical interviews, you see.)
However, one sees that his (early?) education did have some effect on him – because in order to construct his villain, he slavishly follows the ‘demoniac’ theory, that he could ONLY have got from early exposure to religion (Catholic school??), and which has been magnified/enabled in Alan, by the superstitiously obscurantist ‘theories’ of the right-wing Zionists, such as Frank Miller (do some research into all these subjects, if you don’t believe me!), in which, of course, just as “America’s enemies” need to be portrayed in black-and-white tones – well – so do America’s fictional characters! Enter the Demon Joker!!
And of COURSE they have to demonize a Trickster, who is in most mythology, a helpful, questioning, teacher! WELL… as I’ve said elsewhere – it bears REMARKABLE resemblance, ideologically – only the results are not nearly as good, from a literary point of view – to what happened to various (late) pagan mythologies, specifically Norse, when their societies were taken over by Christianity in the Early Middle Ages. (It probably happened to the stories of the Slavs, too, only I don’t have the details.) The old-time gods were always turned into the demons of the new faith – and as with the medieval literary treatment of Loki, SOME of them are seen as more in the role of “devils” than others – nah what I mean?! And USUALLY the one cast in the role of Supreme Boogeyman, ISN’T a god of AUTHORITY – ie, Odin (Batman! Or Thor – you could compare Bats to (the mythological) Thor, as well, if you wanted! Including the ‘vigilante’ aspect – that’s a discussion for another day!)
The one cast in the ‘boogeyman’ role by the Christians (=Zionists=Neocons), is the naughty, disempowered, disreputable, always-in-trouble fringe mythical figure – the god of Questioning/Mischief/Rebellion – LOKI! (Joker.) So. There. You have it.
(Well, I mean, they wouldn’t make the King of the Gods into The Devil – that’d teach the newly-converted peasantry disrespect for Authority! FAR better to allegorize the Devil role onto the king’s *jester*, his under-privileged little bro… *That’s* not going to rock any boats, class-wise…)
But pagan faith, thought and ideology, in truth, HAS no boogeymen! (This was a later invention/imposition by misguided people who hated the natural world.)
So there you have it again, from me!!”
Strong words? Well, I have strong views to convey to all my acquaintances!
And I do WISH you Americans – libruls and the rest of you – would be truly able to see the amazingly negative, stultifying impact the extremes of monotheism – Fundamentalist Christianity – has had on your society. Bet you’re all sitting at home smugly laughing. Bet you’re saying: THAT doesn’t have any effect on Me! I don’t believe in the Sky Fairy… etc.
But, dears, it doesn’t really matter if YOU do or not. Millions of others where you live do. And it’s not even really about whether a majority of Americans literally believe in Jebus, Born-Again-ism, Rapture or anything else. They don’t have to. What matters is, it’s a way of thinking that has affected the ENTIRETY of your culture, from top to bottom. It’s not a question of whether Chris/Jon Nolan believe in Jebus, either. They don’t have to. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised if they were non-lapsed Catholics.) I think they get the “worst of both worlds”, if you ask me, into their movie. Fundamentalist Christian morality (again, if you don’t believe me, just google how many Calvinist Christian sites raptured over the movie, and spoke approvingly of the Joker’s line that “all humans are fundamentally evil) with added Nietzschean-style existentialist gloom and nihilism. A match made in the Christian Hell.
So – what caused the “change in tone” of so much popular culture – movies and superheroes? For there obviously was one! Well… when did the Christian Right really start to get a foothold in the country’s politics?? It started at about the time Ronald Reagan got in, didn’t it… and he started demolishing workers’ rights. The Christian Right were a great help to him in this. They may not like *everything* about today’s popular culture – far from it! But there are enough web sites around to tell me that many American Christians are fanatical moviegoers or fanboys of something or other. I think that basically they are responding to the *fundamental* message that all such productions preach – fear. (Definitely not Christian Love. But then, a lot of Christianity around nowadays doesn’t preach love, but fear. It’s all become politicized.. in the most negative possible cultural way.)
There are certain cultural assumptions, which are deeply riven into the fabric of a society, once the ideology which those assumptions are a part of gets to be dominant in that society. One of these – and it’s a fatal one – is the Christian/monotheistic obsession with dualism. It’s one of the reasons there are so many religious wars in the modern world, and it’s a reason why “out-groups” (eg Native Americans, Palestians) are treated so badly.
If you learn as much about the subject as I have, you’re going to wish that our ancestors had stuck with paganism. Seriously.
And as I’ve said, only a MONOtheistic culture believes in ‘demons’ per se. Makes it very convenient when the time comes along to demonize ‘the other’ ‘the not us’. Hence – some reconstructionists, such as myself, theorize that the ORIGINAL Heathen version of the god Loki (who I adore) was NOT an ‘evil’ god, and he probably didn’t do all of the things attributed to him by Christian medieval writer Snorri Sturloson. Nature religions don’t have any time for “pure unadulterated evil”, as Christopher Nolan described his villain in interviews. And as any Wiccan will tell you – WE don’t worship the Devil – because WE (of the natural faiths) do not believe in him!
But Chris Nolan obviously does.
@ Robert K. Blechman… Hmm, I really thought you were being serious with your post – until I saw the end bit about Bourne!
But, this: “Like Keaton’s Beetlejuice, The Joker in this latest Batman-iteration is the ultimate trickster: a destroyer of worlds and a slayer of men, whose word cannot be trusted and whose motives cannot be divined.”
I’m a pagan, as stated, and I object to that definition of the Fool/Trickster (originally a pagan archetype as everything originally WAS pagan!). WHO says that the Trickster is “a destroyer of worlds and a slayer of men”? Christians, probably, because they see him as their Devil. Bah.
(And don’t expect me not to object! Whenever someone makes negative claims about Jesus on the web or Youtube, all the Christians are in there protesting immediately!)
REALLY the Trickster is a positive Archetype going back into the most ancient roots of human psychology, and featured in all ancient mythology. I will not cite, for example, Hindu mythology, for I do not know very much about it. But I know well that Tricksters appear in Native American folklore (‘Old Man’ Coyote, Raven) and African/Afro-American folklore (Anansi, Brer Rabbit) Greek myth (Hermes – and also the martyred light-bringer, Prometheus) and Norse myth – the notorious and, as I have already said, unfairly-maligned (and exploited by later religions) Loki!! In fact, of course, they appear all over the world. And almost never are they something ultimately negative.
I would dispute that the ultimate trickster is “destroyer of worlds and slayer of men” – MONOTHEISM – that’s not the ultimate Trickster, that’s the ultimate (Great, as Islam would say!) Satan. MONOTHEISMS don’t tend to Tricksters. They have Satans. Now, what the Trickster is, he is helpful, inventive, sometimes a teacher figure, especially in mystic traditions (examples, Hodja Nasruddin, Yoda! Legba in Voudon.). He is an inventor and a culture hero, a provider and an innovator and… everything marvellous! Words don’t exist to describe his wonderfulness. (Bah, so what if he pinches stuff every now and again! That’s part of his creativity – and THAT is why gods like Hermes also acted as patron of thieves!)
Yes, he has his “dark” side. Yes, he’s sly. Yes, he has a sharp tongue! (Now why else would I worship him?!) And of course he can be cast as a rogue – as the original Joker was in the comics. (All this rubbish about him being an extreme character was all later. It’s a mirage created by Frank Miller and Alan Moore, who I have already proved by precepts I was taught, can’t write for nuts! They can only hynotize people into believing nonsense. Ought to work for Bush – oh, I forgot, they do!)
Yes, Tricksters *can* be criminals. They can lie, cheat, and steal. They won’t always hold back from killing. It all depends on the situation that they find themselves in. If they’re at a disadvantage – like Brer Rabbit – they won’t hesitate to use every “trick” in the book to put themselves at a greater advantage. Another really good Trickster, and the fiction he appears in, which everybody on here should read if they care about such subjects, is Aiken Drum, from Julian May’s “The Many-Colored Land”, part of her sf series “Saga of the Exiles”. He epitomises everything I’ve just gone through – including the lying, cheating and stealing parts. (However, as a youngster he is not violent.) Only, see, unlike dumb right-wing movie characters (at least one commenter on this forum agrees that Warner Bros is a “conservative” movie studio!) he doesn’t think that nihilistic murder-suicide is a good idea. When the libro-authoritarian govt of his own time wants to get rid of him, he opts for exile into the past, where he cunningly focuses on “getting along and moving up” – until the time comes for his own (successful) bid to be king! Now THERE’s a young trickster of some real ambition! And, as my old teach would say – I think even he would admit – a thoroughly rounded character, in sf, to boot! Why don’t they make movies out of that?? (Or out of Stephen Donaldson’s fantasies.) Obviously not dumb enough, eh?!
I can think of a more recent novel, which was well and sensitively written, unlike Dark Knight, but which was basically wrongheaded in its “theories”. It was “The Book of Lost Things”, by John Connolly: an adult fairy tale. However, I did *not* like the character of “The Crooked Man” in it, because (as I shall be writing to the author by and by) – specifically because he was called Trickster! No he’s not, I almost screamed at the page. He’s a fairy tale version of Satan – and much darker than the conventional representation of the Devil in proper fairy tales (in many of which, Old Nick appears as a (semi)comic character). But here’s the Big Bad Boogeyman on an outing again… Born-Again-Christian-influenced thought, at work in a fiction near you.
There *is* a difference between the archetypes I refer to, Mr Blechman. Mostly, it’s a difference of (religious) world-view. Guess what – the right-wing fundie one sucks.
Ah, I wish someone would look in on this site! I can see by previous posts that this page still gets a look in now and again, on average every month or so. I hope someone *does* come and have a look, so as maybe to debate me on some of the points I wish to make, on Hollywood “epic” movies as much as anything else.
How about my Christian-fundamentalism in da movies/comix theory?? I believe, you see, that in truth, this religious (and political) IDEOLOGY has a much bigger, deeper… and insidious-er… effect on American culture than every liberal on here would believe to be the case! You don’t really see it unless you step outside the looking-glass world… preferably coming from another country AND a non-monotheistic religious perspective. (That’s why I’m so glad I became a pagan convert!)
A sop to Steven Augustine: You know, Steven, I’ve been thinking, because I’m still formulating arguments to throw at this e-pal of mine. (At the rate I’m going, I’ll have to send him an e-book.) But something you said on a post on the Valve (?) stuck in my mind. Now, I personally don’t believe that you grew up between the world wars – unless you mean *after* WWII. That’s more likely. But you were saying something about the “hipness” and irreverent nature, of older, 20th century American popular culture… and thinking back, to my own childhood in the Seventies and earlier Eighties (for examples of cartoons to discuss with my friend) I did remember a ****load of cartoons from the Sixties, Seventies and so on, which if not always “hip” (some were hip! “Pixie and Dixie” was hep-cat!) were usually very IRREVERENT – and were geared towards making kids LAUGH… and adults, too. Most of these were products of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio, which I believe started sometime in the 1930s, making the famous Tom and Jerry cartoons (which sadly are not much to be seen, on British terrestrial TV any more.) They progressed to many other cartoons, just as funny, sometimes much more absurd – and usually, yes, VERY irreverent. Many of these cartoons, for some reason, were on the topic of *bears* challenging authority! (“Yogi Bear”, “The Hair Bear Bunch”, etc.) Sometimes cats were the heroic antiheroes – cf “Top Cat”. Authority figures – policemen, park keepers, zoo keepers… any kind of “keeper” in these kind of cartoons, were generally *ridiculed* (as schoolteachers tended to be in any British production for kids!) The kids were definitely not encouraged to “bow down” before authority, and this, I think, was a good thing, by and large. Also, I expect it was thought “cool” during those times, to “challenge” authoriy – and kids are always supposed to be into “what’s cool” aren’t they – so the programme-makers, schedulers etc would have strained to provide them with that.
*Nowadays* though – I’m just going with Augustine’s train of thought which I saw somewhere – they don’t seem to be presenting kids with the same *irreverent* characters, as examples of cool! Kids are *far* more likely to be presented with, let me see, “cool” cops, forensic people, “spy kids” (that seems to be a favourite one!) “cool” model-looking characters looking like Bratz dolls that nobody could really aspire to look like – etc. NOT really very encouraging, is it??
(AND, funnily enough, they seem to have taken nearly all the *older* examples of cartoons OFF THE AIR… on British terrestrial channels, at least.. *and* on the digital/satellite kids’ channels over here, they mainly show *new* cartoons. I think Warner or someone has a “golden oldies” channel but I’m not sure if I could get it (or if I can afford it!) I miss things like “Wacky Races”! (I think the last time I saw an episode of that, or an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, was in the early 2000s.)
There is one old-time cartoon that the BBC still keep showing at the moment – and I know this is personal to me, but I find it annoying! (If I see it on again and nothing else, I’m going to complain to the BBC.) Why is it so dislikeable? It’s “Batfink” – one of the old 60s cartoons and definitely not the best show. The thing that strikes me about THAT… is that, well, you might consider it “satirical”… but it’s nowhere near as irreverent as the old “Batman” TV show – or “Dastardly and Mutley” for that matter… and it portrays this bat-creature who is basically always sucking up to the police… I find it quite sycophantic! (Any response to that from Steven?)
THAT and them showing the equally awful (in my view – it’s full of the sort of lame moralizing – at the end of all the “dark” imagery – that you used to get in the worse kind of 80s shows) “The Batman” cartoon show(*not* to be confused with the Dini/Timm one of the 1990s, which was in my view, though not perfect, much better!) means that I have pretty much had it with the BBC and their children’s programme department. I wouldn’t think it was a very good selection if I actually had children!
But I agree – there’s certainly nothing to rival the old 60s “Batman” TV series… unless you count a hundred amateur send-ups of TDK on YouTube! (I suppose the public now has that as an outlet, but it’s not the same as something that comes through broadcase media.)
Now that old “Batman” TV series, THAT was Deconstructionism for kids! (Don’t you see all those French theorists, they had their heyday in the 1960s, having an influence on that?) But, see, I don’t see the American creators of that series, whose names I can’t remember off the top of my head, but who reside securely in a “batbook” on one of my shelves at the other end of the house.. as wanting to “make fun of” the original creators, their ideas, or thinking that their creation was “fascist”. No, I think that their impetus was completely other. (Although reputedly Bob Kane did not much like the show.) I don’t think they wanted to “destroy” Batman, any more than “Austin Powers” is out to destroy James Bond movies. I think they just wanted to have a bit of fun (a rare and possibly getting rarer concept these days) and I think their purpose/shtick was to send up CONVENTIONS in popular art. The CLIFFHANGER device being one notable example – that however, I can’t see there being much use being made of in *comics* of that particular DATE – because most of them were monthlies and a story was generally concluded in one issue! *However*, the “cliffhanger” would have been a big feature in the contemporary *movie serials* that certainly inspired Kane and Finger!
Anyway, if you’re “For real” (and if you ARE a genuine scholar of pop culture you’ll have kept up with what “children’s shows” and so on have been doing over the years!)… well, anyway, I think you must have had pretty miserable parents if they told you that comics were “fascist”! (Did they tell you that about, I don’t know, cowboy TV shows, as well!) Hmm. I think pop culture underwent enough demonizing in the 20th century with Dr Wertham and with people saying that all comics were evol horror comics, etc, etc. (And the irony IS, that now that prediction actually does seem to have belatedly come true – ie, now that many comics really *are* horrific – whereas in days gone by it was only really a few “true crime” comics that were – the irony is, that NOW, nobody seems to be ****ing doing anything about it!)
But did you know that the Mary Whitehouse etc. propagandizing against “horror comics” was the reason I was *not* allowed to read American comics as a younger child – *only* British ones, preferably educational (Beano and Dandy too got sniffed at, though I loved those, and I had a *very* good source for reading them, which I won’t divulge here!).. oh yes, *and* Disney comics, which my mum thought were “all right”. But NOT the American ones – NOT even “Planet of the Apes” – though my mother later saw the movies and loved them! (And I suppose she thought “Star Trek” was OK, because she’d seen the show. But I still wasn’t allowed any annuals or anything – I had to get them as presents from friends or in jumble sales! I feel deprived!)
So you see what a blanket “pop culture is trash” ban can do to a child! (Even if it’s “American pop culture is trash” or something like that. All propaganda. Only the trouble is – now I’m fearing it’s becoming true!)
Just what the fuck are you blabing on about Liz K? I stoped reading when you mentioned that The killing joke is crap. Alan Moore wanted to show us the human aspect of the caracter not the demon that you keep on mentioning. The joker in the killing joke being at his sanest attempts to explain why he is bahaving with no morals and always trying make fun at everything.It is as a poster said above me he is super sane. He isnt an evill person nor an absolute anarchist ( meaning that he wants society to fall apart ) he is trying to rationalize the world is. In a world were cruel chance can take everything precious from you what value do freinds, family or morals have? That is why the jokers anarchy is a state of mind simply bealiving that the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules and see the funny side in everything because it simply mekes sense even if it sounds paradoxical.And that in my oppinion is the killing jokes genius
What I think about Joker’s psyche is- Whatever doesn’t make me stranger, only kills me.
Great read, and I wish I could elaborate on my debate with you as eloquently as you have chosen to do, but in my years I have come to discover, sometimes, a short, sweet and simple reply is all that is needed. A culture cannot be labeled wrong-headed or flawed for their beliefs, be they accurate of not. Culture will always have an effect on the mannerisms and thinking nature of their people.
Such great reads like “The Art of War” couldn’t exist in just any culture. A well rounded character is not always one who is traditional either, whether it concerns a writing formula or not. I can certainly say that a character like the Joker could be simply what he was stated to be in the movie itself. “A man that you do not fully understand”.
Devil or no devil, there are men who kill for no reason, or for reasons that no other person who considers themselves normal (or sane) can fully comprehend. However, as you know yourself, a hero is only as good as his villains. I can honestly say IMO, the Joker WAS the only class of criminal worthy of battling a man who can take on an entire army by himself.
In retrospect, the Japanese are criticized for their Manga and Anime, as well as the Italians for their poor interpretations on westerns. There is NO ultimate formula to creating a believable character, nor should there ever be. That’s what makes creative writing, creative. I’m certain your very opinionated English teacher has yet to write a “New York Times” best seller himself.
“You can either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
-Shaum
The scarist thing about the Joker is that he might very well be right. He’s a demon philosopher, a murderous Socrates who has freed himself from the cares and fears of Man.
Because how DO you respond, in a world gone insane? In a world where no one panics when They die, because They aren’t Us?
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