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The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime [Book], 2015
Since his Bronze Age revision, the Joker has consistently served as an archetypal trickster, alternating between clever, nonviolent whimsy and vicious malice. Like Trickster, he is well-versed in social engineering and stagecraft, practical jokes, and idiomatic verbal humor, employing each to maximize his sense of schadenfreude. This behavior, which typifies the Joker ethos, is generally misconstrued as sociopathic but actually prizes cleverness, inventiveness, and Dadaist absurdity as much as the destabilization of social and emotional expectations. This convoluted dynamic is principled on the ludic rationality and anomic subversiveness that govern the monomania for which the Joker is best known. As the Joker evolves from prankster to psychopath to anomos personified, his character continually embodies the disrupter culture intrinsic to both trickster mythology and contemporary phenomena such as hacker culture and trolling. The success of modern disrupter culture is measured in " lulz, " most simply characterized as pleasure derived from disturbing another's emotional equilibrium (Schwartz, 2008, para. 8). As the central organizing logic of the Random-/b/ board of the imageboard 4chan 1 , " doing it for the lulz " mirrors the Joker ethos: it too seeks to transcend conventional rules of engagement, interrogate restrictive order, create social disjuncture, and above all take pleasure in provocation. Like Trickster, /b/ users expose the arbitrariness of social structures and perpetuate online culture in doing so; like Joker, these users don't require a motive or catalyst for their actions or for the acquisition of lulz. The Joker ethos is thus an especially applicable paradigm for understanding the 4channer as trickster-troll, especially on /b/, where trolling 1 The website 4chan, located at http://www.4chan.org, is a bulletin-board system for discussion and image-sharing. It is divided into approximately fifty themed discussion boards designated by letters within backslashes, such as Anime-/a/, Comics-/co/, and Random-/b/, where subject matter is literally random (" 4chan FAQ, " n.d.)
In this, my research master thesis, I looked at laughter as a form of resistance in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke, Tim Burton's Batman and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. The aim is to analyze if the Joker's most famous characteristic, his continuous laughter, can be seen as a form of resistance in itself. Following two laughing theorists, Nietzsche and Foucault, this work analyzes the laughter and the madness of the Joker in three of its most famous incarnations.
It has been over twenty-five years since Jack Nicholson’s performance as the iconic Joker in the 1989 Batman, and still the Joker on film mesmerizes audiences. This study will examine depictions of the Joker in the American motion pictures Batman (1989) and The Dark Knight (2008), beginning with a brief description of the disputed origins of the Joker in the annals of the comic book industry and inspiration for the character in early film, with a word about physiognomy. Next, the paper describes the nebulous origins of the Joker within the narratives of the Batman movies by way of comparison to background given in comic books. After establishing the Joker’s history (or lack thereof), I argue that the character comes to embody different kinds of collective fears and evils in different eras, and these have a relationship to physiognomy. In the 1980s, which saw the rise of neoliberalism, the Joker embodied anxiety surrounding America’s inner cities. In the post-9/11 era, he represents anxiety regarding new global cities and the threat of terrorism, institutional evil, and mental illness. In these two films, the Joker embodies the tensions of whiteness and blackness, beauty and disfigurement, and commentary on institutions and networks. I examine these tensions with reference to the history of physiognomy and contextualize the Joker’s relationship to Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Bruno Latour) and cyborgs (Donna J. Haraway). The paper concludes with a reflection on the meaning of Batman’s intimate relationship with the Joker, that is, if Batman and the Joker could have been two sides of the same person.
Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 2019
Whether in comic books or their movie adaptations, Batman stories return obsessively to the moment Thomas and Martha Wayne were killed. Using Cathy Caruth's definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as "the overwhelming events of the past repeatedly possess[ing], in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them", this essay focuses on how Batman's origin story must be continually revisited to allow him access to his heroic identity. The dreamlike "oneiric climate" of continuity as described by Umberto Eco, however, makes forgetting an ongoing threat, and later comic book events such as Crisis On Infinite Earths attempted to wipe superhero memories clean. Subsequently Grant Morrison et al. sought to bestow "hyperconsciousness" to Batman during their run, allowing him and his stories access to seven decades of previous adventures-and transforming the narrative experience into a game of recognition for the long-term audience. But both Morrison's and Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's subsequent time on the Batman title inflicted amnesia on their hero. The former created a vicious vigilante, without a secret identity holding him back; the latter a well-adjusted Bruce Wayne, without a Batman at all. Examining the differences in these approaches to memory illustrates how remembering itself is a heroic act in the tragic continuity of superhero stories. Full text available: https://refractory-journal.com/im-eight-years-old-again-batmans-tragedy-memory-and-continuity/
When one thinks of the archetypical hero versus villain in the world of comics, Batman and The Joker often come to mind. They connect to the concept of the eternal battle between oppositions. Choosing a side, however, is relative. Heroes can look like villains through the eyes of a hero’s villain. It is an argument that The Joker uses to challenge Batman, in Arkham Asylum. He is tricked into accepting The Joker’s invitation to the Feast of Fools, which was a theatrical event that dates as far back as the Middle Ages. Its contents usually revolved around social and moral criticisms of their time. The fact that an accusation full of reason comes from the mouth of a madman, is an attempt to obscure its contents through comical absurdity. According to Foucault, by the end of the Middle Ages, European literature had stigmatized the madman as a satirical figure by attributing to him the lack of reason to the rest of his repertoire, which consisted of poverty, crime, and ugliness. By reducing the rejects of society to the point of comical absurdity, it often helped reinforce the position of reason, but sometimes it backfires. The absurd claim of the insane is actually a useful tool in philosophical logic. A reductio ad absurdum is a process of refutation on grounds that an absurdity will follow the entailment if we were to accept a certain claim. Morrison claims that Batman would only be mentally unstable if he did not wear a costume and channeled his pain through violence, but so does The Joker, and he is labeled insane. The whole structure rests on the hidden premise that the rich are superior to the poor, who are monsterized like the fool is ridiculed. Nietzsche himself thought that if a person was ugly, they were automatically also criminals. What a reader is subjected to, in the Batverse, is a class warfare between the rich and the poor, authority and the whistleblower, or the wolves and the sheep. There is a tacit agreement at play, and it is The Joker who engages the reader to question that agreement.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2019
Mikołaj Marks MA thesis, 2019
Legendary Caesar and the Architect Ariadne: Narrative, Myth and Psychology in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception, 2013