“Joker” and the Will To Destroy

Joaquin Phoenix's Joker

I initially didn’t intend to watch Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker movie trailer. I had various reasons for this: because recent DC movies have been mostly disappointing, or because the makeup scheme looks too deliberate, or because I just can’t keep abreast of today’s overproduced superhero industry. But like countless Americans, I couldn’t resist social media buzz, and I dialed it up. Now I find myself, shall we say, torn.

Audiences who don’t read comics probably accept one of the various prior big-screen Joker depictions, especially Jack Nicholson’s appearance in Tim Burton’s Batman, as authoritative. But Burton arguably damaged the character, by insisting he have the kind of character arc taught in university-level screenwriting classes: he needed to come from somewhere, and be going somewhere else. In the comics, the Joker doesn’t come from anywhere.

When Joker debuted in comics, in Batman #1 (1940), he had no “real” name. He had no visible motivation, made no demands, and simply announced his intent to kill. Then, having made the announcement, he carried through. This begins the arc which carries through today, though inconsistently: Joker destroys because that’s his nature. Unlike, say, Catwoman, a thief, or Scarecrow, a mad scientist, Joker doesn’t want anything. He just kills.

Heath Ledger's Joker

This doesn’t always sit comfortably with comfortably with contemporary writing scholars. Good villains, we’re assured in critical literature, have underlying motivations. Even the Joker’s publisher, DC Comics, has broadly accepted the story from Alan Moore’s 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke, which gives Joker’s insanity roots in a specific incident. It doesn’t clarify or systematize Joker’s actions, but it does establish a concrete inciting moment.

Yet this devalues the character, particularly from the context which birthed him. Gotham, a cartoonized depiction of Depression-era Manhattan, reflected the anomie of its original era pretty accurately. Research at the Santa Fe Institute has persuasively argued that cities, which provide opportunities for random and unanticipated interaction, intensify all aspects of human ingenuity. Large cities create more art, science, and innovation, but also more crime.

The positive and negative of urban life are inseparable. In order to avail ourselves of employment, culture, and other life opportunities, city-dwellers knowingly put themselves at risk of crime. They consider that an acceptable risk. Cities, like Gotham, intensify all aspects of life, creating a richer pallette for creativity, but also occasionally destroying the unprepared. Batman is prepared for city life, and flourishes, albeit violently. Joker is unprepared, and pays.

We see this somewhat in the Joaquin Phoenix trailer. Joker starts as Arthur Fleck, a momma’s boy and aspiring comedian whose domestic life, apparently nurturing his mother through early-onset dementia, leaves him too depleted to pursue his career. His name provides clues. He might be King Arthur, living like a peasant, awaiting rediscovery and coronation. But ultimately he’s a fleck of a man and, like dandruff, destined to get discarded.

See, that’s actually a pretty good kickoff for a story arc. In the Scorsese movies this trailer visually references, like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, a fundamentally admirable but weak character gets crushed and becomes the very thing he previously deplored. Audiences rightly consider these movies classics because they say something important about us: we all contain the capacity to destroy the very virtues we so assiduously create.

Jack Nicholson's Joker

But. Within the Batman duality, Joker isn’t a put-upon everyman. Understanding Batman’s continuity requires a willingness to resign traditional morality and instead see things through Nietzschean eyes. Nietzsche insisted modernity required superior minds willing to resist reducing everything to “good” and “evil.” Rather, will we complete ourselves by asserting our reality into the world? Most people, he insisted, won’t have courage enough to demand the world notice them.

Faced with the way modernity strips outdated concepts of meaning, Batman and Joker respond in opposite ways. Batman, like the Greek tragic heroes Nietzsche admired, asserts himself boldly on Gotham, creating order, or pockets of order anyway. Joker, by contrast, surrenders to the one force Nietzsche abhorred, nihilism, and simply tries sow chaos. Joker doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t demand anything. He just exists to destroy.

Near the trailer’s end, we see Phoenix’s Arthur applying Joker makeup. That says everything. Arthur chooses to become Joker, and re-applies the makeup daily. “Doing Joker” is, to Arthur, an active and continuing choice. But Joker doesn’t choose to do Joker, he Is Joker, a condition of existence independent of will—and thus, in Nietzschean terms, a failure of will. Arthur continues the action; therefore he wants something. Therefore he isn’t the Joker.