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Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Who is the Joker?

First of all, I promise this is not becoming a comic book blog. It just so happens that the big movie people have been talking about right at the same moment I've begun this blog is Todd Phillips' Joker... right after I wrote a post about the X-Men. Yeah, okay, I know, I'm sorry: I do like muh superheroes. If you're either Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, then this might not be the blog for you.

Joaquin Phoenix is the most recent actor to take on the role of
the Clown Prince of Crime.
So did you see Joker? It's a masterpiece, I'm told. I mean, I saw it as well, and it was... fine. I saw it with my friend Ted. Ted and I have been friends since high school and we are now, er, older than that, and I am one-hundred percent certain that there is nobody in the world with whom I have seen more movies in my life than Ted. After the credits rolled on Joker and the lights came up (literally; Ted always sits through all the credits for every movie, and this, too, has been a thing since high school) Ted turned to me and said, "That was one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen." To which I replied, "Really?" Silence of the Lambs, I think, is more 'disturbing' than JokerSeven is more disturbing. Pauly Shore's Bio-Dome is, in its way, more disturbing. Joker is violent, to be sure, but I'm not even sure if it's any more 'disturbing' than Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the film it takes large swaths of inspiration from.

This is all really just a prelude to what interests me about Joker, which is the Joker. As we approached this film's release, I said to anyone who asked me if I wanted to see it: "I wouldn't want to see a Batman movie without a villain; why would I want to see a Joker movie without a Batman?" The Joker, though, is the one Batman villain who can confidently carry a film by himself. As I said to one rabid Joker fan on Twitter the other day: people wouldn't exactly be lining up in the streets to see Penguin or Clayface or Killer Moth.

The Joker, the character, is often described as the yin to Batman's yang, except when a particular writer is going about telling a story about how similar the two characters are, as writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland did in the seminal graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, and Sean Murphy did more recently in the excellent graphic novel Batman: White Knight. Ironically, both of these tomes offer new variations of what I find most fascinating about the Joker, his origin story... or more accurately, his lack thereof.

Batman's origin story is easy and universally adapted across mediums: a young Bruce Wayne was present when his parents were gunned down by a criminal. Usually the gunning down takes place in a Gotham City back alley dubbed Crime Alley, and usually the Waynes have just exited the theater, very often (but not always) after seeing a Zorro movie. Over the years the identity of the killer of the Waynes has been revised for the purposes of a particular story (in comics lore a crook named Joe Chill killed the Waynes; in Tim Burton's film Batman it was Jack Napier, the mob enforcer who would eventually become the Joker.) But the core of Batman's motivation remains the same: he saw his parents die at the hands of a criminal and determined to wage war against the Gotham City underworld.

The Red Hood.
The Joker's origin story and alter-ego are, by contrast, extremely fluid. The character first appeared, fully-formed, in 1940's Batman #1 with many of his signatures already in place: his chalk-white skin, green hair, purple suit, and tendency to kill his victims with rictus-inducing "Joker venom." The Joker's creators, writer Bill Finger and artists Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, initially declined to present an origin story for the character, deciding that some of his allure came from the mystery of his past. It wasn't until 1951 that the first telling of the Joker's origin was told in Detective Comics #168. In this tale the Joker is a laboratory worker who dons a costumed identity, the Red Hood, to rob his employer of a million dollars. Stopped by Batman, the worker falls into a vat of chemical waste and emerges with bleached skin and green hair.

The Joker and his unnamed earlier self from
Batman: The Killing Joke.
1988's The Killing Joke expands on the 1951 tale, presenting the Joker as an unnamed engineer who tries stand-up comedy and fails miserably, only to fall in with criminals, be forced into the Red Hood identity to serve as a distraction so his partners can rob the diamond exchange next door to the chemical plant. To escape an approaching Batman, the failed comic jumps into a vat of chemicals that bleaches his skin and turns his hair green which, along with the recent death in a household accident of his wife and unborn child, drives him insane. One year later, in 1989, that origin was deviated upon yet again in Burton's Batman, where mob enforcer Jack Napier, played by Jack Nicholson, is double-crossed by his boss, falls into a vat of acid, and emerges a lunatic with bleached-white skin and a permanently disfigured rigor-mortis smile on his face.

It is The Killing Joke, however, that offered the true key element of Joker's origin story. In it, the tale of his own origin is told through flashbacks by the Clown Prince himself, and in true unreliable narrator style he admits of his pre-Joker days, "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... if I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" This piece of dialogue, much like The Killing Joke in its entirety, builds upon the foundation of origin uncertainty established by the character's creators way back in 1940. 

Heath Ledger with an Oscar posthumously for his portrayal
of the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.
The Joker remains the ultimate multiple choice character. Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, has played the Joker in voice-over performance for almost 30 years in various mediums, and many die-hard Batman fans consider his to be the definitive performative version of the character. Heath Ledger played the Joker to great critical acclaim in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight, written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan. The Dark Knight is my personal favorite Joker story, because of all the origins the character has ever had this is arguably the most ambiguous. This version of the Joker does not have bleached skin; instead, he greases his hair and paints his face white. What he has are scars on his face, extending his smile up past its natural limits, and three times in the film he asks other characters if they want to know how he got them... but each time, the story is different. And when then-Detective Gordon captures the Joker midway through the film and the mayor of Gotham asks what the police have on him, Gordon replies, "Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name. No other alias."

Jared Leto also played the Joker once.

A reformed Joker, with Harley Quinn at
his side, looms over the Caped Crusader
in Sean Murphy's Batman: White Knight.
Batman: White Knight is a 2018 limited series comic book that tells the tale of a reformed Joker. In White Knight, writer/artist Sean Murphy is purposefully working from a potpourri of elements gathered from the vast history of Batman interpretations over the previous 80 years of storytelling, best exemplified in a key story moment when several of the characters in the tale each drive one of Batman's many collected Batmobiles: the one from the early comic book years, the one from 1960's Adam West series, from Burton's Batman, from Batman: The Animated Series, from the Dark Knight trilogy, etc., etc. That gathering of diverse elements is present as well in the series' depiction of the Joker, who is given a definitive backstory for this standalone, non-canon story. White Knight's Joker is Jack Napier (as in Burton's Batman), a failed stand-up comic turned minor crook (as in The Killing Joke), who puts on make-up (as does Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight) and turns to crime alongside a lover/accomplice named Harley Quinn (invented in the 90's for Batman: The Animated Series.) White Knight even contradicts Joker's origins within its own pages: although it is heavily implied that Napier put on make-up to become the Joker, later in the story Napier reverts to the chalk-faced Joker persona spontaneously and instantaneously. 

This brings us back full circle to the most recent retelling of his origin, as featured in Todd Phillips' Joker. In this version of the story, Joaquin Phoenix in an excellent performance portrays Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill man who is driven slowly but surely by an uncaring system into the psychotic clown-faced criminal identity of the Joker. In this telling, the Joker's face is not white. In this telling, the Joker wears make-up. In this telling, Arthur has a stint as a failed stand-up comic and the resulting public derision does more than any vat of chemicals does to turn him into the Joker. And in this telling, Joker is revealed halfway through to be, as he always is, the most unreliable of narrators, a notion that is reinforced in the final shots of the film which place Arthur into a ephemeral version of Arkham Asylum.

But it is the third-to-last shot of the film that, really, is the most important moment of all in both the film Joker and in the existence of the Joker as a character. Arthur-slash-Joker sits in Arkham, chuckling to himself, prompting his therapist to ask him, "What's so funny?" For no more than a second, we flash back into Crime Alley, where a young Bruce Wayne stands between the bodies of his parents, slowly looking up to face the camera.

Emperor Joker
Hold onto that thought. I'd like to reference one final story: the year 2000 saw the release of the comic-book crossover Emperor Joker, a DC Universe-spanning event that, through some very comic-booky shenanigans, saw the Joker obtain near-omnipotent Infinity Gauntlet-level powers, free to shape, create, and destroy reality as he saw fit. In the end of the story, Joker's downfall is that, while he has the power to destroy all of reality, that would mean destroying Batman, as well: and in a rare moment of clarity, he realizes that this is something he cannot do, for without the Batman, the Joker would not exist.

And that's why the only shot that matters in Joker is that one of Bruce Wayne and his fallen parents, and why the entire film arguably takes place in Arthur's head: the Joker has no true, honest, origin that "counts," because his entire purpose is to provide an equal and opposing force to the Batman. Every protagonist needs a great antagonist. It's one of the few truisms of storytelling: for drama there must be conflict, for conflict there must be a hero blocked by an opposing force. The Joker is Batman's opposition. He's a near-demonic force of nature through which any number of tales can be told. The one constant in his fictional biography is Batman, an agent of order and lawfulness. Joker truly does not need an origin, because he only exists to be the opposite of all that the Batman is. All we need to know about the Joker, honestly, is that for all the death, chaos, and destruction he gleefully leaves in his wake, Batman will always rise up in opposition to everything he stands for.

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