VILLAINS come and go throughout the years, but the Joker has been one of the most enduring villains of of all time and one of the most iconic villains in American literature. Created in 1940 by Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger and Bob Kane, the sadistic self-proclaimed "clown prince of crime" has had more effect upon the Batman's life than any other of his enemies. The Joker brutally killed Jason Todd, the second Robin, by beating him with a crowbar and locking him in a warehouse rigged with explosives. He paralyzed Barbara Gordon, former Batgirl and daughter of Commissioner Gordon, by shooting her in the spine. He shot and killed Gordon's second wife, Sarah. And the list goes on.
Yet for all the waste of bodies left broken in his wake, the Joker has no sensation of guilt and no remorse. He also wields an extensive array of poisons, venoms, acids and lethal equipment. These coupled with his sheer unpredictability make him the Batman's true archenemy. He acts outside of social order, even as the Batman tries to uphold it. He is the injustice to Batman's justice, the chaos to his order, the black to his white, the evil to his good and the dice-roll which could land any side up to Batman's careful premeditated plans. As the Batman said in the animated series episode Christmas with the Joker: "It's never easy with the Joker." The Joker embodies the storytelling archetype of the Trickster, even as Batman embodies the Hero.
But what makes a man so twisted, if the Joker indeed has any semblance of humanity left? What could make any human being take such an extreme route of hedonistic violence and carelessness toward the well-being of his fellow man? What makes a man chuckle, guffaw and laugh at the misery and suffering of others, assuming from pain some sort of wicked punch-line?
The answer to these questions, to the question: what made the Joker, has been explored by numerous DC writers and artists. But perhaps, as is befitting a character who needs no introduction, the origins of the Joker have always changed from story to story to story. Was he a failed comedian who turned to a life of crime? Was he a man who lost it all in one bet? Was he a poor guy who just had one really, really bad day? Did he actually tumble into a vat of bubbling chemicals? Did he truly suffer under the hands of an inexperienced plastic surgeon? Was his father really a drinker and a fiend? Did he really stick razor blades in his mouth?
Ultimately, there is no answer and Batman readers the world over will be left guessing while Batman writers constantly reinvent the character as he evolves and changes.
But the true theme of all the Joker's origins is that he faced some event, some trauma, some undeniably disturbing and life-changing moment, and never got over it. Or maybe... he did. Maybe the Joker persona was the way in which that original human being took on a mentality that could cope with the seeming hostility and arbitrary happenstances of life. Maybe the Joker's worldview, mindset, whatever you want to call it, is the product of an outlook on life which demands that everything, even abject cruelty, be treated with laughter.
This is a conclusion which others have already reached. One unfortunate therapist who worked with the Joker said:
"The Joker's a special case. Some of us feel he may be beyond treatment. In fact, we're not even sure if he can be properly defined as insane... It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century. Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over the sensory information he's receiving from the outside world. He can only cope with that chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow. That's why some days he's a mischievous clown, others a psychopathic killer. He has no real personality. He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theatre of the absurd." (Batman: Arkham Asylum graphic novel, 1989, 2004)
What is the nature of madness? For the Joker, it may represent a "heightened" perception of the world around him: coping with the hopelessly mundane and random sadness and meaninglessness of life with laughter. And if this is the case, then of course a man could act however he wanted to. For him, there could be no law, no codes, no honors, nothing to restrain any desire he may have. For him, love and life and humanity would mean nothing. He has no beliefs. He has no morals. He has nothing. And he would be sane while everyone else is actually mad. Face the facts! Like Alice we could cry that we don't want to go among mad people. But as the Cat said to her: "Oh, you can't help that. We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
Maybe that's true, no matter how much we wish it isn't. Maybe life is too meaningless and purposeless to have any kind of beliefs or absolutes or laws or reason... only laughter. Maybe that's why the Joker's the Man Who Laughs, at once both a creepily disturbing psychotic and hilarious, pun-quipping prankster. You almost feel guilty yourself for laughing at him, but maybe he is the sane one.
Then again... maybe not...
Let me say something before I come back to this question. I do not mean to say that all atheists are demented monsters and sadists. I know atheists and agnostics and people in between. They don't run around plastering horrific grins on victims' faces with chemical concoctions. Neither do they sew anarchy by kidnapping city officials or holding stadiums as hostages or shutting down transportation or communication or any of the other things that the Joker regularly does.
But ideas have consequences. Even "religious" ideas have consequences. Even truth if abused by someone with the wrong intentions or motivations will have consequences. It may scream "unfair" to even compare atheists with a monster like the Joker, but all ideas have consequences, effects and results.
For the Joker, his worldview bears tragic results for the citizens of Gotham city. And all the Joker has done is take the statements of nihilism, which in itself stems from atheism, has said "Okay, there is no God and therefore no morals (since morals must be relative without a Giver of morals), no value in human life (since we're just organisms, anyway), no purpose (since we're not here for any reason other than chemicals randomly bonded some billions of years ago) and therefore... it's all meaningless".
Before you're tempted to think I'm stretching this whole idea a bit far, let's hear it from the Joker's own grinning mouth:
"Ladies and Gentlemen! You've read about it in the papers! Now witness, before your very eyes, that most rare and tragic of nature's mistakes! I give you: the average man. Physically unremarkable, it instead possesses a deformed set of values. Notice the hideously bloated sense of humanity's importance. Also note the club-footed social conscience and the withered optimism. It's certainly not for the squeamish, is it? Most repulsive of all, are its frail and useless notions of order and sanity. If too much weight is placed upon them... they snap. How does it live, I hear you ask? How does this poor pathetic specimen survive in today's harsh and irrational environment? I'm afraid the sad answer is, "Not very well." Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random, and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this... any other response would be crazy!" (The Killing Joke, 1988)And again:
"All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else... Only you won't admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! ... You make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that... Something like that happened to me, you know. I... I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is... My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you? I mean, you're not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we've come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?" (The Killing Joke, 1988)
He paints a bleak picture, but that is the reality of any worldview like atheism or nihilism. If anyone says otherwise, then they simply haven't thought it all out yet. No matter which way you flesh it out: either there's no God and no meaning, or there's no meaning and thus no God... the outcome is the same. The ultimate embracing of these ideas is the Joker persona: a kind of "super-sanity" which is only insanity in its fullest, a depressing, chaotic worldview which cannot cope with the capricious sadness and agony of living because it has already pre-disposed of any hope, of any meaning and of any law and of, finally, God Himself.
If you're an atheist, why aren't you also a nihilist?
Why aren't you laughing?
If you're an atheist, you have to fess up to it. The culmination of removing God is utter meaninglessness. You may believe you can make up your own meaning or that there is value in humanity, but what are those other than chemical processes in organs in a species which will someday not exist? Either you take your worldview and follow it to its inevitable conclusion... or you admit that there must be a semblance of order, law, morality, meaning and purpose which can only exist if there is One who gives order, who commands law, who defines morality, who brings meaning and purpose to the human soul. As the Joker said: "Why aren't you laughing?"
Enough quoting villains. Permit me to quote the greatest Hero of all time.
"I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." Christ said those words.
This is not a crutch. This is not wishful thinking, as has often been the accusation leveled against Christianity. What kind of crutch says of those who hold it: "At your best and most moral, your deeds are like filthy rags and before God you are a criminal and beggar, solely resting upon the Divine mercy and affection"? Now, this post is long enough without debating the proofs for the veracity of Christianity or the Bible or God. Presently,, there is only the statement which must either be ignored, denied or affirmed.
In one of the more philosophical writings within the Bible, the Book of Ecclesiastes, the writer, identifying himself as "the Preacher" and an Israelite king, proclaims:
Ecclesiastes Chapter 1 Verse 2 - "'Vanity of vanities,' says the Preacher; 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."The ancient Hebrew word used for vanity is the word hebel, which can also mean emptiness, figuratively something transitory and unsatisfactory, something meaningless. The writer took a good look at the world around him and said "It's all meaningless!". Listen to his observations:
"What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun?...One generation passes away, and another generation comes... All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full... The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing... that which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come... In much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. I said in my heart, 'Come now, I will test you with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure'; but surely, this also was vanity... Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure... Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled; and indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun... 'This is also vanity.' For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come. And how does a wise man die? As the fool! ...Then I returned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun: And look! The tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter--on the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter. Therefore I praised the dead... more than the living... Yet, better than both is he who has never existed, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun." (selected quotes from Ecclesiastes)
Depressed yet? Was the Preacher the Joker of Israel?
Nope. He doesn't fly into the refuge of insanity from a world that appeared to him like one big joke. He doesn't finish his work without hope. All his considerations were from a temporal and earthly perspective. His vantage was horizontal. He saw only what was under the sun. But when at last he considered God, he wrote:
"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man's all." --Ecclesiastes 12:13
There is no need for depression. There is no need for vanity, for hopelessness or for meaninglessness. Christ has come that you may have life abundant with meaning, value and hope. There is nothing else.
Will you take "asylum" from life in insanity or in God, in meaninglessness or in reason?
-norton
No comments:
Post a Comment