The Anarchist of Gotham: The Joker’s
Encounters and Negotiations with the State Apparatuses in The Dark Knight (2008)
and Joker (2019)
Rebanta Gupta
Research Assistant,
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies,
Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Abstract:
This article attempts to show how the Joker,
the fictional supervillain of the DC Comics Universe, encounters and negotiates
with the state apparatuses of Gotham City, the fictional dystopian town
featured in two films-The Dark Knight (2008)
and Joker (2019). The article
presents the Joker as an anarchist, who has launched an intifada against the
Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses of Gotham City, and discusses his
attempts at subverting these apparatuses to nullify the affluent class, which
has held its sway over a large section of the impoverished, disgruntled, and
disenfranchised population of Gotham. By using the theoretical model of the RSA
and ISA developed by the French Marxist thinker Louis Althusser, this article
shows how the Joker is engaged in a constant combat against them in the two
aforementioned films, where his primary opponent is the Batman, the sworn
sentinal of the Gotham City.
Keywords: Althusser, Batman, Ideology, Joker, State,
Oppression
Introduction
Human history has witnessed power struggles
between the two hostile camps of the society- the bourgeois and the
proletariat, or the oppressors and the oppressed, since time immemorial, which
has defined the topography of humanity. The State’s muscle power has always
endeavored to silence the voices of the oppressed through repression. The
inebriating mechanisms of the State apparatuses try to impose the dominant
order and ideology on the masses and annihilate their desire to question or revolt
against hegemony. The Joker, the prolific fictional super villain of the DC
Comics Universe, epitomizes the struggle of the oppressed class to uproot the
cancerous hegemony of the dominant class and articulate its own dissentient
words. He unleashes a reign of terror at the heart of the dominant class
inhabiting the fictionalized dystopia called Gotham City, and thereby
challenges its civil constitution. This paper tries to explore the Joker’s
anarchism and his insurgency against Gotham’s Ideological and Repressive State
Apparatuses in light of Louis Althusser’s concepts expounded in his influential
essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, with special references to
two cinematic documents that encapsulate the Joker’s mayhem-The Dark Knight (2008) and Joker (2019), directed by Christopher
Nolan and Todd Phillips respectively.
Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses:
A Brief Exposition
The French Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser left signatures of his erudition and political contemplation in the
groundbreaking essay “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation” (1970). It
is an explication of the concepts of ideology and its weaponization as a State
Apparatus. Ideology has been sketchily described by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels as ‘false consciousness,’ but Althusser deviated from this viewpoint and
redefined ideology by drawing references from the works of Antonio Gramsci,
Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. The essay discusses the relations between the
State and its subjects; he questions, why the subjects are obedient to the
State’s jurisdictional machinery? Why revolts are not ubiquitous in the
capitalist society? His views on ideology have surfaced from his explorations
of the relations between the State and the subject: “It follows that, in order
to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its production
at the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce” (Althusser
128). And the rest of the theory surfaces from this axiom.
The Repressive and
the Ideological State Apparatuses are the two limbs of the system that the
ruling class employs to subjugate the masses. Althusser defines the Government,
the Administration, the Army, and the Police as Repressive State Apparatuses
(RSA), which ultimately exercise violence and coercion for mass control. The
ruling class controls the RSA along with the political, legislative, and armed
powers of the State. Alongside, there are Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA),
which he describes as “a certain number of realities which present themselves
to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions”
(Althusser143).ISA is deployed as an ideological substitute for RSA to achieve
the same objectives; it is a part of the civil society, and an informal part of
the State. He discusses the religious, educational, familial, legal, political,
communications, and the cultural ISAs, and distinguishes between the two
apparatuses of Statist repression; the RSA is a unified entity, tethered to the
public domain, while the ISA is marked by its apparent plurality and diversity
in functions, which is associated with the private domain. Repression is RSA’s
cornerstone feature, and it only functions secondarily by ideology. Whereas ISA
functions predominantly through ideological manipulation and repression is the
secondary weapon in its arsenal. A State apparatus cannot be, therefore,
exclusively repressive or ideological, it is a hybridized system. Althusser
comments, “Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment,
expulsion, selection, etc., to 'discipline' not only their shepherds, but also
their flocks” (Althusser 145).He juxtaposes two contrary theses to describe the
mechanisms of ISA: “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their conditions of existence” (Althusser 162) and “[i]deology
is a material existence” (Althusser 165). The first thesis reflects the
familiar Marxian view, that ideology is an instrument of masking the
exploitative arrangements, which act as the foundations of a class-divided
society. The priests and despots of the eighteenth century were the
fountainheads of ideologies; they manipulated the masses with falsified ideas
or representations of the world. Ideology is imaginary, which represents the
human beings’ relation to the real world, to the perception of the conditions
of existence, it is the representation of their relation to the real world,
which is actually a product of relationships. However, ideology attains a
material existence, because it “always exists in an apparatus, and its
practice, or practices” (Althusser 165), and it manifests itself through
actions, being inserted into multifaceted practices.
Joker’s Resistance: Juxtaposing The Dark
Knight and Joker
The Joker dawns as a quintessential anarchist
in The Dark Knight and Joker, albeit with different
performative modalities. He, whose character has been sketched bygraphic
artists like Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson, is the archenemy of the
Batman, the sworn sentinel of the fictional Gotham City. An embodiment of
chaos, destruction, and anarchy in the eyes of the Gotham administration, the
Joker nurtures the desire to destabilize the existing social order and uproot
the hegemony of the dominant class. The Joker, who has been enlivened on the
celluloid by the stellar performances of Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix in
the 2008 and 2019 films respectively, puts on a clown’s attire with disheveled
green-dyed hair. His face is caked with white clown makeup, and a sinister
Glasgow smile accentuates his diabolical nature. This attire itself posits a
challenge to the parameters of aesthetics (or the Cultural ISA) set by an urban
landscape like Gotham City, with the Arnoldian notions of ‘sweetness and light’
constituting its kernel; it has marginalized chaos and anarchy from its center,
and created a facade of technocratic refinement by erecting skyscrapers and
mansions harboring the rich and the famous. The subalterns of Gotham,
representing the flip side of the ‘sweetness and light’ facade of the city,
have largely been distanced from the center of power controlled by the likes of
Thomas Wayne, the celebrated business tycoon of the city.
Phillip’s Joker portrays the life of a failed stand-up comedian called Arthur Flake, who
eventually metamorphoses into the infamous Joker, thanks to the social
repression facilitated by the State apparatuses of Gotham City. Gotham is
marked by social polarizations; there is the wealthy dominant class on the one
hand, with Thomas Wayne, the business tycoon and wannabe mayor as its
ambassador. The Joker, on the other hand, represents the other side of the
socio-economic spectrum, i.e.-the poor and the disenfranchised population. The
dominant class has maintained its sway over the oppressed class through the
police, legal apparatus, and the media, which uphold the bourgeois discursive
values to keep the underprivileged lives under its control. Murray Franklin,
who is initially admired by Arthur, is a veteran showman driven by fame and
money, a media marionette espousing the interests of the dominant class. The
movie addresses the expanding gulf between the rich and the poor, and its
adverse effects on the masses, which has produced a fundamentalist and
belligerent underclass, as reflected in the assault on Arthur by a gang of
teens. The bourgeoisie-controlled administration does not hesitate to close
down public clinics citing budget cuts, depriving Arthur of his medication for
his pathological laughter. The black counselor’s caveat, that the authority
does not pay heed to the patients like Arthur, underscores the sheer
nonchalance and the repressive attitude of the dominant class and the State.
The murder of the three abusive Wayne Enterprises employees by the Joker
ignites a rebellion across the city to end the repressive regime, marking a
quantum leap for the disgruntled citizens from the status of ‘good little
boys,’ to ‘werewolves in the wild.’ In this context, Wayne and Murray can be
interpreted as the representatives of RSA and ISA respectively. The former
administers the economic milieu of the city, and his abusive employees, who
engage in a bloody scuffle with the Joker on the subway train, are his agents
of oppression, who maintain the power dynamics of Gotham through intimidation
and bigotry, as reflected in their abuse of a solitary woman. Their murder and
execution by the Joker are the first responses to the hegemony of the RSA,
which inspires thousands of demonstrators wearing clown masks to condemn the
hegemony of the affluent class of Gotham, which snowballs into a confrontation
between the rebels with the police- the mercenaries of the State. Wayne
disparagingly calls the revolutionaries ‘clowns’, who are envious of successful
people. Moreover, when he faces the moment of anagnorisis, that his mother
Penny adopted him as a child and let her abusive boyfriend torture him, and
Wayne used his influence to fabricate the adoption and thereby silencing the
affair by sending her to the Arkham Asylum, the distraught Arthur suffocates
Penny to death. The State influences the behavior of an individual through the
prism of the Family ISA, which contributes to the reproduction of the labour
forces and subversion of individualism. Arthur’s hatred towards Wayne perhaps
acts as a catalyst in the murder of Penny, but it is actually Arthur’s vendetta
against the dominant ideology and its constituent apparatus, the family, which
is epitomized by Penny, a former employee of the Wayne Enterprises. She
channelized her diluted and delusional thoughts into Arthur, transforming him
into a complacent neurotic. The murder underscores the dialectics between
Arthur (the ‘other/autre’) and the State (the ‘Other/Autre’),
symbolizing an Oedipal tension between the subject and the dominating
father-figure of the State, which he tried to castrate by murdering his mother,
the domestic representation of the ‘State-father.’ By murdering Penny, Arthur
excludes what Jacques Lacan describes as the ‘Name of the Father’ from the
symbolic order, and refuses to be further symbolically castrated and
internalize the laws of the State. The act of expunging the symbolic father
gives rise to psychosis (Lacan 24), which is marked by Arthur’s clown avatar,
who launches a counter-symbolic intifada like a true psychotic, against the
statist symbolic, which is accentuated by his disjointed speech interspersed
with pathological laughter and his coulrophobia-inducing costume.
George Orwell’s
celebrated novel Nineteen Eighty-Four paints
a lugubrious picture of the future, featuring an authoritarian boot forever
stamping on the human face. It is a manifestation of the Statist hegemony,
reflected in the disturbing scenes of Joker, where the mass media dawns as a
vitriolic instrument of oppression, dubbed ‘Communication ISA’ by Althusser.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, drawing references from Ludwig Feuerbach,
pointed out that the class, which controls the means of production, also
emerges as the primary intellectual force of the society. In The German Ideology, they highlight that the class which
has at its fingertips the means of material production, also has power over the
means of mental production, so that it is subject to the ideas of those who lack
the means of mental production (Marx and Engels 32).The advent of the
neo-liberal policies in the age of globalization has instigated the State to
use them as ideological apparatuses, “forcing the society to accept
neo-liberalism as “the only remedy” “(Sevgi and Ozgokceler 16). The surge of
neo-liberal policies in the last quarter of the twentieth century injected
capitalism into the media sectors. Media capital became monopolized and
commercialized, and the media sector was transformed into an ISA. Murray
Franklin is a representative of Gotham’s Communication ISA, who hosts the talk
show Live With Murray Franklin, a capitalist venture to entertain
the privileged class which emerges as a concatenation of alkaline humor,
insult, and oppression. He invites Arthur Fleck/The Joker to the show, having
noticed the video clips of Arthur’s failed comedy performance, which is an
attempt to exhibit a specimen of an exotic species [the Gotham subalterns] by
dehumanizing him on air. Behind the masquerade of a humble showman, he is a
media mogul who constructs a sanctuary of troubled individuals like Arthur
without any benign intention of addressing his crisis, but for titillating the
bourgeois audience at the expense of Arthur’s public humiliation on camera.
When he castigates the Joker for the triple homicides which triggered riots
across the city, the clown replies, “All of you, the system that knows so much,
you decide what’s right or wrong” (Joker 1:42:21). He clearly accuses the awful society
for making him insane. Murray is an extension of Wayne, who looks at the world
with same nonchalance and alienates people with his biased views, where the
Joker is just like any other exhibit in his showcase, and Arthur highlights
this, “You just wanted to make fun of me, just like the rest of them” (Joker 1:44:26). He castrates the Gotham ISA by shooting Murray to death. It is a
political expression of a subject who has been reified by the civil society
which has lost its voice of compassion, and Murray’s murder marked the destabilization of the civil society, that
mediates between the State and the individual [Arthur], questioning its
characteristic “litany of ethical and political aspirations and implications”
(Kenny). In the chain reaction that follows, Thomas Wayne, who controls the
joysticks of RSA and ISA through his mercantile organization by the desiccation
of the labor power, is assassinated along with his wife Martha by a rogue
citizen before the frightened eyes of their son Bruce, who will emerge in his
Batman avatar as the Joker’s archenemy, in The
Dark Knight. Thomas’ death and the
civil riots mushrooming across Gotham around the Joker occur simultaneously,
marking the effacement of the metaphoric center of power, leading the
disgruntled citizens into a chaotic ‘free play’ in the amphitheatre of power
relations.
Guerric Debona
writes, “Batman is a modern Beowulf who purges Gotham City of its Grendel, the
Joker” (55). The central theme of The
Dark Knight revolves around bourgeois discrimination between the moral good
and the sinister, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The Joker turns the social
order upside down and represents anarchy, which challenges the Cultural ISA of
Gotham City: “While Batman remains the guardian of culture, the Joker manifests
Arnoldian horror for “the anarchical tendency of our worship for freedom in and
for itself, of our superstitious faith...in machinery” (Debona 57). The Joker
is associated with mechanical reproductions of popular culture; as a ‘joke’ he
threatens the power bloc of the traditional culture of Gotham, designed by its
affluent class. He televises the grotesque and mutilated bodies of his victims,
which insults Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture used as a shield by
Gotham’s ‘refined’ urban intelligentsia: “…culture hates hatred; culture has one
great passion, the passion for sweetness and light” (Arnold 23). He embodies the spirit of counter-culture,
as reflected in his portrayals based on the paintings of Francis Bacon, Anthony
Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, and
punk rock musicians. Batman is the champion and a loyal defender of the State
and the established culture, he hands his Bat insignia over to the State as an
emergency rescue signal light. The bat iconography melts into politics, it
becomes a firewall against the pernicious effects of popular/counter-culture:
“As a holder of the Batshield, the State becomes more like Batman, integrating
the Arnoldian ideas of right reason and humane expression. The State has been given,
de facto, responsibility for
maintaining perpetual cultural vigilance” (Debona 62). The Joker’s playing card
is an answer to this State iconography. His first appearance involves a
Nietzschean pun, “What doesn’t kill you makes you a stranger”(The Dark Knight 00:12:13) and he claims
that he is ahead of the curve. At a subliminal level, he is a revolutionary
anarchist, who disrupts the socio-political symphony of the city with
dynamites, gunpowder, and gasoline. He summarily eliminates the police
commissioner Gillian B. Loeb, a court judge, and the assistant district
attorney Rachel Dawes, and incapacitates the district attorney Harvey Dent. He
transforms Harvey (representing the Legal ISA) into the ruthless Two-Face, and
whispers, “Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan’ even if the plan is
horrifying...introduce a little anarchy” (The
Dark Knight1:48:03). He questions the idea of sanity theorized by the State
and the civil society, refers to the other world where he could be considered
sane: “At what point does Batman’s OCD- type, violent behavior (not to mention
costume) become ‘good’ and the Joker’s bad? In what kind of universe does one
person’s violence acquire shades of morality? The Joker is pointing to these
questions” (Nayar). Eric Fromm explores the paradigm of insanity in his The Sane Society; in the last hundred
years, the West has insanely accumulated wealth and debilitated innumerable
lives lunatically, yet the inmates of an asylum are ironically branded ‘crazy’
by the society. In the modern society, asylum or prison is reserved for those
who question good/bad or normal/insane binaries through their complex actions,
and the Joker’s actions trigger a collapse of
these binaries. The Joker’s attempts to tell Batman that they are alike,
imply a common trait of insanity they share, and perhaps to substantiate this
claim, in the final scene of Batman: The
Killing Joke, the two archnemeses together laugh hysterically.
The citizens have
‘interpellated’ the ideological structure of the State, where they “acknowledge
and respond to ideologies, thereby recognizing them[selves] as subjects”
(University of Chicago). Gotham has been depicted “as a corrupt, crime-riddled,
mob-run Sodom, dirty and almost worthless, but also fragile and deserving of
protection” (Tyree 32), and Batman, who is an extension of the State
apparatuses, is in charge of that protection. Christopher Nolan translates the
movie into a saga of counter-terrorism, where Gotham is an uncanny reflection
of the vulnerability of New York City during the September 11 attacks. The demolition
of the World Trade Center shook the ideological foundation of the United States
and exposed the vulnerability of the State machinery. Similarly, the Joker,
just like al-Qaeda, strikes the ISAs of Gotham, which emphasizes the fact, that
one cannot negotiate with him, who has refused to be interpellated, making him
a problematic individual or an ‘Other’ to the State, who cannot be reduced to
its subject. When he is being brutalized by the Batman in the interrogation
room, the Joker comments on the futility of ‘all the little rules’ followed by
the civil society: “Finally, the Roman suspension of democracy is brought up,
in case anyone missed the Big Point being made” (Tyree 32).In Paradise Lost, Satan, the leader of the
archangels who rebelled against the God, slowly metamorphoses into a vicious
soul and hatches the plan to invite chaos into the Garden of Eden, to avenge
their banishment to the purgatory. The
Dark Knight raises this question- has the Joker, who started his intifada
against the State to voice his anger, degenerated like the Satan to become a
bloody mass-murderer? The Joker fabricates a chaotic counter-ideology against
the State ideology. His actions reflect Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas, “One must still
have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Hirst).The
Joker is suspending the established order and logical thoughts to achieve
bigger aims and lofty height of a ‘dancing star.’ But he crosses the threshold
and gets incarcerated by his chaotic equations, which perhaps have been
formulated by the ostracism he has experienced previously (shown in Joker). From planting bombs to
incinerating the heist money, he subverts the established order to proudly
proclaim, “Gotham deserves a better class of criminals” (The Dark Knight 1:20:03). But,
is it possible to survive in a world without rules? For the reproduction of the
labor power, as Althusser says, the reproduction of the skills of the laborers
is an imperative, which can be achieved by the capitalist education system, and
by means of other institutions. But a chaotic world will facilitate a
degeneration of this system, creating an abysmal situation for humanity, where
the Joker is not offering any alternative but pure chaos. When the Joker plants
bombs on two cruise liners carrying ordinary citizens and criminals and gives
them an ultimatum; letting one group destroy the other by midnight or face mass
annihilation, he becomes flummoxed by the two parties’ decision to abstain from
mutual destruction. Batman thus mocks his nihilistic anarchism, “What were you
trying to prove, that deep down everyone is as ugly as you?” (The Dark Knight 2:18:09). Humanity and optimism finally triumph
over brutality at the end, which question the mayhem orchestrated by the Joker:
is barbarism the final solution to all problems? Is Joker the modern
Nietzschean Ubermensch, who can orchestrate another Holocaust to justify
the ways of chaos to men? But what are his own alternative values? These
serious ethical questions will nonetheless continue to haunt his enterprises.
Conclusion
Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg had drafted a
choice for a society to accept either socialism or barbarism (Uetricht). The
Joker chooses the latter, his anarchism perhaps articulates the oppressed
class’ voices, but fails to create a rational outcome that promises social
stability. He thrusts this question upon the audience, should one accept the
commandments handed down by the father figures of the society, which often
anaesthetize the rational and logical faculties of humanity, or should he use
them as raw materials to shape his own judgement for a more equitable future?
However, it can be surmised, that he is perhaps not an absolute anarchist, he
desires to alter the status quo and replace the repressive ideological structures
with new ideas; he gives a clarion call to all the oppressed souls, to welcome
the dawn of a new day of liberation, which echoes the Satan’s proclamation,
“All is not lost; the unconquerable will/And study of revenge, immortal
hate/And courage never to submit or yield” (Paradise Lost1.106-108). His
anarchism, it can be hoped, can give rise to a more equitable society based on
socialistic principles, or spiral into an oppressive Stalinist society, which
will reproduce the same treatment meted out to its opposition by the erstwhile
bourgeois state apparatuses.
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