Joker’s Society, Our Society: A Reality Bent to Our Needs

                So many of us have sung along with the Rolling Stones’ famed song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” most of us stoically accepting its message:  everywhere in life we encounter limitations, an economic  inevitability that reminds us of our limited potential to grasp our desires.  Few of us stand to secure an economic basis so sound that we might see that our deepest desires and the commodity chase are built on a false foundation: relativism.  Most will spend a lifetime chasing economic stability as a means of achieving desire fulfillment, maybe finding enough success in this struggle to then ask ourselves a more important question: What next?  The classic character Joker is not pleased with slow, steady progress toward desire fulfillment.  In this character we cheer his me-now methodology over Batman’s truth and justice because Joker epitomizes current society’s response to alienation by concentrating on desire fulfillment and the false philosophy of relativism.

                Joker responds to feelings of alienation by trying to destroy the old, limiting world and recreating his own world.  In Joker’s new world desire fulfillment can take hold more completely.  In Tim Burton’s Batman, Joker manages to rally support from the disenfranchised.  He promises them a future that allows the freaks and misfits of organized society to obtain their desires, even if these desires come at the cost of other people’s liberties.  The assumption here is that a better world exists, one possible if Joker’s henchmen follow his lead and participate and even sacrifice themselves for the good of the misfit revolution.  David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity describes how the hope in a better future characterizes modernism: “Modernism was very much about the pursuit of better futures, even if perpetual frustration of that aim was conducive to paranoia” (53-54). 

                In Tim Burton’s version of Batman, Joker seems to believe in a better world.  However, in Grant Morrison’s Batman: Arkham Asylum, Joker acknowledges the postmodernist view that the world itself is fragmented and uncertain.  Joker’s prospect of a better world so longed for in Tim Burton’s Batman is replaced with doubt, representing a move from alienation to fragmentation.  When Batman declares that Joker’s Arkham Asylum patients are free, Joker underscores their current state of liberation even when subjugated under Joker’s power hold and Joker’s recognition that Batman himself enjoys a privileged position: “Oh, we know that already.  But what about you?  Have you come to claim your kingly robes?” (Morrison 64).  Batman is given an ambiguous role here, wherein he can easily assume the role of totalitarian leader (i.e., Joker) just as easily as a savior (i.e., Christ), reminding us that the postmodern world divorces itself of a clear demarcation between truth and justice, good and evil, believing that one person’s truth is epistemologically related to another’s atrocity.  Again, Harvey helps us understand this predicament:

But if, as the postmodernists insist, we cannot aspire to any unified representation of the world, or picture it as a totality full of connections and differentiations rather than as perpetually shifting fragments, then how can we possibly aspire to act coherently with respect to the world?  The simple postmodernist answer is that since coherent representation and action are either repressive or illusory (and therefore doomed to be self-dissolving and self-defeating), we should not even try to engage in some global project. (52)

Evident here is the troublesome position of our leaders as society’s helpers and truth holders and how easily leaders and truths are corrupted; leaders become bent on exchanging truth and justice for desire fulfillment.  

A modernist tendency to pursue a better future is not entirely replaced by the postmodernist bent on seeing fragmentation and uncertainty as inevitable.  Capitalist Americans, for instance, press hard to find order in a chaotic economy, even when the ordering process itself presents ideological challenges to the Capitalistic system.  Consider, for instance, David Harvey’s comments regarding the U.S. monetary system, especially the ones relating to household indebtedness and spending: “Uncontrolled bankruptcies and massive devaluation exposes the irrational side of capitalist rationality in far too brutal a way for it to be sustainable for long without eliciting some kind of revolutionary (right or left) response” (181).  Harvey describes the “interventionist state” approach to correcting American debt crises: “This was done, in effect, by printing so much money as to trigger an inflationary surge, which radically reduced the real value of past debts (the thousand dollars borrowed ten years ago has little value after a phase of high inflation)” (185).  The postmodernist answer is merely a restatement of relativism, a false philosophy that comforts us with the notion that the answer leading to the best result is also the truest one.  A mental patient in the asylum with Joker describes the many shades of truth that go unseen in society: “I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary.  I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity” (Morrison 58).  Herbert Marcuse elaborates further on this societal inclination:

The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. (7)

Many Americans would rather accept the false truths of an effective economy that fulfills their desires than to recognize the ideological conflict between a manipulated, interventionist economy that promotes buying, even when acknowledging that the natural end of the living beyond our means, own nothing lifestyle invariably leads to a mass bankruptcy state.

Instead of attempting to transform society outside the asylum, Joker and his cronies are recreating their own twisted society inside the asylum—a place where oddities, peculiarities, and differences are accepted because the mental patients share a common goal: desire fulfillment.  Readers can see how this move by supposed lunatics in ways parallels our own response to society’s uncertainly and demands, represented best in our daily decision to shut ourselves into our suburban houses.  Joker alludes to society as being difficult, also describing the mental asylum as offering asylum from societal pressure to chase desire fulfillment: “Just don’t forget that if it ever gets too tough, there’s always a place for you here” (Morrison 65-66).  The modern audience does not easily accept that reason alone dictates how our world is organized, many of us torn between our perception of truth and justice as being in direct competition with society’s.  In this light a reading of Joker’s comment about the realty of the asylum bears a new dimension: “You’re in the real world now and the lunatics have taken over the asylum” (Morrison 13). 

It seems clear that society is operating beyond the assumed application of reason.  Reason is supposed to guide us toward the societal execution of truth and justice, but in a postmodern world, these dictates become increasingly elusive.  One wonders whether recognizing that truth is so easily bent will lead us away from the lost path of the Dark Ages or toward a Machiavellian end where a leader’s conception of truth brings us all toward the asylum, caught in the trap that the end justifies the means also excuses great inhumanity while we pursue desire fulfillment. 

Works Cited

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1990.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Morrison, Grant. Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. New York: DC Comics, 1989.