Hey Wisecrack, Jared here.
As I’m sure you’re all aware, Joaquin Phoenix is set to star in a Joker origin movie
directed by Todd Phillips later this year.
You’ve heard us consistently wax poetic about the Joker and his nihilistic philosophy
in past videos and podcasts, so we’re pretty excited about the prospect of a standalone
movie- especially one starring an incredible performer like Joaquin.
But the more we thought about it, the more we started to question that excitement.
Why??
“Do you want to know how I got these scars?”
Heath may be asking that rhetorically, but we’re not.
Do we really want to know how he got those scars, or the bleached skin and permanent
grin?
After all, we also thought it’d be cool to see Vader’s origin story and we all know
how that turned out.
“Now this is podracing!”
Often times, the mystique is much more interesting than any answer.
But it’s not just that making a good origin story is hard it’s that The Joker is the
one character that is arguably best WITHOUT an origin story.And that’s kind of a problem
if you’re a filmmaker making one.
He’s supposed to be a case too tough for even the World’s Greatest Detective to solve.
It’s because we have no insight into the character that he comes across as a chaotic
force that defies all comprehension.
Any attempt to give him a definitive origin reduces him to something within the realm
of reason.
It says if we understand where he came from, we can understand his actions.
And The Joker is one of the most compelling villains of all time precisely because we
CANNOT.
So how do you write an origin story for a character like the Joker without pulling the
curtain back too far?
The most recent comics writers have known all along that we don’t actually want to
know who the Joker was.
Even when they have a unique take on his backstory, they’re always careful present it in such
a way as to preserve the mystery.
So today we’ll be taking a look at a few of the explanations as to why the Clown Prince
of Crime has such an mysterious origin, and how that uncertainty is a powerful element
of the character’s mythos…We’ll also respond to some rumors about the film and
hypothesize as to which comic interpretation just might give Joaquin’s Joker the depth
needed to right this terrible wrong.
“By the way I got some grape soda on ice and a bearskin rug waitin’”
Welcome to the Wisecrack Edition on the Secret Origin(s) of the Joker.
And spoilers ahead for some of the comics.
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Let’s start with comics legend Alan Moore, since he started the whole notion of the Joker
having more than one possible origin story.
In his graphic novel The Killing Joke, we get an account of the Joker as a failed
comedian who was crossed by the mob.
Later, the Joker admits to not knowing whether or not that story is true.
Sometimes he remembers it one way, sometimes another, and either way, if he were going
to have a past, he’d prefer it to be multiple choice.
Here, Joker has a multiple choice past because he himself has multiple, mutually incompatible
memories as to what happened, which are the result of his shattered psyche.
It’s all about exploring the contours separating sanity from insanity.
The Joker thinks he must’ve had “one bad day” that drove him mad.
And he thinks, as a result, that the only thing separating commissioner Gordon from
the inmates at Arkham is one such day.
So Joker engineers a day which sees Gordon chained to a carnival ride out of Willy Wonka’s
worst nightmares, but instead of images from a bad acid trip, he’s shown photos of his
daughter Barbara, her naked body broken, bleeding, and brutally raped.
The fact that Gordon doesn’t go mad from all that seems to subtly suggest that it takes
more than one bad day to go insane, and calls into question the Joker’s own memories.
For Moore, we don’t know Joker’s backstory because he’s so divorced from reality as
to not know it himself.
These days we tend to take for granted that the Joker is insane, but it’s Moore who
made that such a crucial component of the character.
Earlier interpretation tended to present him as a run of the mill crook, with a clown motif
and a penchant for laughing at his own lame jokes.
But Moore, by making Joker absolutely divorced from reality, not only got to keep coy as
to whether his version of the origin was true, but was also able to make the clown a funhouse
mirror image of Batman, who’s own one bad day made him equally insane: an adult man
who goes around dressed like a bat.
Here we see how the lack of a concrete backstory not only illustrates The Joker’s insanity,
but his nihilistic disposition.
I think it’s a fair bet that, in the new film, we’ll see a man driven to some form
of insanity, but the “how” could potentially compromise this theme.
Many, including ourselves, have interpreted The Killing Joke as two scarred souls dealing
with the absurd- or life’s utter indifference to everything, in this case, their extreme
suffering.
However, by vowing to dress as a bat and police the city in response to his parents death,
Batman has constructed meaning out of his one bad day.
The Joker, on the other hand, completely embraces the absurd, as even the events that drove
him insane are just as arbitrary and meaningless as the rest of life.
Now there’s no Batman in the upcoming Joker film, but this idea could be repackaged - showing
us the absurdity of life with an absurd, made-up or ambiguous backstory told by an equally
absurd villain.
The Joker in The Dark Knight eases off him constantly professing his madness and instead,
he outright denies insanity.
“See I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve.”
He gives competing anecdotes for how he got his scars,
“I had a wife, beautiful like you.”
“My father was a drinker.”
But importantly, it’s not a reflection of mental illness.
He’s just lying his ass off.
We see him ad libbing anecdotes with no rhyme or reason – and certainly no truth – behind
them.
His goal is not to break people through one bad day, but instead to spread anarchy
so that the unfair and unjust nature of the world is brought to the fore.
“The world is cruel and the only morality in a cruel world is chance.
Unbiased.
Unprejudiced.
Fair.”
By having the Joker tell competing lies that don’t point to any discernible truth, he
comes off not as an actual human being with a backstory, but more as a kind of primal
force of chaos that seemingly fell from the sky.
"What do we got"
"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."
And if the Joker’s argument is that chaos is humanity’s true state, then it’s only
appropriate for his backstory to have no stable foundation.
Again, Joker serves as a dark reflection of the Dark Knight.
Bale’s Batman offers up the noble lie that Harvey Dent died as the hero Gotham deserved.
Contrast that with all the ignoble lies that Ledger’s Joker tells just to hear himself
talk.
This backstory as a vague misinformation campaign seems a little less likely for the Joaquin
Phoenix film.
In order for that to even work, the the bulk of the story would have to be framed as a
flashback, with the Joker in the future telling the story of his origins in order to achieve
some goal.
But we could still see a Joker that’s allergic to honesty, much like Nolan’s.
But Nolan’s character works well because he’s a stand-in for an idea with no tangible
history, something that will be difficult to replicate in an origin story.
Now the Joker’s lack of a backstory doesn’t even necessarily have to have anything to
do with his psychology or his philosophy.
Max Landis in Adventures of Superman offers the explanation that the Joker is just a blank
slate that wears various personas, from buffoonish bank-robber to murderous mobster, without
any being authentic.
Landis is going full meta here, essentially saying every incarnation of the Joker,from
Cesar Romero’s mustachioed miscreant to Ledger’s war-paint wearing terrorist are
all various personas that the same individual is adopting on any given day, each having
their own origin.
If the Joker’s origin is multiple-choice, Landis is circling D:
All of the above.
The Jack Napier personality might remember killing Thomas and Martha Wayne, whereas another
might recall being the ringleader of the Red Hood gang.
What’s interesting is that this is actually a way Landis criticizes our infatuation with
the Joker.
He uses Superman as a mouthpiece to prove how vacuous the villain is, and does the one
thing no one ever does to the Joker: laughs at him.
“You’re nothing.
You’re a goofy idea that only a child would think is cool… the only thing certain about
you is uncertainties…
Any writer could write you, any actor play you, all they need to do is make up their
own version and people will applaud.
But no one will actually ever applaud you.”
Now, I don’t think a Joker movie will go right out and shit on the character it’s
covering,but we’ve seen how Comic book movies can subvert their former legacy and how that
can make the best version of them in years.
So with all this substance coming from the fact that there’s no origin story, it’s
not looking too good for a movie that is entirely about his origins, now unless of course it’s
some kind of formless art film with multiple competing vignettes.
But we doubt that’s going to be the case, but the one thing that really piqued our interest
is the current rumor that the film is going to use The Joker to try to tackle topics related
to the current political climate.
Now why does this make us hopeful?
Because there’s a take on the Joker’s origins in a recent run that Phillips might
draw from to give us the mysterious, philosophical Joker we all want: Scott Snyder’s.
Scott Snyder is one of the biggest newcomers to comics in recent years.
When DC relaunched all of their titles a few years back, Snyder was entrusted as the lead
writer of Batman, and his run quickly became a favorite for many fans.
Snyder’s Joker says that instead of multiple choice, he prefers the truth of who he was
to be more of a choose-your-own-adventure.
While he takes elements from Moore and Nolan, it’s to very different effect.
Whereas the former is insane and the latter a liar, Snyder’s Joker has weaponized disinformation
about his origin story to manipulate Batman and even some fellow Arkham inmates.
In this run, Batman sees Gotham as HIS city, because in an earlier run he had traveled
back in time to partake in key moments of Gotham’s history.
It’s complicated.
But The Joker decides to directly attack this foundational narrative that the caped crusader
tells himself.
From the first issue of Snyder’s run it’s suggested that Batman’s biggest fear is
not knowing the city as intimately as he thinks.
As such, the lie that Joker tailors for Batman is that Gotham is really, and always has been,
the Joker’s city.
Alfred’s daughter and Gordon find images of the Joker in photographs taken of nearly
every major disaster in the city’s history, and even an old painting of a Pale Man already
standing on the shore as ships from Europe first arrive in Gotham harbor.
And the villain Crazy Quilt finds a healing serum in Joker’s spine similar to that of
other immortals, such as Vandal Savage, Ra’s al Ghul or Keanu Reeves.
More importantly, it has all the hallmarks of the kind of story Batman already believes
himself to be in - an ancient struggle for the soul of the city, fought between himself
and the eternal criminal element.
That his greatest foe in the present period should also have so prominent a place in the
story’s past confirms Bruce’s biases.
The Joker does something similar at Arkham Asylum.
While working under an alias, he becomes familiar with the delusions of the inmates in order
to construct a version of his origin that reinforces those delusions.
The Joker convinced a Satanist that he was the Devil himself.With another inmate who’d
flayed her family to prove they’d been replaced by androids, the Joker convinced he was a
robot.
Another prisoner thought he’d been training to become a secret military Batman; so the
Joker convinced him that HE had been the first military Batman before going AWOL.
He even pulls the same stunt with the leading psychiatrist Dr. Zaheer, whose written a book
that reveals the TRUE origin of the Joker.
But being a psychiatrist, she had her own biases, assuming that the Joker must’ve
been an abused child that suffered psychiatric problems as a result.
She even thought she found a trail of documents proving as much, so when the escapees capture
her and offer contradictory accounts, she dismisses any evidence that doesn’t conform
with what she thinks she knows.
In the end, it turns out that the co-worker at Arkham who helped her research the Joker’s
origin, yep, that was the Joker all along.
“I did my best to come up with the story you wanted.
The one you needed.
The grim and gritty tale of woe.
The one a publisher would lay down six figures for.”
What all this is getting at is confirmation bias.
The psychiatrist ignores the other escapees because she already has an idea of the Joker
she’d like to believe.
Snyder’s Joker weaponizes this confirmation bias, or the tendency to give more credence
to evidence that supports one’s position and to discount contrary evidence.
By echoing the beliefs of his targets, Joker creates an echo chamber, a situation in which
a group of individuals isolate themselves from the surrounding society so that their
shared beliefs reverberate and are amplified, all while becoming closed off from competing
views.
So if Philips is looking to make political statement with his Joker movie, perhaps he’ll
crib from Snyder’s run, with the Joker indiscernible past used as a weapon to conduct a calculated
disinformation campaign.
And in a world full of echo chambers and fake news, well, you see where this can go.
The Endgame arc from Snyder’s run that we’re primarily pulling from was written long before
Russia’s Internet Research Agency and everything that’s happening today, so there’s definitely
no intentional subtext on Snyder’s part.
But Philips MAY appropriate Snyder’s approach to the Joker’s various origin accounts if
he wants to be relevant to the political moment and not play with fire by trying to tell the
definitive story of where he came from.
Really, it all comes down to how Philips frames the film.
The Harlequin of Hate is one of our favorite villains at Wisecrack.
We want to be excited for the first film he’s headlining.
But Philips is crazed as the clown if he thinks he can create a definitive origin.
Or maybe it’s just crazy enough to work.
Maybe Philips totally throws everything we think is so cool about the Joker out the window
and manages to make a great movie all the same.
Obviously, we want every film to be fantastic, and frankly, DC needs more wins.
But what do you think: will Philips continue in the tradition of oblique origins to preserve
this philosophically compelling character or will he ruin all of our childhoods?
Let us what you think in the comments.
And if you want to build your own website for free check out wix.com/wisecrack, peace
guys.