Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 38
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The Popular Culture Review
the disparity between mythical American origins and their practical
fate.
Arguably, America's greatest invention is political rather
than technological, consisting of the philosophical discourse of the
Self and the governmental apparatus to support it. It is precisely
here that Joker becomes more than a clown and his threat more than
skin deep. Joker represents a culture in crisis; he capitalizes on the
fears of people who don't know who they are or where they are, a loss
of self evident in the crowds' anonymous violence and greed. The
image of Joker's mouth and lips-open, either to laugh or perhaps to
consume—reflects how the transcendental Self of Emerson and
Thoreau's transcendental Self, in touch with the entire cosmos, has
been redefined as a marketing commodity in touch with consumer
surveys. Abandoning Emerson to the history books, American culture
no longer studies the self or imagines its philosophic possibilities;
instead its dtizeirs package, image and sell self-reliance in cans and
bottles. Joker, after all, threatens to give Americans exactly what
media and advertisements say they should have, a self made in the
image of everybody else, a personality rescued from the burdens of
individuality and history.
Joker reveals the vacuity of American social thinking by
turning its billboard promises into a mirror; what one sees, then, is a
frenzi^ search for individuality through the pursuit of anonymous,
personality-Iess style. But Joker is right; style is what everyone
wears when they don't wish to be seen as themselves. For this reason
Gotham, and the culture that supports it, is in crisis. Style, as Joker
makes dear, is an image, a mask, not too different in its own way from
the variety of masks worn in Gotham. Everyone in this film either
wears a mask or lives one: the governing class of the city, the police,
the Joker's victims—even Batman himself is masked, his
individuality as well as his body buttressed and protected by plastic
and metal. Joker's revised idea of beauty, of course, is hardly more
than homogeneity and conformity. The movie wonderfully parodies
American consumer aesthetics in which the truly unique and "of the
moment" is completely and slavishly conventional, a manufactured
face, indistinguishable from others like it.
For this reason the Joker is more than ordinarily villainous,
and why Batm an is a horror film rather than a conventional
Whodunit. Joker invites Gotham's citizens-and ourselves, as w ell-