Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 38

34 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-