Why So Serious? An Analysis

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The Dark Knight was acclaimed by all as a critical success, and perhaps the most successful performance in it was Heath Ledger’s Joker. I’ve run across quotes in philosophy seminars at Harvard and on T-shirts in Israel, and there’s no denying its appeal – or rather, its allure, a double-edged pull that attracts us and threatens us with that attraction all at once.

What, exactly, is the powerful narrative we’re being given here; what does it claim to tell us about the universe and about ourselves? Let’s try to piece it together. Humans are savage, chaotic beings hiding beneath a thin veneer of civilization, their sanity and society ready to topple with the proper motivation. The universe is cold, chaotic, random, and indifferent; we gain power when we throw off the shackles of convention and concern and give ourselves to that universe. Once we cease to worry about these phony pretenses, we are free to live life in the moment and exert power over those who are still cramped in and clinging to their illusions of order and stability.

It is hard not to find this freedom, audacity, and power intoxicating. It is the dizziness that comes with standing on the edge of a cliff and considering jumping off of it, just because one can, just because it’s there. The power relations the Joker cultivates always seem to go one way; no one can exert power over him. From the Norse stories of the world’s start to Paradise Lost, Chaos has been seen as the primal enemy of man, the power from which the world was wrested so that we could live in it. It is powerful and inevitable. But as alluring as all these effects are, they only work if the first two sentences I’ve noted are true; we must first establish the nature of ourselves and of the universe.

Now, there does seem to be a good bit of evidence that man is chaotic and the universe is meaningless. We have all sorts of documentation of the savagery of man, of the collapse of civilization into anarchy. And if we start with the assumption that men are just particular arrangements of atoms, then it does seem that blowing up a man is not fundamentally different from blowing up a building; they are both just rearrangements of matter and energy that would have eventually been rearranged in any case.

But if all of life is just atoms bouncing around, suddenly this story, too, looks less appealing. If nature is just atoms bumping against each other and becoming progressively less organized, there seems to be little worth noting. Nature moves, by default, toward chaos and randomness; if you toss a handful of stones in the air, you don’t expect them to come down and spell out letters. Entropy is always increasing. Nature leans toward destruction and decay; we must constantly be taking in energy to live; we torch thousands of calories a day just to keep on living. And nature moves towards separation and disunity; the universe is drifting apart, and if you think chance is harmonious, you’ve never heard a toddler on the piano.

So what does it matter if we, too, choose to favor these things, to be agents of chaos and randomness and disunity and destruction? We will only be making ourselves into cogs in the machine, going with the flow of the universe. There is no creativity, no creation, and no imagination in this; there is no audacity. This is the default. Furthermore, there is no freedom; we would be giving ourselves to our instincts without bothering with choice or volition. We would have made ourselves into un-persons. This is what chaos and disunity and destruction are; they are lacks of order and unity and continuation. We would have made ourselves into negation, and negation alone.

All creativity, all accomplishment, requires order and planning. Existence implies order. Perhaps the Joker tells us this, even without meaning to, with the phrase, “introduce a little chaos; introduce a little anarchy.” There is nothing more destructive than a little chaos, just as there is nothing more deceptive than a little knowledge. And the Joker, despite his words, wants only a little chaos; he still relies on a great many rules and a great many plans to accomplish his goals. He doesn’t live from one moment to the next; he has a larger scheme in mind that he enjoys bringing to fruition.

The narrative tells us that he is powerful because of his connection with chaos, but this is backwards; in the end, he is powerful because of his continuing connection with order; his connection with chaos only makes him destructive, not successful. Chaos cannot provide us with anything positive; it is a negation. Anything we might gain – fun, potency, success, challenge – comes from order, not chaos. To be human is to try to bring meaning from confusion, to create order out of anarchy, to follow reason amidst randomness.

But what about freedom? After all, freedom generally means freedom ‘from’ something, the absence of some restraint. So perhaps this is a good negative. But is absolute freedom so sweet, as to be bought at the price of despair and absurdity? Is freedom really just another word for nothing left to lose; is it not better to have something worth not losing, someone to love, something to hold on to? Is there another way to gain what we really like about the Joker’s philosophy? Can we deny that humanity is chaotic and life is meaningless, while still throwing off the shackles of convention and arbitrary codes?

We may find an answer in religion. It may seem strange to speak of religion as going against convention nowadays, but it was precisely this radical disregard for convention and consequences that shocked the Roman world when Christianity came along. The accounts of Perpetua’s martyrdom under Caracalla speak to the shock the spectators received when she put her duty to God above her duty to Rome or to her father, and more than that, when she proved willing to sacrifice her life, steady enough to guide the executioner’s hand to the correct position after his first failed attempt to kill her. Christianity was considered a dangerous religion in Rome, because it overrode all other loyalties and didn’t succumb to threats.

And why? Why could Perpetua do this? Why would she? Because she had a larger context in mind; she didn’t think that death was the end, or that pain was the ultimate evil. Her priorities had been rearranged. The Joker could not be threatened, because he believed in nothing, because he had nothing to care about. Perpetua could be threatened, but she rose above the threats, because she believed in and cared about something beyond the reach of her attackers. Happiness depends on circumstances; if we want more permanent laughter, happiness must give place to either joy or hysteria. Which one depends on us.

It is true that often religious men forget their joy, and instead of keeping the larger context in mind just focus on keeping the rules and acting self-important. But this isn’t the true nature of religion. It isn’t religious man who thinks he is the measure of everything, holding the world on his shoulders. For religious man, the universe isn’t merely a random assortment of atoms. It is a garden, made to be explored, bursting with life and spirit and will, and it rings with laughter.

What is the joke? What is the punch line, the happy twist or triviality that turns the story around? What does Heaven laugh at? The Psalmist tells us. “The wicked schemes against the righteous and gnashes his teeth at him. The Lord laughs at him because He sees that his day is coming.” Evil is the butt of heaven’s joke. It seems great and important and scary and invincible, but in the end, we discover that it isn’t a great thing at all; it’s ‘no-thing’; it’s the lack of something, and that lack will be filled by infinity. The laugh’s on it. And the ending will be better than we dared hope.

Photo credit: anglerp1