The changing faces of our favourite villains
Posted by on March 30, 2008 in Blog tagged withTrailers for the new Batman film are showing in cinemas at the moment, and I was thrilled to see Heath Ledger’s Joker for the first time:
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Even in the short trailer, it was a stunning performance, creepily charismatic and with a laugh that’ll send chills down your spine. The people in the row behind me started talking about it before the trailer had even finished, and I was interested to hear that the main point of their discussion was whether Ledger could ever be a better Joker than Jack Nicholson:
I don’t know enough about the DC comics to debate which Joker is more faithful to the spirit of the original figure, so I’ll leave that to those more qualified; what caught my attention was that the people sat behind me were comparing the two mostly in terms of their, for lack of a better word for it, scariness. Of course, the Joker is meant to be a terrifying character, and rating different Jokers in terms of their effect is reasonable enough. But what is it we’re actually comparing when we do this?
When it comes to figures like the Joker, or Dracula, or Frankenstein’s monster – figures we can re-represent continually, whether in new adaptations of the original work or new stories in which they play a guest-star role – the weight of existing cultural currency puts a strange kind of pressure on the people doing the re-inventing. On one hand, we know Count Dracula should frighten us, and we rate new Draculas in large part based on how well they achieve that; on the other hand, adaptations which present him in a way we’re already used to will fail to have any effect on us at all. We appreciate Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, in other words, but we don’t want Dracula to look like that any more. When he appeared in an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, it was as a very different figure:
The kind of pressures shaping transformations like these is, of course, still the subject of ongoing critical debate (something discussed only a few days ago on this blog, for instance!). If we need our vampires, zombies, psychopaths and murders to reflect upon our own culture, as Nina Auerbach suggests in the case of the vampire, then we can track their evolution in terms of our own shared ideals and anxieties. The recent ITV adaptation of Frankenstein gave us a monster a world away from Boris Karloff’s hulking figure -
- but in 2007, maybe something that looked alien rather than undead would have much greater effect on an audience with a different idea of artificial life (the adaptation centred on stem cell research).
It seems likely there are other forces at work in changing our expectations of terrifying figures, especially in visual mediums like film and TV; advances in techology mean that later audiences will see clumsy artifice where contemporary ones saw up-to-date special effects, and being scared requires the kind of suspension of disbelief that’s difficult to achieve in such scenarios. Or, perhaps, we develop different ideas about what is and isn’t frightening as our shared aesthetic sensibilities shift; personally, I don’t find broader arguments about changing aesthetic sensibilities quite as persuasive in this regard, but I’ve heard some well-made arguments to that effect. There’s a wealth of fascinating material on all of this.
But here’s what I’m wondering, after seeing the Batman trailer: what if the pressure that’s driving such transformations is just to make them seem different to what we’ve seen before? Figures like Frankenstein’s monster, or Dracula, or the Joker, or Darth Vader, or any of the vast company in which they march, scare us because they surprise us, disturbing us because of that degree of otherness from what we’re used to; what if that’s the most significant force behind new portrayals of old villains, and our ideas about cultural anxieties, transforming aesthetic sensibilities and technological advances are mostly overshadowed by that? To play devil’s advocate for a moment here, are we overthinking this?
For myself, I thought Heath Ledger’s 2008 Joker was far more effective than Jack Nicholson’s in 1989. I’m curious about whether or not I’d have thought the same if they’d appeared the other way round, though.
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This interesting. I think you are right in suggesting that appropriating icons in different ways is an attempt to surprise the reader or viewer. I also think that many artists have a certain narcissistic streak that endows them with the belief that they could improve on and/or modify original versions of classic villains. Perhaps this need to recreate the monster is hidden under excuses like “we need a new villain for a new age” (which is a good excuse) but it also serves a selfish creative need in the artist, giving them a canvas on which they can create, not just recreate.
I like Matt’s point that literary and filmic appropriations are necessarily creative, rather than imitative, though I’m a bit wary of yielding relentlessly to the so-called ‘selfish’ and ‘narcissistic’ intention of the artist. I thought that artworks survive precisely because of their adaptability, flowing in and through ‘difference’ (or ‘differance’) in its poststructuralist sense. Could you expand on what you mean by ‘selfish’ and ‘narcissistic’, Matt? Also, and in extension, I’m curious to find out what we mean by the term ‘original’ when we ask such questions as ‘whose portrayal of the Joker is the most faithful to the original figure’ (c.f. the blog above). Can we talk about returning to some kind of originary presence in this way? WHICH original figure are you referring to? Is there really only one Joker, or can we only talk about Jokers, given the context of appropriation? I’m not an expert in this field either, so I’m interested in what people take the authentic Joker to be.
… I should have said that when I write ‘Joker’, I’m placing him in inverted commas, so it can easily be replaced by ‘Dracula’ or ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’. Perhaps my questions yield different answers when the subject of debate changes…I don’t know.
(Brace yourselves!)
The Joker was recently given a makeover in Batman #663 (Feb/March 2007), ‘The Clown at Midnight’, an issue that has plenty to say regarding the character’s personality – namely, that he ‘has no real personality’ and that what he does have ‘changes every few years’. The following passage precedes his latest ‘metamorphosis’ and shows the character struggling to come to terms with his postmodern condition:
‘His remarkable coping mechanism, which saw him transform a personal nightmare of disfigurement into baleful comedy and criminal infamy all those years ago – happily chuckling to himself in the garage as he constructed outlandish Joker-Mobiles which gently mocked the young Batman’s pretensions in the Satire Years before Camp, and New Homicidal, and all the other Jokers he’s been – now struggles to process the raw, expressionistic art of his latest surgical makeover.
He tries to remember how the doctors in Arkham say he has no Self, and maybe they’re right, or maybe just guessing. Maybe he is a new human mutation, bred of slimy industrial waters, spawned in a world of bright carcinogens and acid rains. Maybe he is the model for 21st-century big-time multiplex man, shuffling selves like a croupier deals cards, to buffer the shocks and work some alchemy that might just turn the lead of tragedy and horror into the fierce, chaotic gold of the laughter of the damned. Maybe he is special, and not just a gruesomely scarred, mentally-ill man addicted to an endless cycle of self-annihilating violence…’
The issue was (unfortunately) very poorly received; few fans cared for its being in prose and the ‘new’ Joker has yet to reappear in writer Grant Morrison’s current run on the title (though a return is – as always – imminent).
The above passage – the entire issue – is littered with obscure references to the character’s seventy-year history and forms part of Morrison’s larger aim to reinstate earlier periods of the ‘Bat-mythos’ prior to the overhaul of established continuity back in the mid-eighties. The ‘Satire Years’ almost certainly refer to the fifties; ‘Camp’ to the sixties; and ‘New Homicidal’ may encompass that period starting in the seventies and extending to the present (making Morrison’s Joker ‘New New Homicidal’?). Also, certain references (‘the Thin White Duke of Death’) and the character’s appearance in parts of this issue (no eyebrows!) bring to mind David Bowie, another artist with a taste for reinvention.
It’s interesting how reinvention – in comic books at least, and perhaps in other media – is often greeted by its audience with a rejection of the recent past. Denny O’ Neil’s ‘The Five-Way Revenge’ (Batman #251, September 1973) is widely praised for sweeping aside the camp excess of the sixties and for marking a return to some glorious, ‘darker’ original. The truth is more complex; the ‘original’ Joker who appears in Batman #1 (1940), however visually iconic, is completely bereft of a personality. Perhaps it was this that ensured the character’s longevity; brushing aside his pedestrian motives in these early appearances (diamond-theft?), the character supplied writers’ with a blank canvas on which to project whatever they pleased. At the same time, the ‘New Homicidal’ Joker of the seventies can be seen as simply grafting murderous intent on to the relatively harmless capering clown of the previous twenty years, having that sense of humour and a taste for ludicrous schemes the ‘original’ villain notably lacks (‘The Laughing Fish’, in Detective Comics #475, Feb.1978, is an especially good example).
As the Joker undergoes his ‘metamorphosis’ he spews forth ‘a tissue of quotations’ culled from innumerable comic books:
‘Until there is only a single Joker voice smacking its lips in the huge echoing emptiness of a place, let’s call it his soul, of such utter dereliction there are no words broken enough to describe it.’
Perhaps Morrison is here looking to reinstate the character’s original demonic ‘absence’ of personality. At any rate it provides a practical demonstration of a character’s reinvention being informed by what preceded it, and the character’s subsequent conduct in that issue is quite at odds with what the reader is familiar with, pulling the rug from under their feet.
Regarding that last point there are a few things I’d like to say concerning the films and Nicholson and Ledger’s performances, but I’ll save it for later. But the endless proliferation of a character or text through the media is something that can easily be brought to bear upon the likes of Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula…
Yeeshk! Apologies for the lousy formatting. It was in paragraphs; but now it’s just been squidged into one indigestible lump…
James, thanks for all the background. It seems then that from his conception the Joker is meant to change. This may place him in a different category to say Dracula or Frankenstein, who are not innately prone to alterations. Of course, it is not just villains who change. Van Helsig underwent drastic changes when he became the eponymous hero of a Hollywood film, which, to be honest, was awful. I would also say that Frankenstein is not as villainous in the original text when compared to the films of the thirties. To answer Giles, i would suggest that original would be the first conception of the character. For example, see this seperate post on The Joker by Amy. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/viewblog.php?id=32
The original version, i would suggest, being the comic book figure. As for artistic narcissism I do not necessarily mean it in a negative sense. There is just a desire to create in the artist which means that if a director, make-up artist or actor is asked to do The Joker they would naturally wish to put their own spin on it. I don’t think this is the only thing going on, however. A host of ideas interplay and texts interweave. It is interesting that the Gothic seems to eat itself so often and on so many levels.
Just to flesh out this narcissism some more, the artist naturally has to be dissatisfied with the world around them, in order to be propelled to create something new. This dissatisfaction may contaminate their feelings towards the archetypal characters that they are dealing with. Perhaps I am over-egging this though.
I couldn’t agree with you more, Matt: I think there is an implicit suggestion in your comment that ‘a host of ideas interplay and texts interweave’ that the task of appropriation, at least in the case of The Joker, can extend even beyond the comic book/graphic novel canon. Channel4.com’s filmography of The Dark Knight gives a brief reference to the film adaptation of Hugo’s novel’The Man Who Laughs’, which featured Conrad Veidt (the guy who played the somnambulist in ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari). This might be an unconscious (i.e. intertextual) point rather than one that pertains to an intentional act But perhaps this is still a link worth chasing up, and I’m sure James will appreciate the Hugo/film reference – isn’t there a Batman graphic novel called ‘The Man Who Laughs’? I might be wrong on this…I don’t know. I suppose the point I was getting at with my question on what is ‘original’ was that surely our sense of what constitutes the real deal is a belated event that becomes possible only once it is situated into wider networks of texts and adaptations. I also really like your comment, Matt, about how a sense of dissatisfaction might necessitate and illuminate ‘difference’, though I would add that it’s only ‘contamination’ if you believe that there is an ‘essence’ to this character that needs to be repeated as if it were somehow transendent/ahistorical ( I know that this is not what you are suggesting). It’s not over-egging at all; in fact it raises interesting questions on what we mean by terms such as ‘appropriation’ and ‘intertextuality’, whether we need to offer a distinction between the two.
There is a graphic novel entitled ‘The Man Who Laughs’, and the Veidt film has been frequently cited as a visual influence for the character’s original appearance. Looking at a movie poster only confirms it – it’s as if the artist had simply lifted the image and transferred it to the comic book.
James, thanks for that background information on the Joker! I was hoping someone who knew a little more about DC canon would be able to comment here. I do wonder to what degree the original character needs to have been created with some inherent emptiness/flexibility if they’re to continue through several generations of reinventions. The Joker (being a wild card in a quite literal sense, I suppose?) would seem to have a great deal more of that than, say, Count Dracula… but then, the younger, charismatic, frequently angst-ridden and overtly sexual isn’t usually presented as a *re*-imagining at all. Hmm. I’ll have to think about this some more!
But surely the point is, as Matt suggested, that the whole notion of ‘reinvention’ is something of a misnomer. Each new appropriation is itself a creative act, a kind of creative repetition if you like rather than a repetition which is then ‘tweeked’ here and there. Each new appropriation responds to the concerns of the artists’ respective historical presents. I can’t imagine Shakespeare, for example, intentionally creating empty characters with the hope that they’ll go through centuries of adaptation. It doesn’t ring true with me, though as Jennifer has suggested, a greater knowledge of the DC canon might prove useful here. I didn’t understand your last point, Jennifer…The Joker has a great deal more of what exactly, than Count Dracula?
I think also we have to consider how we recognise that a character is being re-invented. Naming is of course the most crucial factor, and the one that must be adhered to even suggest a renivention in the sense we are discussing here. After the character has been named The Joker or Dracula then it is likely his back story will fit fit the original construction (although this is not strictly the case in the Van Helsing film i mentioned above and variations do occur). The most interesting aspect of the character is the ability of their appearance to change completely and yet the naming process still allows us to recognise the character. Look at the difference between Karloff’s Frankenstein and De Niro’s.
Yes, I suspect I’m falling into some kind of Derridean abyss. I suppose my thinking on certain manifestations of literary/filmic characters is more future-oriented rather than founded on an ‘archaeological’ endeavour to find the definitive causal sequence. I would even extend this to the naming process itself, the creation of ‘the Name’, in which the very names ‘the Joker’ or ‘Dracula’ are in some way death-inflected (i.e. open to future presents [sorry for the phantom-Delueze creeping in], future interpretations that we cannot predict); at the same time however, I agree with Matt’s point that the naming process offers an anchor for recognition across historical periods. Perhaps, then, the naming process is in some way poised between ‘life’ and ‘death’ – does this make any sense? Any critical theorists out there who can help me out?
Sorry for spamming the blog…another thought. As the images above of Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson & Co are now caught in thegothicimaginationmachine, I’d like to ask what is essentially ‘Gothic’ about the various manifestations we’ve been discussing? Gothic for who exactly? For the writer? The director? The audience? I don’t really have any answers to this question myself…
I think it’s difficult, or rather impossible to judge Ledger’s performance as the Joker on a handful of trailers, which are designed to show as little of the film as possible. It’s as predictable as the setting sun that Ledger will be hailed as the ‘Ultimate Joker’ after the movie is finally released, based mostly on its arrival after his sudden death – there may be a touch of the Cobain about the whole affair. That aside, I’m looking forward to it a lot and hope he lives up (no pun intended) to the hype that’s been surronding the performance since his death. As for what people are looking for in the character of the Joker – I don’t think ‘scariness’ is what it is. For me, what makes a truly great Joker is a level of intensity and psychosis that no screen actor has managed to bring to the role thus far. While the Joker may appear to be reinvented with each incarnation, I think it’s more a case that each version of the character on screen and television gets closer in babysteps to what has always been at the heart of the character since his creation – he’s an sociopath and a madman, with a brutally sadistic sense of humour.
In ‘Batman’ (1989) we saw Jack Nicholson play Jack Napier just as he had played Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ (1980). A Jack-of-all-trades! It’s as if the actor has a sort of screen personality that imposes itself upon every role he plays. Most of us don’t mind this because it’s tremendous fun to watch – fun, but not frightening. Ledger didn’t have that kind of screen personality. I don’t mean that as a criticism; he took his work very seriously – too seriously, some have said. After playing the undemanding role of pretty boy in a few forgettable teen rom-coms, everything he did after and including ‘Brokeback Mountain’ showed a man interested in playing interesting roles. Following his death all sorts of rumours began circulating that playing the Joker had pushed him over the edge – an exaggeration to give the story a shot of old Werther. And then there’s ‘the touch of Cobain’ William mentions, and echoes of Brandon Lee (was it Brandon Lee in ‘The Crow’?). The uncanny effect of seeing Ledger on screen this July, a dead man playing a ‘dead’ man while looking all the time like a dead man, will undoubtedly raise a few shudders irrespective of his performance. And I’ve just this minute seen a leaked image of him as the Joker in a nurse’s uniform – a typical Joker moment, but the makeup on his face looks a thousand times more grotesque than anything we’ve already seen. To avoid repeating the events of Burton’s ‘Batman’, and departing from standard comic book continuity, Ledger’s Joker will not have his skin bleached by means of a chemical bath but will simply apply cheap make-up to his face that he never washes off but keeps re-applying, layer after layer, so that his appearance grows more monstrous throughout the film. In Alan Moore’s ‘The Killing Joke’ (1989) we see a man lost in the myth he’s made, trying to make sense of how he could have come to be. In ‘The Dark Knight’ this process will be, in effect, miniaturised; deprived of the prehistory Moore could draw upon for his graphic novel, the legend will be formed within the space of a two-and-a-half hour film, ‘A [Joker’s] Progress’. It’s interesting how the Joker flees from his past where a good many other villains, like the Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze and Two-Face, are shown to dwell upon it to the point of obsession. He has, as Gordon puts it at the end of ‘Batman Begins’, ‘a taste for the theatrical’ – he’s essentially a showman, putting on a performance. And I’m sure I read somewhere in a book called ‘Contemporary Gothic’ by Catherine Spooner (which, incidentally, has a couple of interesting pages on the subject of ‘Batman Begins’), that a defining trait of Gothic is its ‘denial of depth’ and ‘insistence on the surface’ – just like the Joker, thus bolstering the villain’s Gothic credentials. I’m sure there’s a good piece of critical theory that could be applied to this last point, but it’s twenty to one in the morning and the necessary books aren’t within arm’s reach…
So does this then mean that ANY text, film, image, event etc etc that expresses an interest in ‘denial of depth’ and ‘insistence on the surface’ is Gothic by definition? This sounds somewhat vague, and doesn’t ring any Bells with me, James. Again, I ask, Gothic for who? Why is it so important for me to have the Gothic in my eye when reading texts from the various canons we’ve been looking at? I agree with William – I don’t think it’s helpful to prejudge ‘The Dark Knight’ and Ledger’s Joker.
Well it was getting pretty late… Clearly a ‘denial of depth’ and ‘insistence on the surface’ isn’t going to be enough on its own to define a text as Gothic, though it is a feature of a large number of texts considered to be Gothic – I’m thinking of all that medieval nonsense in Walpole and Radcliffe (and didn’t the former have some Gothic edifice cobbled together out of papier mache?), and something Fred Botting referred to as ‘candygothic’. But you’re right that there has to be more to it than that. And I agree we should take care not to prejudge the film and Ledger’s performance, though given recent events I suspect that’s easier said than done. As for your other question, I’m stumped. But perhaps a Gothic imagination was at work when Ledger’s death was first reported and romanticised; journalists and the media in general seem to have a way of viewing events through a Gothic lens.
I would suggest that the Joker can be read as a Gothic character because he epitomizes the “internalisation of the spectre” which Castle has argued began in Udolpho. In other words his psychotic behaviour is the central aspect of his personality that makes him Gothic. However, his context, too, adds weight to him being Gothic; after all, he terrorises GOTHam. It is generally recognised now in Gothic academia now, I would suggest, that deciding what is Gothic and what isn’t these days is a tricky business. However, I think there is a good arguement to say that The Joker is a Gothic character, in the shape of a monstrous psychotic.
Matt and James, I agree with what you’re both saying. I’ll need to look up the ‘candygothic’ reference – it sounds delicious. I apologize if I gave the impression that I was dismissing the ‘Gothic’ lens: if I were to be dismissive, I would be just plain cynical, and that is the kind of attitude that kills rather than nurtures debate. I’d like to think more, though, about the ‘internalisation of the spectre’: from what I can gather from the far reaches of my memory, Castle’s essay is concerned with a form of internalization that pivots between issues of ‘life’ and issues of ‘death’; the living as well as the dead can be ghosts…but I’ll need to ponder the possible relation between that thesis and that of the monstrous psychotic.