Philosophy Now Forum

Ștefan Bolea meditates on madness at the movies.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/136/Joker

Most of us possess a sense of reality, but what if our senses deceive us? Would I still know what was real if, for instance, I had a microscopic brain tumor that made me hallucinate that the people around me were devils, or that a beautiful sunny day was a dark nightmare? What if I then felt the urge to start shooting people?

Okay, was the Joker a madman? Seriously, was he clinically insane?

At the cambridge.org site, he is described as someone afflicted with "antisocial personality disorder".

Okay, but...

Is that more a manifestation of genes or memes? Nature or nurture? And doesn't that make all the difference in the world? After all, in a free will world, if someone behaves as they do because of a brain tumor or because they are afflicted with some serious mental illness, how then can we really hold them responsible for what the do? Morally or otherwise.

Or, instead, is Joker a sociopath? In other words, for any number of reasons given the life he lived -- he was abused as a child, he was raised by sociopaths, he lived a grim and brutal life largely beyond his control -- he simply came to view the world as revolving solely around gratifying his own selfish wants and needs.

Joker, a psychological thriller directed and co-written by Todd Phillips, is a meditation on this disassociative sort of madness. It emphasizes the philosophical problem of the ‘liquid’ divide between perception and reality: if my perception is biased, then my reality transforms as well.

Again, that's why it's so crucial [if possible] to pin down the etiological components of someone who chooses the behaviors as he does. If his perception of the world around him is largely "beyond his control" then the only realistic option is to separate him from the rest of us and try to treat him as a "mental patient" rather than as a "criminal".

On the other hand, if Joker is a sociopath and/or a moral nihilist who rationalizes his selfish and at times destructive behavior, say, philosophically, we may or may not be able to offer him a new philosophical narrative that prompts him to change his behaviors.

With actual madness however...

A second, connected, problem of madness, is the dissolution of the distinction between inside and outside. I can project my inner being onto the world, changing its color and tone. If I can’t tell that I’m doing this then I’ll live in a labyrinthine inferno, a prison of my own projections. No one can reach out to somebody with this kind of insanity. No one really exists for them, and after a while their own broken mirror reflects no one. The subject devours the world, also disintegrating in the process.

...how much of this is so engrained physiologically in Joker, that all we can do is to stop him from devouring our world along with his own.

Harris, Sam would say the J had some bad luck that's all. I mean that's all it can be in a world in which neither geners nor memers have any freewill.

And listen up Mannie and Henry Q. becuz Harris, Sam is talkin to u too (except you're not a rabbi).

Any second now Biggs will chime in and again remind Harris, Sam of the absurdity of him expecting people to be more tolerant and compassionate by not believing in freewill if they are determined not to be able to do so and maintain their belief in freewill therefore.

yes thank u Biggs very clever but it doesn't detract from Harris, Sam's platform. perhaps the idea of determinism, if in the heads of people, will result, through some chain of causality, a world in which less bad luck happens to people. in that case, determinists would be obligated to spread the doctrine even to those who will end up being determined never to understand any of it.

Hey damn watch Harris, Annaka's Freewill one on the Lex Friedman Podcast on YouTube. She's going hard af dudes. Imagine having a wife that smart, that hot and who has a Star Wars name. That's why Harris, Sam is such a beast. Behind every great man is a strong woman.

Joaquin Phoenix portrays Arthur Fleck, a failing stand-up comedian with a psychological disorder that causes him to laugh at inappropriate moments. The film provides a backstory for the character of the Joker in the Batman stories. Under the pressure of successive disasters and injustices, Fleck descends into madness and goes on a killing spree.

Well, here, of course, if Joker in both films is derived from the Batman films, comparisons will be made between Joaquin Phoenix's Joker and Heath Ledger's Joker. The Christian Bale Batman movie is the only Marvel/DC Comic Book film I have ever seen. And that was some years ago. So admittedly it's all rather fuzzy to me now. As I recall, the Heath Ledger character was something akin to a Hannibal Lector. He had layers of depth that set him apart from your typical thug sociopath. Closer to, say, the sociopath who might have majored in philosophy at college.

For instance...

"Joker has a unique character and he is different from other villains in movies. While they committed crime based on personal revenge, economic fulfillment, Joker does it his own way. He does not obey rules, laws, or even morals. Based on those ideas, the writer includes Joker as a nihilist." Satrio Jagaf from Moral nihilism as Reflected by Joker in the Dark Knight Movie

So, sure, a lot of our reactions to films of this sort will revolve around what we first bring to them: ourselves.

But then back to this author's assumption that the key to understanding Joker's behavior is madness. Which would diminish the film's interest for someone like me. Like the manner in which the fascinating character Nathan Landau in Sophie's Choice turned out to have a mental disorder propelling him one breakdown to the next.

In the process, though, he adopts the persona of Joker and becomes the symbol of a revolution against privilege in Gotham City, and a hero to rioters who fail to grasp the depth of his disorders. Madness is notoriously difficult to perform, because, on one hand, the actor must keep his emotions in check while acting as if they are out of balance, and, on the other, his exaggerations must be credible, otherwise the movie becomes a melodrama or caricature. But watch, for instance, arguably the most disturbing scene of the movie, in which Arthur smothers his mother with a pillow as he delivers the crucial line: “I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize it’s a comedy.”

So, does that clinch it for you? Does that make him a madman more so than a sociopath more so than the more sophisticated moral nihilist?

Arthur’s tone is neutral, as if his actions are completely severed from any emotion. The scene is a cold description of gestures with no reference to sentiment. The apathy of the murder is chilling. The brilliance of Phoenix’s performance of madness makes me think of other great deranged villains from past decades: Jack Torrance from The Shining; Bobby Peru from Wild at Heart; John Doe from Se7en.

Same thing though: were these characters construed by you to be propelled by madness? Jack Torrance clearly was. But I'm more ambivalent regarding Bobby Peru and John Doe. Bobby Peru struck me as just basically the out and out sociopath, while John Doe is summed up more accurately here:

"Even though the subjects of Greed, Sloth, and Pride were not ethically good people, John's method of dealing with them was demonic to say the least. Despite being insane, John was far from unintelligent and was capable of working everyone involved in his scheme, victims and law enforcement, with no trouble." Fandom.

Closely linked to the central theme of madness in Joker is the idea of the ineffectiveness of psychotherapy. “You never listen,” complains Arthur to his therapist, “All I have are negative thoughts.” Dialogue is seen as fake, and because access to the awareness of others is blocked, one enters the realm of solipsism, where pain is incommunicable. The other person may be falling apart, yet I cannot see through his mask.

Human psychology. Once that is introduced all bets are off. Our psychological reactions are always going to be an extremely complex and convoluted intertwining of nature and nurture, of intellect and emotions, of libidos and drives, of conscious and subconscious and unconscious reactions to the world around us.

Couple this with the Benjamin Button Syndrome -- all the interacting variables in our life that we are only so much able to grasp and control -- and it is virtually impossible not only to grasp why others do what they do but why we do what we do as well. There are "trained professionals" like psychiatrists and psychologists who are educated to come closer to understanding human psychology in general as a "discipline" but even then, in not having actually lived a patient's life, they can really only go in so far.

And, of course, with Joker we are dealing with an entirely fictional character. A comic book villain. His "backstory" having been created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson.

And with all the usual twists and turns...

So Joker is also a meditation on ‘ontological insecurity’, as R.D. Laing put it, and on a sort of existential paranoia. If I lack empathy, the other may seem to me like a robot, a computer program, or a ghost. I may even doubt the existence of the other person. I may even come to doubt my own existence: the other never sees me, therefore I fail to see myself, therefore I fail to exist.

Psychobabble let's call it. Unless, of course, in considering your own life it seems rather prescient. In any event there are any number of aspects that encompass our lives which are for all practical purposes clearly visible. And of those that are not perhaps better words might be ambiguous or ambivalent or uncertain or confused.

I just happen to prefer "fractured and fragmented". But even then, only in regard to my value judgments.

Invisibility is a socio-political problem: many may feel that they don’t have a place, that they are worthless, that they don’t mean nothing, that their lives make no ‘cents’, as Arthur writes in his journal.

On the other hand, some take invisibility down into the philosophical depths...layers that are rarely explored by others. Black or white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man

As for Joker, what did he mean by a life that makes no "cents"? Is that in reference to the essential meaningless of human existence...or does it also include the manner in which capitalism, in reducing so much down to dollars and cents, creates a systemic alienation like no other political economy before it.

Which brings us to the idea of the ‘damnation of the poor’. A society for which money is god always ultimately equates failure with death. There are many ways in which the poor are put to death by such a society, and one is the denial of healthcare. Arthur’s access to therapy and medication becomes hindered on account of welfare cuts, precipitating his insane behaviour. I might even infer that the motif of rats, which occurs a few times in the movie, is a symbol of the great mass of the poor, which Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, resistant to the systemic extermination machine.

Ah, of course.

Sooner or later the reality of capitalism is going to be introduced here. Alienation, exploitation and the growing disparity between the working class and the ruling class. What that can precipitate in the way of truly ominous characters.

Indeed, right now, the "debt limit deal" unfolding in Washington will no doubt result in further cuts to the "welfare state"...to folks who rely on any number of government programs just to, in some case, merely subsist. Watch the Democrats and the Republicans -- cohorts sustaining my own rendition of the "deep state" here: https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p ... s#p2187045 -- do the bidding of Wall Street. And of course the "sacrosanct" military industrial complex. Though the defense budget in America is greater than the next 10 nations combined, no cuts there.

Thus to the extent that Joker falls between the cracks here there can be little doubt that his plight will be exacerbated. Though I doubt there were many Marxists in the film suppling him with a "class analysis" of the "lumpenproletariat"...those who along the way may well become moral nihilists or sociopaths or psychopaths. Or, in fact, do indeed go mad from all the stress and anxiety of barely scraping by. Capitalism and mental illness are never going to be that far removed.

Then...religion?

Two religious ideas come to mind. First, I think of the Hindu principle of tat tvam asi (‘thou art that’), which states that we should try to recognize the same essence in the other, since we are essentially the other. Failure to recognise ourselves in the other means that ‘man is wolf to man’; that exploitation never ends; that ‘the boot stamping on a human face’ (to quote Orwell’s 1984) forever remains the symbol of our never-ending civil war. This lack of empathy is another motif throughout the movie, and it leads to mass destruction.

You tell me. I never watched Joker. And if any of this is applicable to the Heath Ledger Joker, I missed it. A "lack of empathy" in human interactions is usually associated with the sociopath. That's why they are so scary. They're not like most people in that there is no reasoning with them at all. They want what they want [for whatever reason rooted in how they became this way] and your job is always the same: don't get between them and that.

With Heath Ledger, "The Joker" seemed far removed from the Cesar Romero cartoon character in the old Batman series I watched as a kid.

Again, however, it's been awhile since I watched The Dark Knight. But as I recall, the Ledger Joker seemed to remind me more of the Anthony Hopkins Hannibal Lector [anything but] cartoon character. I could imagine someone's life unfolding such that in embracing a moral nihilist perspective they moved beyond just being a criminal or a sociopath. There were deeper layers that made them more intriguing.

Second, I think of the Christian idea that greatest are those who serve; “they and not the strong being pointed out as having the first place in God’s regard” (in John Stuart Mill’s words). So contempt towards the lowly in the movie is not merely a symptom of fascistic indifference but of satanic arrogance. Like Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, the Joker scene where the wealthy are seen amusing themselves while watching Chaplin’s Modern Times, a film about the hardship of life during the Great Depression, discloses the sadistic sense of superiority of the ruling class, who observe the drama of the disadvantaged from the heights of their contempt.

Again, you tell me. Perhaps there was a more overt "class analysis". An analysis that was somehow intertwined with elements of religion. Me, what I'm always looking for in characters is the extent to which as a moral nihilist myself I can identify with what I perceive to be a "philosophy of life" similar to my own. That and [of course[ the part rooted in dasein and in the Benjamin Button Syndrome.

Then this part...

When the most advanced societies treat their most disadvantaged members as ‘rats’, one may say that pessimism becomes a valid interpretation of life and that optimism is wicked, as Arthur Schopenhauer argued. In the movie, many respond to Joker as people respond to Schopenhauer or to the nihilist philosopher Emil Cioran: they are so sick of being lied to that accepting even an inconvenient or toxic truth is better than believing the lie.

The Great Pessimist and the man who wrote The Trouble With Being Born? To the extent that Todd Phillips, Scott Silver and Joaquin Phoenix went in that direction is intriguing.

On the other hand, for many being lied to is the equivalent of believing that there is a One True Path -- their own -- and "the system" refuses to go down it with them. Whereas for me in being "fractured and fragmented" in regard to moral and political value judgments, will there ever be a Joker more in sync with that?

Anyway, I just ordered the DVD from amazon, so I'll finally watch it myself in a few days.

We come to a central problem of humor. We are trained to laugh only when it is appropriate. “We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves” is how Martin Heidegger puts it in Being and Time.

As is often pointed out, much of humor does revolve around the punch line being at the expense of someone else. Sometimes this becomes the whole point when, say, a celebrity is "roasted". They are poked fun of but in a "good naturedly" manner. Other times though the humor is nothing short of scathing...vicious.

Now, with Joker -- the sociopath? the nihilist? -- there is so much resentment building up inside him, who can tell where his own attempts at humor might go. With those like him the joke is on...everyone?

Joker has his own particular humor, and laughs when things aren’t funny, so harassing the dictatorship of conformism. Generally, he can be seen as an educator of the sense of humor. One might distinguish between fake laughter – the appropriate laughter of the ‘they’ – and Joker’s super-fake laughter that becomes authentic because it is his own original expression, uninfluenced by social imperatives.

Here again, rooted existentially in dasein, one person's assessment of a super-fake laughter may be entirely at odds with another person's assessment. And that's because once someone goes way, way off the beaten path in trampling a particular society's "imperatives", their own reaction to them will clearly reflect the embodiment of their own subjective sense of reality. There's Joker's reaction to them and then, say, Rupert Pupkin's?

His vision of life as a comedy which is darker than a tragedy reminds us of the absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco’s reflection regarding the hopelessness of the comic. When we enjoy watching a performance of Ionesco’s Exit the King, we are laughing at the tragic aspect of existence – we laugh at our lives and our deaths.

Which brings me back to the extent Joker becomes the subject of philosophy. Thus the very existence of this article in Philosophy Now magazine. We are prompted to probe him as, perhaps, far, far more than just a comic book character. Instead, some can see themselves in him and speculate as to what his behaviors "mean" in a larger more "erudite" manner. How can we relate him to the world that we live in today? How are our own moral and political and philosophical prejudices played out up on the silver screen. Thus, my own existential reaction to the Heath Ledger Joker as more or less a reflection of moral nihilism.

[similar in part to the reaction I often have in regard to the characters created by Woody Allen]

Joker’s vision of life as comedy is also connected to his mental illness, and so raises the question from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: is laughing demonic or divine? According to some theologians, the devil – the first parodist – is simia Dei (‘God’s ape’). People are sadder than they declare, sadder even than they think they are. “I’ve never been happy,” declares Fleck ironically, upon explaining that his childhood nickname was ‘Happy’.

Back again to that: mental illness.

If Joker was afflicted with a brain tumor or schizophrenia or some other serious mental illness, well, wouldn't that change everything? Scrape the philosophical analysis? Why? Because he does what he does, by and large, in a manner that is "beyond his control". Same if he was possessed by some demon.

Nope, for me, Joker has to be basically a sane human being who because of his own unique trajectory of experiences, took the particular path that he did in a free will world. That way, I can imagine how, if my own life had been different I might have ended up something akin to him myself.

And then the part where, in a No God world, there are no philosophical, sociological, psychological, etc., assessments able to result in a deontological moral assessment of him. Instead, all we can do is to contain him somehow.

Lock him up and throw away the key? Acknowledging that given the way he is there is almost no possibility of "reasoning" with him and bringing him over to "society" and its own rendition of rational and virtuous human interactions. And in acknowledging that, had our own life been different, we might have ended up just like him.

Finally, one of Joker’s central ideas is reminiscent of Fight Club or Mr Robot: a schizoid character sparks the flame of insurrection. One question we might ask here is, do I have to fight myself, or the world?

To ask that question seems to suggest one might possibly come up with an answer that would justify an insurrection. Whereas for a moral nihilist of my ilk, in being "fractured and fragmented", all insurrections are equally, ultimately futile. At best I can choose not to go in the direction that a sociopath might come to embody: me, myself and I. And fuck anyone and everyone who attempts to come between me and what I happen to want at any given point in time. It's just better for everyone if I stick to the distractions that provide me with at least some measure of fulfillment in the comfort of my own home.

In other words, should I attempt to master myself, as the Stoics urged, or should I attempt to conquer the world? And is the loss of myself acceptable if I gain the world in return?

It's impossible for me "here and now" to put into words just how ludicrous either of those options are. In fact, basically, the only viable recourse open to me now is to sustain my own rendition of waiting for godot. Recognizing how fruitless any attempt on my part to explain that to others would be. They haven't lived my life after all. And even though I have, I'm still far removed from understanding it myself.

When he becomes Joker, Arthur becomes the worst possible version of himself; but he gains the world, or at least the acceptance of some part of it, turning into a symbol of the revolution.

Here though you would have to run this by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. They wrote the screenplay so what did they intend Joker's motivations and intentions to be? Did he have a "philosophy of life"? Was he intent on reconfiguring the world into a facsimile of what unfolded inside his head?

As for this...

If I’m fighting evil, I cannot be good, because then I would surely lose. Sadly, I must become more evil than evil. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we might say that whoever fights monsters will surely become a monster.

That may actually mean something important to some here. They may have concocted a more clearcut distinction between good and evil in their own head. I'm about as far beyond good and evil as one can be.

So, was that the case with Joker too?

You tell me.

Joker: How Joaquin Phoenix’s Film Makes Nihilism Look Beautiful and Arthur Fleck’s Anarchist Views Far Too Believable
Surabhi R

Joker may be one of the nastiest villains in comic book history but DC’s latest film starring the incredibly brilliant, Joaquin Phoenix goes way beyond this world. To simply place this film in the DC universe would be an underservice to it. Todd Phillip’s film is a telling tale of our time. It’s not just Gotham that is descending into chaos. Look around and you will realise the urgency and relevance of it.

So, is that the "message" being conveyed by Joker? And then the part where millions of Americans seem intent on pushing America all the way back to the 1950s again. A white Christian heterosexual utopia where men were men and women were...June Cleaver?

Or perhaps your Joker may be more in sync with how you see the world around us today. The point being that something has to be done to bring us all back to sanity. And while Joker's methods may be too extreme for some at least he's out there fomenting "the people" to do something about the anarchy we have descended down into?

In the past, we have seen a string of Hollywood films based on Joker and who can forget Heath Ledger’s brilliant adaptation of this character in the Dark Knight but Phillip’s film sets itself apart by taking us back to the time when Joker was not Joker. A struggling-to-make-ends-meet-clown Arthur Fleck, taking care of his ill mother and more importantly spiraling down into an unhealthy mental state is what we see.

Back to that again. Back to the part where he is not really a nihilist at all. Or, rather, not as philosophers grapple with it. Instead, he is afflicted with a mental illness such that even though a bona fide nihilist might choose the same behaviors, Fleck's behaviors are more or less "beyond his control"? Assuming of course that, as with all the rest of us, he lives in a free will world.

Joker's backstory. And what is this but the part I root existentially in dasein. Arthur Fleck is born and raised in "a particular world" historically, culturally. He accumulates a particular set of "personal experiences" that predispose him to embody particular moral and political prejudices.

Just like all the rest of us.

He just happens to be entirely fictional.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:46 pm Joker: How Joaquin Phoenix’s Film Makes Nihilism Look Beautiful and Arthur Fleck’s Anarchist Views Far Too Believable
Surabhi R

Joker may be one of the nastiest villains in comic book history but DC’s latest film starring the incredibly brilliant, Joaquin Phoenix goes way beyond this world. To simply place this film in the DC universe would be an underservice to it. Todd Phillip’s film is a telling tale of our time. It’s not just Gotham that is descending into chaos. Look around and you will realise the urgency and relevance of it.

So, is that the "message" being conveyed by Joker? And then the part where millions of Americans seem intent on pushing America all the way back to the 1950s again. A white Christian heterosexual utopia where men were men and women were...June Cleaver?

Or perhaps your Joker may be more in sync with how you see the world around us today. The point being that something has to be done to bring us all back to sanity. And while Joker's methods may be too extreme for some at least he's out there fomenting "the people" to do something about the anarchy we have descended down into?

In the past, we have seen a string of Hollywood films based on Joker and who can forget Heath Ledger’s brilliant adaptation of this character in the Dark Knight but Phillip’s film sets itself apart by taking us back to the time when Joker was not Joker. A struggling-to-make-ends-meet-clown Arthur Fleck, taking care of his ill mother and more importantly spiraling down into an unhealthy mental state is what we see.

Back to that again. Back to the part where he is not really a nihilist at all. Or, rather, not as philosophers grapple with it. Instead, he is afflicted with a mental illness such that even though a bona fide nihilist might choose the same behaviors, Fleck's behaviors are more or less "beyond his control"? Assuming of course that, as with all the rest of us, he lives in a free will world.

Joker's backstory. And what is this but the part I root existentially in dasein. Arthur Fleck is born and raised in "a particular world" historically, culturally. He accumulates a particular set of "personal experiences" that predispose him to embody particular moral and political prejudices.

Just like all the rest of us.

He just happens to be entirely fictional.

NONE

Of the above explains Y U R such a KUNT that needs to be killed by ....


BATMAN

See what I drive some here to?!

Pick one:

1]
2]
3]

#3 m'lord