The Joker’s Message
This is my final paper for WRIT 5 The Pursuit of Happiness with Professor Deanne Harper:
"Some men just want to watch the world burn," says butler Alfred Pennyworth. He speaks this memorable line about nihilists to Batman in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight. Although typical superhero movies tend to showcase fanciful fight scenes and alien characters with colorful costumes, The Dark Knight does just enough to connect solid entertainment back to reality. A masked vigilante by the name of Batman finds inspiration from childhood trauma and a fear of bats, channeling his emotions into protecting his beloved city of Gotham from evil and destruction. He must deal with rising tensions in his city, a borough plagued by crime and corruption across the social classes. Some criminals have large desires for money and power, and they will do anything to obtain these for the sake of financial well-being, security, etc. But some criminals break the law to make a statement, and this precisely describes a particular diabolical clown: The Joker. To the Joker, society needs mayhem to house the corrupt and misguided. He does not believe in collective happiness because he thinks that each individual focusses on pursuing his or her own personal happiness. Both Batman and his foe strive to show Gotham’s true colors, while having divergent perspectives on how society should function. Through conflict between the Joker and Gotham, we see that collective happiness in society is attainable, but it requires that people are virtuous enough to sacrifice their personal happiness for the well-being of others.
The Joker Aspires for Anarchy
Children are born into a world reading story books about endless opportunities and freedom, but they eventually can see that society is far more complicated than their fairytale preconceptions. During his youth, the Joker suffered from the abuse of his own father, "a drinker and a fiend." His father brutally attacked him with a knife and engraved the Joker’s eerie smile, while also attacking his defenseless wife. A tragic event like this can give a growing child so much pain that it can scar them, quite literally in the Joker’s case, for life. They fuel a person’s frustrations and can lead one to rebel through misdemeanor, as is the case with the Joker. Though the character himself looks and behaves like a freakish lunatic, his childhood trauma is a rather pitiful aspect that the audience can connect with.
The crimes of the Joker’s ill-natured father mirror the problems in the city of Gotham, a society influenced heavily by personal greed for money, power, and security. Several corrupted members of the Gotham City police department are affiliated with Mob boss Sal Maroni, including Detectives Michael Wuertz and Anna Ramirez. They captured District Attorney Harvey Dent and his fiancé Rachel Dawes, turning them over to Maroni for execution. Both detectives are driven towards evil via monetary reward, despite being members of the Major Crimes Unit for the city police. It is key to note that Detective Ramirez chooses to work for the Mob to pay off her ailing mother’s hospital bills, provoking the question of whether her actions are at all justified. But according to the logic of Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who suggests that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong," (Bentham 2) Ramirez acted poorly. She chooses the safety of one individual, her mother, over the lives of two others, Dent and Dawes, which does not maximize the total happiness she could bring if she were to save two and sacrifice one. Nonetheless, her concern for her mother is understandable. The irony that law enforcers break the law shows that some Gotham authorities are no better than criminals themselves. Dishonest officers simply enable wrong-doing for their own personal gains.
Nolan’s Gotham city embodies what modern society can look like if citizens cared only about themselves and neglected the consequences of their decisions on others. In "We Have No Right to Happiness," English novelist C.S. Lewis discusses the moral pursuit of happiness. A man deserts his selfless wife for some mistress, which although could tie back to the man’s legal right to the pursuit of happiness as per America’s Declaration of Independence, Lewis believes the man is using this right as an excuse to pursue sexual happiness. (Lewis 228). The writer contends that as people choose to pursue their own happiness without helping others pursue theirs, society may exist but "civilization will have died at heart and will be swept away" (Lewis 231). This is similar to what is happening in Gotham, where certain human beings¬–corrupt officers, mobsters–are acting in their self-interest and cheating others of their freedoms. After a bank heist, the Joker burns all the acquired money in front his astonished henchmen, declaring "this town deserves a better class of criminals." The villain makes clear that his goal is not to behave like an ordinary egotistical criminal, but to send a message to the city’s people.
If government fails at its job of providing order and enrichment to society, could anarchism, which the Joker desires, be a viable option? Few nations have been run under this political philosophy in history, but anarchist activity in Spain persisted from 1860 up until the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 that handed power to Dictator Francisco Franco. As Spanish farmers and peasants grew increasingly frustrated with their inattentive landlords and leaders, their tensions culminated into revolution by the time of the war (Jackson 136). Workers in regions like Aragon, Catalonia, and Andalusia took over the economy by ousting factory bosses and landowners, turning old workplaces into anarchist meeting grounds. By the Civil War, the fight was not just between Franco’s fascist nationalists and the incumbent communist republicans, but also involved anarchists who desired no government whatsoever. Ultimately, the anarchist movement was not strong enough to win over in Spain and eventually subsided. But the point of anarchism, as described by American historian and journalist Gabriel Jackson, is "local autonomy, the collectivization or distribution of large estates, and a policy of noninterference with small property," (Jackson 135-136). Followers want to decentralize the system in order to gain greater individual freedom, to own and do what they so desire. One success that resulted from anarchism, at least in Spain, was that disadvantaged citizens could finally address their problems with capitalism and spur change, by redistributing welfare to the people. Yet a major concern with this kind of rebellion is the serious harm it could inflict on society. In our example, Spanish factory owners actually lost their jobs without any compensation. Rules and regulations are completely determined by anarchist groups themselves, so suffering in such a state could entail frequent crime and death.
The Joker believes that Gotham deserves anarchism because an individual’s pursuit of personal happiness supposedly supersedes the desire for collective happiness no matter what. He tries to prove that everyone is inherently corruptible to illustrate that we all act in self-interest and would ultimately give up order in society. After Dent barely survives execution thanks to the heroics of Batman, he grieves over Dawes’s death and resorts to attacking all of whom are accountable for his loss. Dent’s career had centered on upholding the law, yet he still takes the lives of men instead of putting them onto trial. This was a victory for the Joker, as the once exemplary and incorruptible prosecutor falls into crime, showing that even the best of individuals cannot consistently follow morals.
Batman and Virtue in Society
The Joker’s philosophy assumes that innocent individuals will crumble upon being pressured, but Batman’s character demonstrates that not everyone behaves in such a manner. As a teen, Bruce Wayne experienced the anguish of losing his parents to murder, but tragedy transformed him differently than it did with the Joker and Dent. Feeling guilty of leading his parents to the site of their deaths, Wayne transcends his fear of bats as Batman and uses his inherited wealth to fight evil, protecting his fellow city people from organized crime. Although a superhero has characteristics unlike those of an ordinary human being, his or her motives can provide a basis for why obtaining personal happiness is not the sole purpose of an existence.
People can desire more than just maximum utility and minimum pain in their lives. English philosopher John Stuart Mill expands on what is the utilitarian doctrine, which states that people only desire happiness and any other means towards happiness, specifying that virtue "is not naturally and originally part of the end, but is capable of being so" (Mill 125). Virtue is the practice of moral excellence, and as Mill says, it can cultivate in certain individuals but not all. This makes obtaining happiness a unique experience for different people because each person has a distinct outlook on rightful and wrongful action. A thief may steal to make a living and find happiness in his existence because he obtains much-needed money and goods. His conduct may be self-justified due to desperation but remains societally unjustified because he did not pay for his property. Were the same thief disciplined and brought to realize how unfairly he had treated his victims, he may become more virtuous and avoid stealing again. Whether one demonstrates virtue depends on the circumstances that he or she was nurtured in, but as Batman’s backstory suggests, it can be acquired through a realization of one’s flaws and desire for self-improvement.
Two ferries, one carrying civilians and the other transferring criminals, discover that each has a bomb onboard and possesses the detonator for the other ferry. The Joker informs each ship that saving itself requires destroying the other, warning that both would be destroyed should neither choose to detonate by midnight. This experiment tests how obsessed humans are about their personal well-being, as the Joker hopes to show that they are willing to forgo the happiness of others. In contrast, virtuous individuals consider the lives of others as valuable as their own and would lean towards avoiding detonation. Both civilian and criminal groups have mixed opinions on how to proceed. This predicament is known as a prisoners’ dilemma, a concept formalized by Mathematicians Merril M. Flood and Melvin Dresher that deals with two parties, each of which must maximize his or her payoff without knowledge about the other’s choice (De Herdt 185). Below, Table 1 and 2 each display payoffs for four different scenarios. In Table 1, each ferry prefers detonation because it yields a chance at survival; there is a survival case for each ferry, both labeled *. Table 2 considers when each ferry prefers doing nothing, acknowledging that people do not have the right to hurt others; there is an equilibrium case labeled **. In the film, both ferries remarkably settle on avoiding detonation (scenario ** in Table 2), and it takes Batman’s eleventh-hour heroics to prevent the Joker from triggering both bombs. We see that the people of Gotham contemplate whether they should save themselves but feel guilty for desiring to take the lives of others. They defy the Joker’s beliefs, suggesting that an individual can desire more than personal happiness, even if it means risking his or her life just to spare others from immediate harm.
Table 1: Prisoner’s Dilemma – Ferry Scene – Survival Outweighs Virtue
Table 2: Prisoner’s Dilemma – Ferry Scene – Virtue Outweighs Survival
The more people who have virtue, the happier society should collectively be overall. Shidehara Oishi and Ulrich Schimmack, professors in psychology at the University of Virginia and the University of Toronto, find in their paper "Culture and Well-Being" a significantly positive association between social support and reported life satisfaction of nations, based on regression analysis on data from a 131-nation Gallup World Poll (Oishi & Schimmack). This suggests that as we perceive care from others around us, the righteous deeds of peers and strangers for our own well-being, society collectively feels better. The opportunity costs for the virtuous giver are time and energy less spent on satisfying themselves. We see hope in ailing cities like Gotham as people have shown potential to care for one another, so perhaps the Joker’s anarchy may not be the appropriate measure to run society by. Nolan uses Batman to give Gotham’s susceptible civilians and punished criminals another chance at existence, for them to realize that virtue is desirable and worth giving up their self-pursuing drives for because it intrinsically feels just.
In The Dark Knight, the Joker seeks to exploit Gotham’s corruptible citizens and show that members of society ultimately live for their personal happiness and well-being. When members of the city’s law enforcement operate in their self-interest and fail to serve proper justice to the accused, and when the city’s acclaimed district attorney falls into the hands of crime, we see deep underlying problems in a society. Civilians cannot live securely and must fend for themselves, perhaps destining them to become criminals themselves to survive amidst the surrounding brutality. Although this plants the seeds for the Joker’s desired state of anarchy, the Batman proves that people who develop a sense of virtue, a care for moral standards and distinction between proper and improper action, can resist corruption. Virtue enables the masked vigilante of Gotham to move beyond the pain of his past and pursue the protection of people from such suffering, keeping the hero from seeking mere vengeance and enraged destruction. Additionally, virtue brings awareness to citizens that their lives are worth as much as anyone else’s, preventing one group from sacrificing the lives of the other for their own benefit. As we discussed, both ferry ships could have perished had Batman not been there to immobilize the Joker, but this is the price of living in a society where people live for each other and not solely for themselves. Sacrificing oneself for others, whether by simply quitting the pleasure of smoking for a pregnant woman or risking your life to save someone else’s, means you appreciate society and society should respect you for that. The city of Gotham has proved what it means to be human not just to the Joker, but to modern societies plagued with corruption.
Works Cited
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, Oxford UP, 1970.
De Herdt, Tom. "Cooperation and Fairness: The Flood-Dresher Experiment Revisited." Review of Social Economy, vol. 61, no. 2, 2003, pp. 183-210.
Jackson, Gabriel. "The Origins of Spanish Anarchism." The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 2, 1955, pp. 135–147.
Lewis, Clive S. "We Have No Right to Happiness." Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt, and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 227-231.
Mill, John Stuart. "Of What Sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is Susceptible." Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt, and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 123-129.
Oishi, Shigehiro, and Ulrich Schimmack. "A New Inquiry into the Psychological Wealth of Nations." Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 5, no. 4, 2010, pp. 463-471.
The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Monique G. Curnen, Ron Dean, and Eric Roberts. Legendary Pictures/Syncopy, 2008.