The Joker and the Occult

The year was 2009, in Dendermonde, Belgium. A man with white face make-up, blackened eyes, and dyed red hair wandered into a day care center. His goal was mass hysteria, and brandishing his weapon, he set to accomplish his task. After all was said and done, the man, "Kim D", had murdered two baby boys, a woman, and injured 13 others in a "frenzied knife attack". A knife, small axe, and fake pistol were later confiscated, as well as a piece of paper with the address of another creche, perhaps what was intended as his next target. He was wearing body armor, similar to James Holmes almost three years later in Colorado. "You see this kind of thing on TV and you think it's bad," a resident told Reuters. "You don't realize, but now when it happens in your own street, so close to us." The killer was later identified as Kim De Gelder, an unemployed Belgian from Sinaai. He was high on drugs and alcohol, and according to his attorney, had heard voices in his head. "In further media reports, De Gelder reportedly watched The Dark Knight an unusually high number of times ("film obsession"), appears to have quoted the character Harvey Dent at the start of the attack, and committed the attacks on the one-year anniversary of Heath Ledger's death" (Wikipedia).

"It’s a combination of reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it," he says. "I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices — it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts. He’s just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke" - Heath Ledger (Empire Online)

Reading Ledger's account of how he created the Joker, it certainly sounds like he was communicating with something beyond the realm of corporeal existence. The process sounds terrifying. I imagine a normally-dressed man writing in his notebook, completely alone. The light from the lamp is repressive and shining harshly on his pacing frame. The actor would later report having trouble sleeping, which would eventually lead to his death by overdose. I can't help but think that his role as the Joker may have contributed to that mental state. On the 22nd of January, 2008, Heath Ledger was found unconscious in his bed at 421 Broome Street in the hip Soho neighborhood in Manhattan. The EMTs arrived seven minutes later, but were unable to revive him. At 3:36 pm, Heath Ledger was pronounced dead in his apartment. The autopsy produced toxicological analysis report declared that "Mr Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. [...] We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications." Ledger had complained of being unable to sleep to his co-star, Christopher Plummer, and his ex, Michelle Williams confirmed this in an interview. The Joker's avatar was dead.

A year after Ledger's death, another man dressed as the character, US army specialist Christopher Lanum, would be shot dead as he pointed a shotgun at police. "Lanum's girlfriend [...] told investigators that the soldier idolised the Joker," it was reported in The Guardian. He was a suspect in the stabbing of another soldier just a few hours earlier. In another case, this time in 2010 in Ireland, Christopher Clancey, who was also wearing clothes similar to Heath's, "filled six large jerry cans with petrol" and poured their contents through a broken window at his school. He had bought the 100 liters of gas from nearby stations days prior and had been storing the fluid outside the school. Clancey lit the fuel ablaze, taping it on his phone, and sent the destruction to his friends. "I am glad I did it," he told reporters, "because the people will realize they can't treat students as sub-human." The resulting damage was over $1 million. Heath's character was no longer only affecting his creator, but also those who had come to see him as a hero.

In light of the recent shootings in Colorado, I have been contemplating the occult aspects of the character and why he holds such dangerous, addictive qualities. At the 2008 opening of the The Dark Knight, I remember being in awe of Heath Ledger. It was late in the night, when the veil between the worlds is less perceptible, and even when I watch it today, I relish every nuance of his performance. The way he inflects his voices, raises certain syllables into a whine but others into a rabid growl. His stances, the way he sucks his lips, being "young, alive, and evil" as one reviewer put it. He fascinated a generation, but he is also dangerous, particularly to unstable minds. The Joker killings in Belgium. The case of Christopher Lanum in the States. His image is so iconic that it has been adopted as a challenge against authority by various groups. When I imagine Ledger's performance, I can't help but think of a bubbling, black ooze that is slding under our streets, under our houses, in places we can't see but is always there, waiting to be discovered if we look too closely. He is tempting. An evil spirit who beckons us with duplicitous promises. In previous blogs, I have mentioned the Joker's link to Dionysus' mass hysteria. Dionysus is the god of masks, acting, drunkenness, and rebelling. He was the call of the wild to ancient Greece's patriarchy, bringing chaos to Pentheus, Orpheus, and countless helpless animals.

There was something in Ledger's performance that was so utterly primordial, that it's as if the ancient spirit of Bacchus flowed through him to entertain a new millenium of mad people. Certain sites link him directly to the Anti-Christ, and I can't help but think that is not too far off. Our culture is in love with death. It permeates our movies, our political actions, even the clothing we wear. It is a symptom of a society that is at odds with itself, not only unaware of its lunatic subconscious but denying it even exists. It is societies like these which are ruled by the masculine left brain and have sudden outbursts of madness... mass killings, wars, racism, sexism, debauchery... We are so controlled, so tightly wound, that when we snap, we really snap. Hear it? That snapping? It's the sound of the Joker's cackling laugh. See that 1000 point drop in the DOW? See the failing EU? The US's crumbling infrastructure, wars, and economy? It's a house of cards that the Joker wants to kick, letting them fall across the earth. It is interesting to note that the only card in the deck without hierarchy is the Joker. He is outside the system, willing to take on any role (i.e. mask) that he needs to defeat the enemy. Nolan's communicated with something evil, that's for sure. It was a finely tuned metaphor for the cracks on the dam's edifice, and the plaster used to cover it up. TDKR showed that this was only a temporary solution and delaying the inevitable: madness would eventually reign, flowing from the torn up dam and pouring across the streets of Gotham. TDKR has one literally burst.

The only thing standing in Dionysus' way was Apollo, the god of laws, numbers, and language. They were also rumored to be one in the same. Apollo, who lived in Delphi three-fourths of the year, would fly north for the other fourth. In his stead, Dionysus would rule. In other words, madness would overtake logic for a part of the year. Our modern culture has, at-large, forgotten this. We live in a world where men are expected to be rational 100 percent of the time. Maybe that's why it's the males who are the ones who snap these days while in ancient Greece it was the women. One can see The Dark Knight as a modern representation of this eternal struggle between the id (The Joker, Bacchus) and the ego (Batman, Apollo). The id, the Mother, is a sense of wildness and wholeness. The ego, harbored in the left brain and represented by masculine entities, is the place where language, mathematics skills, and laws are formed. It is individualistic, where 'I' is. The Mother's right brain is untamed, where sublime art is created, and where the community is king.

The socially constructed 'I' is constantly being taunted by the forces of nature. We age, we die, our loved ones die, and there is nothing we can do about it. It is what some philosophers call the bait-and-switch, we desire, but we also fear. One can look at each of Nolan's Batman movies, especially the first two, and see how each is represented by one of these concepts. Batman Begins is a society taunted by fear. The Dark Knight is based around a villain who begs for society to let go to its base desires. The Dark Knight Rises may be Nolan's clumsy meditation on overcoming fear and desire, to simply exist. The director had his finger on the beats of our culture--at what cost are we willing to be free? He employed some of Hollywood's best thespians to get there.

Most actors commune with otherworldly entities to play their roles. I posit that each personality trait is a spirit which exists within and without us. A typical person will communicate with one dominant entity, while actors are aware (subconsciously or not) that there are many, many more. If, like Heath Ledger, the actor starts communicating with a demon, there can be repercussions. It seems to me that Ledger accidentally performed ancient magic which summoned a dangerous spirit, releasing him to the masses. It was a spirit that had always lived inside him, buried but never forgotten, that emerged in his performance. And that spirit threw him aside when he no longer needed him. Not only that, but because it would be really funny in a dark humor sort of way. The Joker, this evil prickling in the back of our minds, is asserting his reemergence in the modern world. To be clear, this is one way to look at the world. The polar opposite, a pragmatic material universe, is another way. As are all myths.

Mass hysteria. Death. These are things that the Joker would get a kick out of.