The Joker and the Occult

Bale's Batman. Property of Warner Brothers.

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 seems like he was communicating with something beyond the realm of corporeal existence.

The process sounds terrifying. I imagine a man in a T-shirt and jeans. He is writing in a notebook, alone in a stale hotel room smelling of sweat, old candy wrappers and empty soda cans littering the floor and desk, bed unkempt in the center, with the light of the lamp harsh on his 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, and 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.

S S S

About 20 minutes into TDKR's midnight showing in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, a man opened fire. He was armed with AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 870 shotgun, two .40-caliber Glock handguns and covered in a suit of armor many had assumed was cosplay. It was the worst mass shooting in the United States' history. Children, teenagers, and even a baby were feared among the casualties. 12 dead. 58 wounded. Many others reported irritated eyes because of the tear gas he had opened his assault with. The man, James Holmes, was from San Diego and attending school in Denver for a PHD in neuroscience. He surrendered willfully to the police when they arrived on the scene. When asked his name, he replied, "The Joker, enemy of Batman."

The Joker...

Police rushed to his Aurora home. Ascending up the stairs wearing protective gear, the shooter had rigged his 850-square-foot, third-floor apartment with chemicals and explosives. An official later noted that Holmes' death-trap "seemed to mirror a chaotic state of mind." Waist-high trip wires were set up across the living room, one strategically placed against the front door. If a visitor had accidentally set the trap off, 30 live grenades would have exploded under their feet. Holmes' had improvised these particular bombs, filling empty jars with "explosive liquids and .223-and-.40-caliber bullets" which were connected to "'control box' in the kitchen" (LA Times).

The impending blast would have probably also ignited 10 gallons of gasoline which were nearby. At least that's what appears was Holmes' intention. "Overall," the official noted, "[...] if the devices [...] had gone off, the fireball alone would have blown up and consumed the entire third floor of the apartment building." Five buildings were soon evacuated. Many Batman-related paraphernalia decorated Holmes' flat. A Batman poster and mask were discovered on the scene. More booby traps were placed in another room, and connected to a lethal combination of acids. Because of the danger, evidence such as a computer and chemical compounds were carefully taken away. People wishing to collect their belongings from the evacuated area were told to hold off until the grounds could be fully secured.

This attack was reminiscent of the chaos The Joker championed in The Dark Knight, especially his followers' killing of Rachel Dawes and mutilation of Harvey Dent.



However, there was a strange inconsistency in Holmes: why did he warn the police that his home was booby trapped? Why did he so easily surrender? If Holmes' goal was the total over-running of senses through death and destruction, he apparently had had a last minute change of heart.

Holmes' face was covered in a red towel as he was led into the Arapahoe Detention Center. His hair and clothing were already red. It was clothing which had been hidden from the movie goers under a suit of ballistic gear. His legs were shackled. His hands were cuffed behind him. "He's spitting at everything," one of the inmates later told a reporter. "He was spitting at the door and spitting at the guards. [...] Dude was acting crazy." Holmes was locked in solitary confinement and put on suicide watch. His actions had off-put some of the prisoners, to say the least. Many talked of killing him. Holmes ate his meal in the morning, however, a breakfast of grits and sausage. His windows were blocked with tape. "Let’s just say he hasn’t shown any remorse," one of the jail's employees reported, "He thinks he's acting in a movie."

And madness was sweeping across the nation. A Maine man turned himself in a day after seeing the The Dark Knight Rises, telling the authorities that he was on his way to kill a former employer. After searching his car, police found an "AK-47 assault weapon, four handguns, ammunition and news clippings about the mass shooting that left 12 people dead early Friday" (Yahoo News). In New Jersey, 100 were evacuated from the Edgewater Multiplex after an emergency exist was opened. A man had stood up, walked outside through the door and spoke to another person, then went back in. After the authorities arrived and the opener refused to step forward, the showing was ended. Another was canceled in Norwalk, California when a male raised his cell phone up and shouted, "Does anyone have a gun? [...] I should go off like in Colorado." Shots were heard outside another theater in Florida. There were no casualties in the incident.

The country was going crazy.

The famous director Peter Bogdanovich blamed modern entertainment, writing that "violence on the screen has increased tenfold. It's almost pornographic. In fact, it is pornographic. Video games are violent, too. It's all out of control. I can see where it would drive somebody crazy," and America's gun laws, "Anytime there's a massacre, which is almost yearly now, we say, 'Well, it's not the guns. Guns don't kill people. People kill people' and all that bullshit from the NRA. Politicians are afraid to touch it because of the right wing. And nothing ever changes. We're living in the Wild West." The shooting has sparked an increase in gun sales across the nation. Buyers claimed, when prompted, that it was for protection from future shootings. Meanwhile, unrest in Anaheim has gone, for the most part, unreported by the press. Echoes of the Joker's speech from TDK about 'everything going as planned' comes to mind.

During his first court appearance the Monday after the shooting, Holmes looked despondant. Off-color humor was attempted in the press, many writing how the "Joker wasn't laughing now," but other observers noted his creepy appearance. Holmes stared down with tired eyes. He never said a word, his droopy head falling back and forth when spoken to. An appearance of remorse sometimes fluttered across his troubled face. However, it would quickly return to indifference, as if he didn't know what he had done. Later in the week, Holmes would ask a guard how the movie ended. A witness told a reporter of the event, "He was trying to look like he was sincerely curious. Like he had no idea why there was anything wrong with what he was saying. It was sick ... I think he’s trying real hard to act crazy.”


Smirking face of James Holmes, taken years earlier.


Death is not only a theme of Nolan's Batman franchise, but a specter that swirls around it like so many bats on the movies' logos. Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight hit a new macabre high. Not only because of his grungy, hilarious, terrifying, and sexy performance, but also because we were watching a dead man. The spirit of chaos, the trickster spirit, had performed his greatest joke. He had killed off the soul who had communed with him so closely, making the world awe at Ledger's walking corpse. It is a Faustian fable. When a person strolls too close to perfection, he is going to get burned.

Ledger's Joker was the perfect representation of sexy madness. Like the Bacchanalia in ancient Greece, he was a spirit to be communed with, begging you to let go of society's made-up rules and embrace the insanity within. He taunted the 'rule-makers', pleading with Gotham's citizens to opt out of their constructed game, and did this by pointing out the absurdity of it all, a theme epitomized in the Joker's talk with Dent in the hospital. "I'm like a dog chasing its tail," he said, "I don't know what I would do if I caught it!" It is this thirst for new order from unorder that is also symbolized with the likes of Tyler Durden and "Breaking Bad"'s Walter White. White, for his part, shows us another man literally sick to death of the modern world. Eventually, his evil acts spread like a disease, poisoning the whole community. One wonders if Nolan's Batman series hasn't had a similar result. Several actors and workers involved with the movies' production were accidentally killed violently, and it was around the time of the second film's launch that Bale was arrested for attacking his mother and sister. And now this.

At the 2008 opening of the The Dark Knight, I remember being in awe of Heath Ledger. It was late in the night, the veil between the worlds was less perceptible, and even when I watch it today, I relish the 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 an iconoclastic pog against authority. When I imagine Ledger's performance, I can't help but think of a bubbling, black ooze that is sliding 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 utterly primordial, as if the ancient spirit of Bacchus was flowing through him to entertain a new millennium of mad people. Certain sites link him directly to the Anti-Christ. 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 not only unaware of its lunatic subconscious but denying it even exists, and it is societies like these which are ruled by the masculine left brain... 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.

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.

Now the film franchise will have the ever-lasting burden of not only Ledger's death, but also the murder of the poor people inside that Colorado movie theater, and because of Holmes, we will never be able to look at the Joker the same way again either. This is not a symptom of the character's potency, but our society's attraction to him. We admire the Joker because there is something about him that we wish we could be. Leonard Shlain would make the link between the left brain's controlling ego and the need in society for a balancing madness. The more controlled the ego, the more uncontrolled the id. Thus, there is not something wrong with the Joker for existing, there is something wrong with us, our society. The people who paid for it with their lives were the people who loved him the most.

If the demonic spirit of the Joker is alive, surfing the paranoia and desires of our collective unconscious, he is getting his greatest laugh. Not only are the masses still knee-slapping and getting a thrill out of his dead puppet, Ledger, but now they are literally dying at his amphitheater alter. See them line up and perish in the name of pop chaos! In this regard, it may interest you what the mad author of one of the Joker's most iconic stories, "The Killing Joke", has to say on magic. In another example, Moore writes that "the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it.” The trickster is cackling in the night, making children afraid of the glow of the movie screen. He beckons them to him. He tempts them with anarchy, destruction, anonymousness. Yes, he is the 'man' that wants to watch the world burn.

What is it about our modern society that would drive a young man to throw his life away and shoot a bunch of others? As an economics minor, I think it has to do with incentives. Our culture idolizes the rich, famous, and successful. By killing a bunch of people, Holmes could achieve something his PHD degree never could do, earn national attention. Some on the internet were calling for his identity to remain a secret as to dissuade similar massacres. This is clearly a crap-shoot. In our age, this secrecy is almost impossible. However, what if we look at it from the other end-- there is something in our society that wants to admire men like Holmes. It's a sickness, a disease, like the one Walter White suffers. What is causing that feeling in men today? It is a question we should all be asking ourselves in the face of this new tragedy. My thoughts are with the families of the victims.