“He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, and Jokers

Since his debut in 1940, the Joker, famed adversary of the Batman, continues to permeate the American cultural mediascape not merely as an object of consumption but as an ongoing production of popular imagination. Joker mythmakers post-1986 have reimagined the character not as superhuman but as “depressingly ordinary,” inspiring audiences both to empathize with his existential plight and to fear his terroristic violence as an increasingly compelling model of reactionary resistance to institutionality. This article examines the recent history of modern terrorism in conjunction with the “pathological nihilism” diagnosed by Nietzsche in order to elucidate the stakes and implications of the Joker’s legacy and popularity. Our analyses of the Joker lead us to conclude that “lone wolf” terrorism is an inherent affordance of a politically pluralistic society, a morally relativistic culture that stresses self-determination and authenticity as top priorities. These values impact “lone wolves” like the Joker in their function as media-driven auteur killers--striving for post-mortem recognition and dissemination. Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) then proposes that this type of criminal can ironically result from a media-induced contagion, a discursive fear propagated by twenty-four-hour news cycles that incidentally creates a path for the socially impotent to make their television debuts.


Introduction
Dennis O'Neil writes: "Because he's inhabited that vast, unbounded mirror world known as Popular Culture, where realities shift from day to day and change is the only constant, the Batman has had to remake himself every decade or so or risk almost certain extinction." 1  This article is not interested in diagnosing the Joker's psychopathology; rather, we aim to explore the social pathologies articulated in and by the Joker's reinvention by content-creators and consumers alike. 3 During the Q&A of the "Is the Joker a Psychopath?" panel, the speakers were asked a series of questions related to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke (1988)the single most important Joker comic given its tragic retelling of the villain's origin. "Can a psychopath be created from a single traumatic experience or is it actually something you're born with?" 4 Outside the world of comics, Dan Hassler-Forest proposes the term of transmedia to further highlight the intertextuality or continuity that exists between modern popular culture properties. 7 As the Comic-Con panel on the Joker's pathology demonstrates, artists, fans, and scholars are invited to interpret various elements of Joker transmedia in a collective ritual that reconfigures, and thereby embraces, the character as a member of our social mythos.
For this article, recognizing the separate traditions of Joker transmedia, 8 we prioritize one genealogy of representation over others. Since his debut in 1940, depictions of the character oscillate from a violent criminal to a petty thief. 9 While some recent comics have re-presented notable hyper-violent Jokers, 10 we focus on a more popular Joker lineage (beginning with the comics of the late 1980s) 11 that portrays the character as a domestic terrorist and active nihilistaspects we explore in the six sections that follow. This strand of Joker "macrofiction" then culminates in the pseudo-revolutionary of Arthur Fleck.
Unlike other traditions, which depict a superhuman and/or supervillainous Joker, the Phillips film recasts its protagonist as "depressingly ordinary." Fleck is not a well-resourced prankster or expert chemist. 12 He isn't emotionally intelligent, charming, or possessing of a dominant personality. 13 Instead, he's a thirtysomething bachelor, living with his mother, working paycheck to paycheck, who struggles with depression and loneliness. Within the first act of the film, the audience is informed of Arthur's previous institutionalization, unproductive therapy sessions, various psychotropic medications, and rare medical condition (likely the pseudobulbar affect) which causes "sudden, frequent and uncontrollable laughter" that often doesn't match the emotion of others. Despite such pathological signifiers, we cannot scapegoat Arthur (and those mentally ill) as the source of Gotham's dysfunction. Instead, we argue that this reinterpretation of the character inspires audiences both to empathize with his mundane plight and to fear his radicalization as representative of a dormant social reality. Accordingly, audiences began to fear the film itselfthe empathy it generatesas a potential catalyst for radicalizing certain viewers and inciting offscreen violence. This era's Joker functions as a cultural Rorschach test, our means of selfknowledge, prompting scholars to ask, "What are our cultural conditions such that we fear the Joker as a concrete possibility in our society?" 14 Though set in 1981, the Gotham City of Joker is meant to reflect the social tensions of contemporary America; "the characters live in the real world and the stakes are personal," Phillips writes at the beginning of his script. 15 Such "stakes" then include deinstitutionalization, the ineptitude of mental health services, the stigmatization of mental illness, the rise of celebrity worship, the glorification of White crime and violence, and so on. 16 However, we identify the recent history of "lone wolf" terrorism as the most relevant factor in the fear surrounding Gotham's most famous criminal. The narrative of Arthur's psychological degeneration and eventual recourse to violence represents a possible, fearful, and, regrettably, familiar outworking of actual contemporary conditions (e.g., poverty, social isolation, and the like). By this recourse to brutality, 17 Arthur takes power (back) from a society that disempowers him. He justifies his killings not only as retributive violence but also as stages in a process of existential healing. Note that, at the film's conclusion, he is finally able to laugh without pain.
Thus, within the fictional Joker, the authors see a popular reflection and creative distortion of the violent extremists who exist among us. This article is then organized into two parts, each with three sections. First, we propose the Joker as a case study of the antics and motives traditionally associated with contemporary "lone wolf" terroristsas both figures terrorize the current social imagination.
Second, we offer a philosophical commentary on the social constructions and values that seemingly shape said figuresnamely, moral relativism and a public disdain for institutionality. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche are essential to this latter discussion. If the first three sections can be reduced to a demonstration of how the Joker advances academic discourse on "lone wolf" terrorists, then the latter three sections demonstrate how Nietzsche's diagnosis of Western culture as "pathological" and "nihilistic" further elucidates the stakes and implications of the Joker's legacy and popularity and his imagined connection to the disaffected killers of contemporary society.
To transition from one discussion to the other, the six sections that follow adhere to a chiastic structure, a ring composition providing the authors an analytic symmetry in presentation. The first three sections analyze the discursive terroristic ascension to (1) power, (2) self-realization, and (3) contagion, while the latter three analyze the nihilist descension into (4) commisery, (5) dark comedy, and (6) reactionary resentment. The relationships between violent extremism and pathological nihilism (1 and 6), self-glorification and derisive expression (2 and 5), and cultus and communitas (3 and 4), we argue, are most apparent once discussed in such thematic sequence. In short, autonomy and artistry fuse into a performative violence governed by a systematic choice of death, whereby idiosyncratic killers are consumed, disseminated, and reproduced within popular media. At the same time, these active nihilists seek to commiserate with an audience, embracing an identity of institutional abuse or abandonment which transitions into a spirit of mockery and destruction.
Through our analysis of fictional and non-fictional violent extremists, we find that domestic terrorism and pathological nihilism ultimately stem from the neoliberal social conditions and hypermasculine revenge politics of postmodernity.
One hears social cries over a loss of human decency, physical intimacy, and individuated masculinity. Such social impotence is reconfigured into a fractured yet popular resistance to institutionality and governmentality, especially within a pluralistic (that is, morally relativistic) society that prioritizes self-determination and authenticity over traditionalism and convention. Such Western values become weaponized against the public, as these terrorists/nihilists construct an idol of themselves through acts of destruction. This, too, reveals the overarching cultural value attributed to public recognition, digitized identity, visual technology, and idiosyncratic artistic signatures.

The Deliberate Pursuit of Death
The rise of transnational terrorism has significantly impacted the stories of the Joker (and superheroes more generally). Consider the Joker's recent targets of attack: mass transportation services, state institutions, and public spaces meant to garner media interest. 18 While much has been written on the aftermath of 9/11 and depictions of foreign terrorism, 19 we devote our attention to the more recent face of extremism: those domestic terrorists who act without traditional forms of radicalization. The "lone wolf" moniker remains best suited for an introduction to this type of criminal: "a perpetrator of violence who does not have a political motivation, and is better described as either a vigilante or mentally disturbed." 20 Olivier Roy dubs this modern phenomenon "the Columbine syndrome": [A] youngster goes to his school premises heavily armed, indiscriminately kills as many people as possiblestudents and teachers, acquaintances and unknownsthen kills himself or lets himself be killed by the police. Prior to this, he has posted photos, videos, and/or statements on [the internet]. In them he assumed heroic poses and delighted in the fact that everyone would now know who he was. 21 Suicide as spectacle, Roy argues, should be understood in the context of the "generational nihilism" that shapes today's global youth culture, rather than as an expression of specifically religious (i.e., Muslim) extremism. For Roy, then, nihilism refers to both the "futility of life" and the "systematic choice of death": What fascinates [contemporary radicals] is pure revolt, not the construction of a utopia. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself. It is violence devoid of a future. If this were not the case, it would be merely an option instead of a norm and a conscious choice. 22 This is a new Jokerone that views death (of himself and others) as the only way to construct a lasting image in the postmodern world of digitized identity.
Though he laughs in the face of death and post-death, 23 in past iterations, the Killer Clown is not a suicidal maniac. The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008;dir. Christopher Nolan), for instance, wears a suicide vest in order to escape a Gotham mafia meeting and later puts a gun to his head when proving a point about the fairness of chaos. Yet such death-may-come schemes are rarely the true "payoff" of his grand designs, save for two exceptions. The first is Joker's suicide in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) where the Grim Jester goads Batman into killing him so as to incriminate the vigilante for murder, while the second is the "comedy routine" of Arthur Fleck in Joker.
In the film, Arthur yearns for the approval of celebrity-idol Murray Franklin, a late-night television host akin to Johnny Carson or Jerry Lewis. 24 After humiliating Arthur on his show (via footage of his failed stand-up performance), Murray's office calls a disaffected Arthur, inviting him to perform a bit of his act live. Arthur agrees and begins to orchestrate a proper television debut. "I don't want to die with people just stepping over me," Arthur writes in his journal. "I want people to see me." Arthur is not given an audience during the course of his life and, thus, seeks to capture Gotham's attention with his death. In his apartment, Arthur methodically rehearses his TV appearance. He sets up a sheet on the doorway, sharpies Live with Murray Franklin on a mug, sits on the couch, and practices his dialogue with a phantom host. The climax of his act involves a single "knock knock" joke, whose punchline will be a gunshot beneath his chin. In these rehearsals, Arthur hears laughter and applause whenever his act is complete.

Auteur Theory
How then are we to interpret such "performative violence"? As Mark Juergensmeyer observes, "lone wolves" are never truly alone: "in each case there is an audience in mind and a larger network of imagined supporters whom the act is meant to impress." 25 After his final "joke," Arthur is subsequently arrested as footage from his late-night appearance dominates the news cycle. As chaos ensues in the streets, bringing a smile to Arthur's face, his cop car is T-boned by a speeding ambulance driven by two rioting Gothamites. Arthur awakens from the crash and dances in glee atop the car before dozens of protestors in clown masks who shout and cheer as Gotham burns. Arthur has finally achieved recognition and empowerment, yet, unlike other "lone wolves," he lives to witness the impact of his performance.
Since Columbine, "lone wolves" continue to be media-driven. 26 Consider the Virginia Tech Shooter, twenty-three-year-old Cho Seung-Hui who killed thirtytwo people and himself in 2007. 27 Despite reports of the shooter's antisocial behavior and mental illness, Vinay Lal observes that: Cho's insanity was not such as to preclude him from understanding that contemporary world views are fundamentally shaped by the image. Secular life long ago banished the idea of transcendence, but the image is the incarnation in which the ideal of the afterlife survives and flourishes. The police say that the QuickTime video files and still photographs Cho sent to NBC studios are demonstrable proof of the preparation that went into the massacre, but what they do not appear to have understood is that Cho was directing his own film, playing the lead role in it, creatingon reel and in real lifea montage of shots, and acting every bit the auteur. The death of the auteur was heralded some time ago, but Cho…paves the way for a new conception of the Killer as Auteur. 28 In film studies, "auteur theory" provides a framework for which to deconstruct cinema, the inherently collaborative product of filmmaking, into a range of artistic choices made by individual writer/directors. According to such a theory, artists that construct a consistent vision (a creative signature) across their filmography should be respected and celebrated. 29 A future project, for instance, could offer analysis of Joker directors (i.e., Burton, Nolan, Phillips, Snyder) using such a framework, 30 similar to Dan Hassoun's performance analysis of Joker actors. 31 Our use of the term "auteur," however, deviates from the tradition of film studies and specifically follows Lal's observations abovearguing that contemporary terrorists are not just media-driven but aesthetically-driven.
Another way of formulating such an artistic criminal design is the theory of "idiosyncratic terrorism," which Jesse Norris uses to study the "strange or unusual characteristics" surrounding terrorist motives, ideologies, tactics, and strategies. 32 To use Jack Nicholson's Joker from Batman (1989; dir. Tim Burton) as an illustrative example, the Ace of Knaves, recently disfigured, wishes to impose his trademark image onto anything he can (e.g., televised broadcasts, banknotes, people). He develops a toxin called "SMYLEX," triggered through a secret combination of conventional household items. This "Joker Venom," as it is called in the comics, forces the human body to smile and/or laugh uncontrollably, killing the victim within seconds of exposure and affixing their jaw muscles into a grotesque rictus grin. Gothamites then live in fear of their food, drink, and beauty/hygiene products after the Joker "markets" his new concoction over the local news. His motivation is then personal, subconsciously misogynistic (as women are predominantly targeted), yet embellished within a novel ideology of transcending traditional beauty standards. 33 His tactics (e.g., embracing the image of a grinning playing card jester) are equally as novel as his forms of strategic thinking (i.e., his plan to replace "The BAT" as the most newsworthy quasi-public figure in Gotham City).
Arthur's explicit idiosyncrasies, far less extravagant, are then found in his tactics (dark comedy) and strategies (televised death). His novel ideology, like that of other "lone wolves" and iterations of the character, Alec Opperman traces to the "politics of recognition." 34 As Lal suggests, this type of killer speaks to contemporary American experience, namely "the nature of freedom, the persistence of loneliness amidst intimacy, and the overarching importance attached to 'image,' thanks to the power of visual technology." 35 Within such a nihilistic ideology, public recognition (in modern standards, the achievement of a digitized identity) provides Arthur a warped form of human dignity. As Anthony Kolenic writes of both Cho and the Joker: [I]t becomes clear that, at least potentially in his mind, this attack was built for reproduction, staged to be seen: an authenticity contingent upon acknowledgement and dissemination. ... His attack was for spectacle, to disrupt governance; it was staged for TV because that is what authenticity…looked like. The camera (which reproduces) is not only part of it, but is what makes it real. 36 Let us not forget that the Joker in The Dark Knight sends two self-directed home videos to the Gotham City News station as a way of informing the public of his antics and demands. Though this Joker is far more sinister and organized than Arthur Fleck, each of them (Nicholson too) feels personally validated once their schemes and faces occupy air time.
Infamy and theatricality are sure to dominate Gotham news media. Though Arthur wished it followed organically from a successful stand-up career, his selfrealization can, in his mind, now only occur through the performance of auteur death. The Joker has constructed the clown to be his lasting imagelasting thanks only to its consumption and reproduction by both copycats and various media outlets. Arthur's flamboyant costume (new red suit and slick make-up) also serve as a residual self-image (the clown being his last chosen form of identity, emblematic of his failed career and the "happiness" commissioned by his mother).
Elsewhere, this costume serves as an intimidation tactic. 37 But in Joker, the idiosyncrasy is embraced as artistic and expressive. On his way to the show, Arthur even performs a dance of triumph down the stairs near his homedancing towards his auteur death, never feeling more in (creative) control. Gary Glitter's "Rock & Roll Part II" (1972) plays as if Arthur is going to the "big game." Most importantly, Murray's studio marquee lists Arthur as a "Special Guest" on the evening's show.
Arthur has become special. He is given the opportunity to be a starto package his art into an exposé for a new audience -and he doesn't disappoint.

Inspirational Contagion
Kolenic was correct to bring the Joker into conversation with shooters like Cho.
The Thin White Duke of Death, though fictional, would later be implicated in the performance of domestic terrorismmore so, at the level of discourse. In 2012, the Aurora Theater Shooter, then-twenty-four-year-old James Eagan Holmes, dressed in tactical clothing, set off tear gas grenades and fired multiple weapons into the audience of a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises (2012; dir. Christopher Nolan). Twelve people were killed and seventy others injured, with reports that the gunman referred to himself as "the Joker" during his interrogation, booby-trapped his apartment for the police, and dyed his hair orange for theatrics. 38 Did Holmes adopt the persona and antics of the Dark Clown as a matter of personal taste, or did the Joker's onscreen philosophy in some way radicalize the young man into an idiosyncratic terrorist? Popular consensus supports the latterso much so that before the release of the Phillips film several media outlets expressed fear of another mass shooting occurring at the film's premiere. 39 Joker received additional backlash over the lead character's association with misogyny, with behaviors reminiscent of the recent "incel" hostility. In an early script leaked online, Arthur throws a tantrum after entering the apartment of his neighbor, Sophie, whose kindness he mistakes for romantic interest. "I just…felt sorry for you," she says. "I have a boyfriend." In his outburst, Arthur berates Sophie in front of her daughter, calling her a "bad person" and "whore" for "seeing two men at once." 40 Thus, the fear that the film would incite violence (in theaters and/or against women) intensified within the echo chambers of social media.
In Arthur, critics began to see the "lone wolves" radicalized by the hypermasculine revenge politics of 4chan and Reddit, 41 namely the Isla Vista Killer. In 2014, twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people then himself in the college town near the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before dying, Rodger uploaded a "Retribution" video online along with a link to his 137-page autobiography ("MY TWISTED WORLD")both of which detail the reasons behind his "retributive" violence. In short, Rodger, who described himself as the "ideal magnificent gentleman," resented the popular women on his campus for his "involuntary celibacy." Such "ideological masculinity" has since produced many followersboth abusers online and terrorists in public. 42 In 2018, for instance, twenty-five-year-old Alek Minassian killed ten people in Toronto, Canada, moments before tweeting: "The Incel Rebellion has already begun! … All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!" 43 Thus, although the Isla Vista Killer gained nothing material from his terrorist attack and suicide, the dramatic spectacle of his violence succeeded in garnering the attention for which he hoped and of which he felt wrongly deprived.
As one reviewer writes: "[Arthur] could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels." 44 Yet throughout the film's entire theatrical run, the "lone wolf" violence associated with the Joker never escaped off the big screen. This calls into question not just the impulse to politicize Arthur's psyche (his actions and ideologies) but the role news and social media play in constructing our fear of this character. 45 In fact, according to George Brauchler, the Colorado District Attorney who prosecuted the Aurora Theater Shooter, Holmes' identification with the Joker "never happened." Brauchler and other Colorado officials have attempted to clarify for years that the rumor spawned from misinformation given by then-New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at a Manhattan press conference. The target selection of a Batman-themed film was simply incidental, the goal was to attack a high occupancy movie theater. 46 For many, this era's Joker represents the threat of radicalization. Two generations ago, "lone wolf" terrorists (e.g., the Unabomber, Oklahoma City Bomber, the Columbine High School Shooters) largely created their own ideologies. 47 However, with the advent of the "dark web," these personalities can be exalted in death, providing a terrorist lineage, or viral continuity, for any member of the online community to appropriate. 48 "Inspirational Contagion," as it has been called, speaks to the discursive fear that has then engulfed the fictional terrorist and nihilist Joker. Contagion refers to "a form of copycat crime, whereby violenceprone individuals and groups imitate forms of (political) violence attractive to them, based on examples usually popularized by mass media." 49 Within his vast comic book mythology, the Joker has a long history of copycats and appropriators of his image and philosophymost of which he rejects and loathes. One recent issue, for instance, features many Joker-themed gangs that parade around Gotham with names like "Die Laughing," "League of Smiles," "Funny Bonez," and "Punchline." As Batman observes: [The] Joker has a tendency to attract anybody who's not in his or her right mind. Not just the obsessives, the nihilistic fanatics looking for a hero. But the depressingly ordinary as well. The ones who finally have an excuse to give in to their darkest urges. Who need nothing more than a bit of inspiration. 50 As the Joker says in The Dark Knight, "Madness . . . is like gravity. All it takes is a little push." 51 The recent Phillips film is paradigmatic of such contagion in two respects.
First, Gotham erupts in flames once its marginalized denizens appropriate the Joker's image in their practice of "uncivil disobedience." 52 All of Arthur's victims (corporate investors, his mother, a bullying coworker, his celebrity idol, and his psychiatrist) draw their power from institutionality. But while feelings of impotence and abandonment motivate his choice of victim, in the film, the killings take on an unintended social significance once politicized by the mediathereby, ironically producing the very followers the Gotham reporters fear.
Initially catalyzed by Arthur's subway shootings, this "clown" uprising is further galvanized when billionaire Thomas Wayne, in a TV interview, publicly condemns Gotham's lower class, whom he describes as envious "clowns," for manifesting "a groundswell of anti-rich sentiment." Even before the film's final act, people gather in the streets to protest Wayne's comments, with signs that read "Kill the Rich," "Wayne = Fascist," and "We are all clowns." "The Joker" is simultaneously created by the social elite that fear the political implications of his actions and a popular uprising that embraces the folk devil that the news media condemns. Offscreen, this image of the Phoenix Joker has been appropriated as a form of cosplay-protest, with numerous appearances in political demonstrations around the worldi.e., Beirut, Santiago, Hong Kong, France, and elsewhere. 53 Thus, we arrive at the second respect in which this discussion of mediainduced contagion remains pertinent to Joker: its "real-world" implications. The Joker's crimes, which we have shown reflect the recent waves of "lone wolf" terrorism and other violent acts, 54  Joker's writers and creators then use this complex mythos to confirm one of society's worst fears: that this type of character exists among us. The public has come truly to fear the Jokernot as the Ringmaster of Riotous Robbery but as the Tycoon of Teasing Terror. A fictional comic book villain has become so realistic that he presumably has the power to corrupt his viewers via the nihilistic path to madness, to radicalize the impressionable (youth) into terrorists, and, as such, ultimately is perceived as bearing responsibility for their performative acts of selfdestruction and social mayhem. 62 In these ways, the Joker's recent history is deeply enmeshed with the same key issues that concern the study of "lone wolf" terrorists, viz., violence devoid of a future, the construction of a lasting image, and the potential radicalization of others. "Lone wolf" terrorists like the Joker seem to strive for the last laughand laughter, as we know, can be contagious.

Dysangelism
Following Lal and, especially, Kolenic, we, as scholars of American culture, should approach "lone wolf" shooters (like Cho Seung-Hui) and the Jokerin all of their respective iterationsas evidence of separately emerging yet now mutually recognizant forms of criminality and resistance to institutional power: [In his sermon designed to corrupt Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight] Joker goes on to explain the danger of adhering to governmentality, describing a world where even the most horrifying acts and events are tolerated as long as they adhere to the provided narrative. Clearly he aligns chaos with a brand of fairness, altruism, and purity as an alternative to this institutionality, which somehow makes it right and without alternative in his mind, not unlike Cho in that respect. Further, and particularly important in this current mixture of strong global forms of governmentality and both justified and unjustified resistances to them is this Joker's ability to create panic and disrupt social order from within and with very low-scale technologies [i.e., "a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets"]. 63 This observation of social disruption from Kolenic provides us with another principal basis to interpret the motivations of violent extremists. Thus far, we have analyzed a novel ideology by which systematic death and murder are rendered artistic (due to the construction of a lasting digitized identity) and expressive (due to an embrace of various idiosyncrasies as auteur signatures). Yet if such destructive behavior is routinely labeled as madness (in both popular discourse and media), how are we to explain the penchant of such jokers to narrate to, and perhaps share their madness with, an audience? This is the first principal concern of the three sections that follow.
Here, we analyze Jokerology within the context of Nietzschean philosophy, as both engage nihilism, impotence, and reactionary outworkings of resentment.
The relation between these two discursive traditions is not a merely thematic coincidence. Nolan's Joker explicitly presents himself as a Nietzschean disciple of sorts, proclaiming, "I believe that what doesn't kill you simply makes you . . . stranger," an obvious adaptation of the cliché made famous in Twilight of the Idols. 64 The Joker thus performs, even if by caricature, key elements of Nietzsche's thinking -what Gavin Smith elsewhere refers to as an "ersatz-Nietzschean" tradition found within popular culture. 65 To treat Joker media as social critique through such an interpretation raises the second principal concern of the remaining sections: Is "lone wolf" terrorism an inherent affordance of a pluralistic culture? In other words, is such individualized violence the inevitable result of a morally relativistic society that prioritizes self-determination and authenticity over traditionalism and convention? 66 As the Joker says on Live with Murray Franklin: You think [billionaires] like Thomas Wayne ever think what it's like to be someone like me? To be somebody but themselves? I don't. They think that we'll just sit there and take it like good little boys. That we won't werewolf and go wild.
It is here that we take the recent terrorist-construction of the Joker as a spokesman for the real-life "lone wolves" of previous sections 67as both stem from the neoliberal social conditions and hypermasculine revenge politics of postmodernity (of which Nietzsche provides much insight). The Joker fancies himself not as contagion risk but as a truthsayer. Blaise Pascal writes that "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." 68 Thus, the Joker invites us to understand his craziness as a form of "super-sanity," and everyone else's healthy-mindedness as a normalized pathology. 69 The Joker takes Pascal's message as the bad news he must deliver to the world: When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! So why can't you [Batman]? You're not unintelligent, you must see the reality of the situation? 70 Like the Biblical evangelists, who set about to deliver a liberating truth to those who would have ears to hear, so the Joker endeavors to deliver the eye-opening truth to those who live with scales on their eyes (Matt. 11:15, Acts 9:18). The Joker's gospel is not the "good news" (eu-angelion) of Christ's resurrection; it's the decidedly "bad news" (dys-angelion) that the world, its morals and code, is "a bad joke." The Joker, then, embodies yet inverts a biblical archetype as a committed dysangelist, a preacher of the gospel of nihilism. "It's not about money, it's about sending a message," says the Ledger Joker. "Everything burns." 71 In his dysangelicalism, the Joker resembles Nietzsche's "madman"an untimely messenger delivering the news that "God is dead." 72 His madness then consists not in his own insanity but in the unwillingness of the "sane" populace to countenance his message. When the madman runs to the marketplace and delivers the grave news, "he provoked much laughter" among those who heard him. The truth lands like a punchline among the crowd, but what's so funny? Immanuel Kant observes that "in everything that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something nonsensical. … Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing." 73 Kant's formula articulates a basic incongruity theory of comedy, which grounds humor in a disjunction between expectation and reality. 74 The proclamation that "God is dead" therefore provokes laughter because the very idea of God is incongruous with the thought of his death; the reality itself is so taken for granted that the possibility of its nonexistence is comical. What then are the tenets of the Joker's dysangel that, like the madman's proclamation, contradict the basic assumptions of its hearers?
Most of the Joker's sermons pertain to human nature and society. The Dark Knight Joker, for instance, contends that "the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules," that "when the chips are down, these . . . 'civilized people' [will] eat each other." Presumably, as in The Killing Joke, his own experiences serve as the basis of the message he wishes to deliver to the world: "It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for . . . it's all a monstrous, demented gag!" The Joker's musings about the divine are then quite rare. In one recent comic book, the Joker sequentially executes an entire wedding party in a cathedral, proving that God wouldn't stop himonly Batman would. It is unclear, however, from his monologue whether he believes that God is absent from just his life or all lives. 75 Thus, insofar as the Joker experiences the world as a godforsaken place, he must prove to everyone else that such is "the reality of the situation." In this way, the "joke" of his particular post-theological atheism operates on two levels: the Joker himself was the butt end of a joke which he now wishes to play on everyone else, but getting the joke, he thinks, amounts to a spiritual awakening to his dysangel. 76

To Laugh Out the Whole Truth
In detailing the Phoenix Joker as an auteur killer or idiosyncratic terrorist, we examined the fiend's appearance, brute violence and killing techniques, and novel ideology through which public recognition awards a semblance of human dignity.
And yet none of these discussions elucidate the comedic aspects of the character.
Namely, what are we to make of the Joker's laughter and joviality, especially in terms of their incongruity with the character's depressive and violent characteristics? Consider Arthur's experience of incongruity in Joker, specifically when he conveys crisis to his hospitalized mother: You remember how you used to tell me that God gave me this laugh for a reason? That I had a purpose. Laughter and joy, that whole thing? ... HA! It wasn't God, it was you. Or one of your boyfriends. Do you even know what my real name is? Do you even know who I really am? 77 In this scene, Arthur has just done some research on his mother's past, and discovers (1) that he was adopted; (2) that his mother was institutionalized for abusing him; and (3) that his painful laughing condition was a result of head trauma from domestic abuse at the hands of either his mother or her partner. These discoveries disrupt his most basic assumptions about himself and his worldthe foremost here being the belief that God was benignly orchestrating his trials to foster a sense of purpose in Arthur's life. Though he asks his mother, "Do you even know who I really am?" the question is truly posed to himself: "Who even am I?" These discoveries hit Arthur like the punchline of the world's sickest joke by contradicting his longest-held expectations about the unfolding of his life. He captures the existential whiplash and its darkly humorous inflection with his final remark to his mother before he kills her: "You know what really makes me laugh? I used to think my life was a tragedy, but now I realize . . . it's a fucking comedy." 78 Nietzsche writes that, on the whole, "Man seeks 'the truth': a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change." 79 However, both Nietzsche and the Joker ask us to consider that a world free of contradictions, free of incongruities between expectation and reality, would be an all-too serious worldone without any sense of humor. The Nietzschean injunction to "kill the spirit of gravity [by laughing]" reverberates into the Joker's modern persona and especially the famous Ledger mantra of "Why so serious?" 80 Batman's "misplaced sense of self-righteousness," according to the Joker, is ultimately unsustainable. It is a heavy burden that only weighs down the hero, chaining him to a failing conception of morality that society no longer values and thus he must impose it upon Gotham City. The Caped Crusader is the spirit of gravity incarnate and thus he isn't risible.
On the other hand, the Joker's sinister humor can be seen as a form of coping whereby life's incongruities become an occasion for laughter rather than weeping and the gnashing of teeth. "Smile tho' your heart is aching"a message delivered multiple times during the Phillips film. Arthur's mantra to "Put on a happy face!" is consistently associated with the Joker's "joyful wisdom," or gay science. This exhortation to levity voices one of Nietzsche's central questions: "Why is it that [Man] derives suffering from change, deception, contradiction? and why not rather his happiness?" 81 Thus, we understand further Arthur's gleeful dance towards death and the dark comedy associated with his planned suicide.

Will to Kill / Will to Die
Arthur's personal transformation, in part, is a progression from suicidal despair to self-affirmative violence. In Nietzschean vocabulary, he transitions from "passive" to "active nihilism." 82 "I just hope my death makes more cents than my life," he writes in his joke diary. As Arthur recounts in the Joker script, "My mother told me I had a purpose, to bring laughter and joy to the world." 83 Unfortunately, his mother was a pathological liar, and most of what she told him about himself, even his own name, was a fabrication. In the absence of God, Arthur faces a vertiginous purposelessness in his life, similarly revealed in the villain's sermon to Harley Quinn after he assumes divine status in the "Emperor Joker" comic arc: The world…as I've come to understand it through intimate and inappropriate contact, is sick. Flawed. Broken. There is not, never was, never will be a master plan, a divine order, or a gentle white-bearded shepherd who will instill harmony in the wee brains of the galaxial host. … And we're all suffering for it. Be it behind a desk or in a straight jacketeveryone feels the pain of life.
[M]y utter destruction of all things that are will have a healing effect. … I'm fixing everything. I'm leaving behind a clean, quiet universe. A place where people like me…won't ever come in existence. 84 What these two extremes reveal, the lower and higher traditions of Jokerology, is that the character consistently encompasses the precise criterion of Nietzsche's nihilism: "The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer." 85  Once he receives the traumatic blow of the punchline that God is not merely dead but was never alive, as staged literally in "Emperor Joker," the Joker himself must assume the place once held by God as the ultimate arbiter of his own purpose in an existence which itself lacks one. "Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos," the Joker says.
The Joker's claim that social order, functioning like a disguise or veil, covers over the fundamental truth of chaos articulates a basic social constructivist (that is, postmodernist) theory of reality and, relatedly, a moral relativism, according to which social convention, while empirically "there," is either "less real" or outright illusory because it is historically constructed rather than ahistorically given. 88 On Live with Murray Franklin for example, Arthur proclaims that "comedy is subjective." "All of you, the system that knows so much, you decide what's right or wrong. The same way that you decide what's funny or not." In this resentful remark, the Joker makes the Nietzschean point that judgments of goodness and evil are not determined by any inherent quality of the thing being judged but, rather, represent subjective determinations by those in power, which are internalized by the weak-willed masses as taken for granted "facts." 89 Like humor or art, morality is a matter of taste; what we call "good" is whatever the powerful have a taste for.
Per this perspective, as Nietzsche claims, the reliance on an external authority (be it God or society) to posit one's purpose and morality is an implicit attempt "to get around the will…the risk of positing a goal for oneself" whereby one "rid[s] oneself of the responsibility" of being a free individual. 90 To properly divorce oneself from social convention remains key to Nietzschean resolve. Along these lines, the Joker's rampaging could be interpreted as an anti-heroic assumption of responsibility for himselfthus, the fear of radicalization that consumed the Phillips film. 91

Max Haiven, for instance, interprets Batman and the Ledger and Phoenix
Jokers as proxies for the hypermasculine character drama performed within the altright mythos: Ledger's Joker [was] the nightmare version of hegemonic, hypercapitalist masculinity: a self-made man fully in control…a judicious investor in his own criminal ventures…. The real-life [Aurora Theater Shooter], an awkward, unpopular, alienated young man (not, ultimately, unlike Phoenix's Fleck) found in Ledger's Joker [sic.] the apotheosis of a kind of agentful, vengeful masculinity he, like all of us raised men in this society, was taught to adore and emulate. The false choice of masculinity under revenge capitalism is to be caught between Batman (the suave but vengeful boy-king who takes the law into his own hands to save it) or the Joker (the nihilistic icon of the will-to-power). Both see through the veil of social norms and niceties, and presume to know how the world "really works," and take individuated masculine action to rectify or destroy. By contrast, even in his moments of vengeful glory, [Phoenix's Joker] appears out of control, a victim, a strangely feminized subject to whom the world happens. Even his metamorphosis into the supervillain is…accidental. 92 A prominent concept within Nietzsche's writings, the "will to power" serves as an encapsulation of the philosopher's high esteem for strength and acumen -"the strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant." 93 As Haiven observes above, one shouldn't ignore the masculine encoding of this Nietzschean principle nor the two fictional "alpha males" battling for control of a fragile (weak-willed) city. 94 Though Arthur exists within a world initially devoid of costumed vigilantes empowered through violence, he belongs in conversation with the popular narration of men's crisis.
Following Henry Giroux, one could see male violence in Joker as a "performative basis on which to construct masculine identity." Furthermore, if we bifurcate Arthur from the Joker, we can project each onto the dual protagonists of the redemption of masculinity repackaged as the promise of violence in the interests of social and political anarchy." "By constructing masculinity on an imaginary terrain in which women are foregrounded as the Other," Giroux continues, "the flight from the feminine becomes synonymous with sanctioning violence against women as it works simultaneously to eliminate different and opposing definitions of masculinity." 95 As Pablo Castillo Diaz and Nahla Valji warn, however, to approach misogyny (the system that polices and enforces gender-based norms and expectations) as an ideology in and of itself overlooks the circumstances that purportedly affect "a sense of failed masculinity" within men. 96 Arthur's "disaffection and aggrieved masculinity," as with many of the "lone wolves" mentioned previously, stem from his inability to perform the traditional gender roles of family provider, community protector, and/or father/procreator. 97 The Joker certainly asserts his own "will to power" by setting his own goals and operating with his own sense of right and wrong (divorced from social convention). And yet, does the Joker embody the Nietzschean ideal of the affirmative superman, 98 or is he (and those he represents) symptomatic of precisely the pathological nihilism that Nietzsche diagnoses and whose advent he seeks to mitigate? We propose the latter.
Nietzsche remarks that "It was morality that protected life against despair and the leap into nothing, among men and classes who were violated and oppressed by men; for it is the experience of being powerless against men, not against nature, that generates the most desperate embitterment against existence." 99 What Nietzsche is calling "morality" functions like Marx's and Engels' notion of "ideology": a normative conception of social reality in the imaginary of the "classes who are violated and oppressed" that perpetuates their oppression through a false consciousness (whereby the oppressed believe in the legitimacy of their own oppression). In Joker, Arthur undergoes an increasing disillusionment with the legitimacy of the structural conditions of his own impotence, and his violence targets those who directly exercise power over him. Indeed, Arthur's character arc is a movement from resignation to power. However, while Marx and Engels hoped that the overcoming of this false consciousness would galvanize a revolutionary spirit (like the clown mob Arthur inspires), Nietzsche seems concerned that the collapse of ideology and its reasons for resignation could just as easily devolve into a sheerly destructive nihilism (exhibited by Arthur himself), owing to an emergent relativism.
"The untenability of one interpretation of the world…awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false." 100 Hence, the collapse of a given moral order (be it for a group or individual) will lead not to a sort of blank slate on which to build anew, but will instead engender "the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure." 101 In this way, the Phillips film stages two trajectories, one Marxist and one Nietzschean, of the collapse of social convention political revolution and nihilistic violence. Much less optimistic than Marx and Engels, Nietzsche worries that nihilism is a "symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort [in life], that without morality they no longer have any reason to 'resign themselves'that they place themselves on the plane of the opposite principle and also want power by compelling the powerful to become their hangmen." 102 The psychological impetus left in the wake of a categorical suspicion of moral order itself will be an assertion of power meant to achieve death, albeit with a symbolic statement, rather than to accomplish a strategic political end. On this point, Nietzsche echoes the analysis of Roy and the "lone wolf" terrorists who construct an idol of themselves by their destruction.
In these ways, "lone wolves" like Arthur Fleck appear not so much to fulfill the Nietzschean ideal of the self-assertive and responsible will, but rather embody the worrisome endpoint of an individual rejection of inherited values, which at a certain critical threshold, loses the constructive edge of a revolutionary spirit and devolves instead into an embitterment against existence itself. Nietzsche famously calls this pathology resentment. Rather than asserting themselves constructively, the resentful "compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge…say [ing] No to what is 'outside,' what is 'different,' what is 'not itself'." 103 Resentment therefore does not mark the assertion of oneself (i.e., the "will to power") but merely the negation of what is Other. Like the popular constructions of masculinity, that Giroux argues can easily be used to sanction violence against women, "its action is fundamentally reaction," not proaction. 104 Reactionary resentment is neither restorative nor revolutionary in its vengeance, which is to say it lacks a future entirely, being neither conservative nor progressive in its aim. In this way, this inflection of nihilism, though it rejects the current order of the world, expresses itself as "'life against life'…the physiological struggle of man against death…against disgust with life, against exhaustion, against the desire for the 'end'." 105 Although the revolutionary and the resentful erupt from the same sentiment -"It's enough to make anyone crazy"unlike the former, the latter often does not wish to live anew but only to live no more.
Joker media since the 1980's, understood in terms of the historical and philosophical legacies it explicitly and implicitly invokes (that of domestic terrorism and existential nihilism, respectively), represents a cluster of concerns about modern societynamely, the pathological affordances of political pluralism, or neoliberal authoritarianism. Originally an ecological term, an affordance refers to what possibilities are furnished by the environment to a given individual within it. 106 The pluralistic environment structures itself around the axiom of mutual respect or tolerance. Contrary to culturally monopolistic environments wherein one value system is deemed authoritative and thus enforced by the state, a pluralistic society operates according to the principle that, within a minimum of legal parameters, any value system is viable and that, therefore, allegiance to any one way of life should be voluntary rather than coerced. Emphasizing an ethic of voluntarism over determinism, autonomy over heteronomy, a pluralistic system operationalizes a laissez-faire policy not only towards ideas about right and wrong but also towards notions of true and false. In this way, as Peter Berger observes, "the pluralistic situation is, above all, a market situation." 107 Pluralism creates a minimally regulated market situation in the sense that value systems that could in other political contexts impose themselves authoritatively now must be marketed to a population whose allegiance is, in principle, voluntaristic. Definitions of reality "must be 'sold' to a clientele that is no longer constrained to 'buy'." 108 However, the implicit affordance of this cultural environment is that one can reasonably abstain from the existential consumerism of selecting at will one's definitions of true and false, good and evil, and the purpose of life from the ideological emporium that is a pluralistic society. In fact, the individual's ability to say "No, thanks" to any given value system is precisely the goal of a pluralistic society, indeed the very definition of liberation: freedom to choose. In short, some people will survey the menu of options and simply say, "I don't buy it." This refusal marks simultaneously the greatest success and fundamental danger of pluralism.
While abstention can mark a key revolutionary moment, 109 as we have seen, the spirit of denial can remain stagnant and fester into reactionary resentment.
Where does it leave a person, being trapped in such a vast marketplace with no interest in making a purchase? Resigned boredom, at best, and violent escapism at worstwith Nietzsche's madman somewhere in the middle. This categorical skepticism towards commodified definitions of reality seems to be the logical extremity of pluralism's basic premisethat all ways of life are viable and therefore should be voluntarily enacted. The concern articulated comically by the Joker is that modern political pluralism is a euphemism for moral relativism. If we don't accept the Joker's dysangelism as revealed truth, perhaps we should at least heed it as a warning.
Nihilism no longer just "stands at the door"; 110 it invades our homes, schools, churches, public transportation, and the like. We wish these "lone wolves" were just "comedians," as Nietzsche saw himself, iconoclasts who "philosophize with a hammer" and wage war with "ideals." 111 Modern terrorists, instead, find recourse in philosophizing through more socially destructive means. Unwilling to buy what others are selling, the resentful (those discussed in this article and whatever future iterations they inspire) attempt to disrupt the market through terroristic entrepreneurship. We fear their mass appeal. "See, I'm a guy of simple tastes," says the Joker in The Dark Knight. "I enjoy dynamite. Gunpowder. And gasoline! And you know the thing that they have in common? They're cheap."

Conclusion
This article examines a specific genealogical sequence within Joker transmedia, beginning with the comics of the late 1980s whereby the character is reimagined as both a domestic terrorist and active nihilist. The selection of such material allows the authors to triangulate a conversation between the "lone wolf" terrorists of contemporary society, the fictional villains that saturate Western popular culture, and the pathological ideologues presented in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Each of our selected sources then features a particular social and philosophical drama staged before the public. To rephrase our previous quote from Dennis O'Neil, the "lone wolf" terrorist is "a strange amalgam of fiction, instant mythology, and imaginary history," one that derives its value from singularity and multitude. In the hands of such extremists and those they inspire, the "dark web" becomes a space to commiserate, an occasion for the performance and radicalization of social resentment. It is also a site for the creation of "macrofiction," a "saga" whereby "heroic tales," although complete in themselves, are collected and serially related as "part of a much larger fictional construct." This analytic synthesis is our first major contribution to the study of modern terrorism, film/popular culture, and continental philosophy.
Our more specific contribution to the study of domestic terrorism then lies in our analysis of the mythological construction of such personalities. To assume that the creation of a terrorist lineage occurs entirely within private or encrypted spaces online is demonstrably misguided. While it is true that such terrorists strive for post-mortem recognition and dissemination, such transcendence into digitality simultaneously occurs within the echo chambers of twenty-four-hour news cycles and social media. Todd Phillips' Joker then proposes that this type of inspired criminal can ironically spawn from a media-induced contagion, a discursive fear propagated by a hyperactive news media, incidentally creating a path for the socially impotent to make their television debuts. Fortunately, despite months of televised anticipation and discursive dread, no form of "lone wolf" violence associated with the Joker ever escaped off the big screen in 2019 or 2020. Nor was Arthur Fleck "adopted as the patron saint of incels." And yet, scholars would be wise to approach these charactersin all of their respective iterationsas evidence of separately emerging yet now mutually recognizant forms of criminality and resistance to institutional power.
We don't need to wait for the Joker to be fully implicated in the performance of domestic terrorism before we consider his violent ascent to power and nihilistic descent into madness. The Joker presents an opportunity to learn about auteur killers. "I make art until someone dies," Nicholson says in Batman (1989). "I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist." Through him, we learn how such criminals view themselves and those they hope to inspire. In the "That's Entertainment" episode of Gotham (2018; dir. Nick Copus), a proto-Joker says before death to Detective Jim Gordon: I'm more than a man. I'm an idea. A philosophy. And I will live on in the shadows, within Gotham's discontent. You'll be seeing me soon.
Finally, the Joker teaches us more about how such figures view others, society, and madness. "Everybody is awful these days," Arthur says in Joker. "It's enough to make anyone crazy." As mentioned before, the Phillips film stages two trajectories for the collapse of Gotham's social structure: a Marxist political revolution and Nietzschean nihilistic violence. In regards to the former, it is rare for the Joker's revenge on society to be motivated by strictly socio-economic issues. In one recent comic series, an elderly Bruce Wayne commissions the construction of the "Wayne Family Center of Tomorrow," a metaphorical bridge between the street-level and elite towers of Neo-Gotham. Within minutes of its unveiling, however, the building is destroyed in a terrorist attack by the Joker via a hijacked train laced with explosives. 112 As he later explains: [My friends] live down here on the streets. Victimized and taken advantage of. Because people like you get the towers…and they get slums. … They know that since they can't move up to the luxury palaces in the sky…I'll bring the upper-crusters down here. To their level. So everyone can live together in peace, harmony and equal wretchedness.
Class warfare is typically foreign to the Joker's gleeful dysangelismyet another reason why Arthur Fleck should be studied as a distinct iteration of the character.
Arthur is, indeed, more emblematic of the nihilistic violence that Nietzsche diagnoses and whose advent the latter seeks to mitigate. Our contribution to the philosophy of religion is then a contemporary staging of some of Nietzsche's most famous ideological dramas, recasting the "spirit of gravity" as Batman while the Joker simultaneously becomes the "madman" and "active nihilist." To elevate the Joker to the status of "affirmative superman" (who doubles as a Nietzschean "comedian") effectively ignores the villain's attachment to reactionary resentment. The Joker and the "lone wolves" he reflects ultimately stem from a bastardized form of the "will to power," one that projects of an image of terrifying strength (a virality of virility), often labored at those ideologically constructed as Other and/or institutionally empowered, and results in violence inherently devoid of future. In contrast, nihilism, for Nietzsche, is simply another temporary stage of development in the reevaluation of societal norms.
For Arthur, as with other resentful Gothamites, the fault of the rich lies not in their control of the means of production but in their reconstruction of Gotham into, what Giroux calls, a "culture of cruelty," a system governed by neoliberal authoritarianism and the "emergence of an unprecedented survival-of-the fittest ethos." 113 Such a "mean-spirited ethos," Giroux continues, then "rails against any notion of solidarity and compassion that embraces a respect for others." Note that it was this same force that seemingly created the Joker of The Killing Joke. Yet, given that Arthur ultimately survived his comedy routine, it's unclear what kind of Gotham he seeks to make following his asylum escape.
This observed fear of cultural and religious pluralism, produced by popular and conservative discourse on crime and urban life, becomes the final contribution of this article. As Steve Macek argues, fear and loathing of the city (and the social chaos it allegedly harbors) is a central motif in contemporary conservative ideology, "one which appeals to a largely white middle class that is increasingly isolating itself from the rest of American society in ever more exclusive, ever more homogeneous suburban enclaves." 114 In his analysis of anti-urban paranoia and anxiety, as observed in American cinema post-Taxi Driver, Macek demonstrates how violent criminality is presented not as the product of systemic social and economic forces but as the result of individual psychological aberrations or personal moral failings. 115 The recent Phillips film then functions as an ideological critique of this type of narrative, highlighting the role that Gotham City plays in the ultimate creation of this era's Joker.
A future project, following this article and Macek, should investigate further the fatalist arguments present within popular condemnations of cities. 116 Urban landscapes are characterized as a modern-day tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, suggesting that any effort to save these cities (and their denizens) will ultimately be in vain. 117 This scathing political discourse is reflected within Batman transmedia (i.e., comics, films, games), particularly in their depictions of Gotham City. Recall that throughout Batman's mythic tenure as the city's champion and guardian, Gotham has only further receded into crime. Mobsters and gangsters still exist within the criminal underbelly but now alongside corrupt officials and far more bizarre and menacing predators. Gotham exists within an endless comic book cycle of progression and regression, one that should be studied in the same manner we study its most famous criminal (and others, its most famous hero). The political and economic failings of Gotham are consistently presented as the conditions that produce social unrest, organized crime, vigilantism, and new forms of terrorism within its streets. How well this mythic city represents current Western political economies, its societies, and denizens is a question that warrants academic consideration. Phillips (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2019). While this essay exclusively uses "he/him/his" pronouns for the character, we would be remiss to not acknowledge that the character has been reimagined as a woman. To our knowledge, Bianca Steeplechase from H. Chaykin and D. Brereton, Batman: Thrillkiller 1:1-3 (New York: DC Comics, 1997) is the only female Joker to receive scholarly attention; see T. Taylor 30, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSlHpr4wKmE for LaKeith Stanfield's ambition to play the next Jokersignificant as the character is always portrayed as White.