조커의 철학: 배트맨 유니버스의 허무주의와 혼돈

### 조커의 철학: 허무주의적 혼돈의 요원
* 🃏 '웃는 남자'에서 영감을 받은 조커의 기원은 앨런 무어의 '킬링 조크'에서 **"어느 나쁜 날"이 만든 악당**으로 묘사되는 등 일관되게 비극적인 인물로 묘사되어 왔습니다.
* 🦇 배트맨과 조커는 모두 충격적인 사건에 대응하는 인물로, **배트맨은 자경단원으로서 도덕성을 지키고** 조커는 **허무주의와 폭력을 포용하는 인물**입니다.
* 🃏 배트맨과 조커의 관계는 **질서를 상징하는 배트맨과 혼돈을 상징하는 조커의 실존적 투쟁**입니다.
* 🎭 장 보드리야르에 따르면 조커는 **고담시의 도덕적 질서를 세우려는 배트맨의 시도에 도전하고 전복시키는 급진적인 악의 세력**입니다.
* 😈 악으로 선에 맞서는 다른 악당들과 달리 조커는 **"선"이라는 개념 자체를 파괴**하려고 합니다.
* 🤡 조커의 허무주의는 **기존 도덕의 위선과 허약함을 폭로**하는 데서 즐거움을 찾는 그의 사악한 유머에 반영되어 있습니다.
* ☠ 조커의 대표 무기인 조커 독은 **누구나 자신처럼 될 수 있다는 조커의 신념**을 상징합니다.
* ♂ 조커는 때때로 영웅적인 행동을 보이기도 하지만, 여전히 **우리의 도덕적 확신에 도전하는 혼돈의 대리인**입니다.

조커의 허무주의적 관점은 기존의 도덕성에 도전하며 혼돈과 유머를 통해 인간의 연약함과 도덕적 타락의 가능성을 드러내는 것을 목표로 합니다.

Hey Wisecrack. This is Jared, clown prince of Wisecrack, and today we’re talking about the guy people have in mind when they say that Batman has all the best villains, everyone’s favorite nihilist — the Joker. Making his first appearance in 1940’s Batman #1, the world’s busiest evil clown has been featured in hundreds of comics and cartoons, dozens of video games, and four live-action films. Inspired by Victor Hugo’s hero Gwynplaine in the 1928 film adaptation of The Man Who Laughs, the Joker’s motives have ranged from the sadistic to the mercenary to the downright inexplicable. But despite the fact that hundreds of creative minds have worked on the Joker, his outlook on the world has been surprisingly consistent, and it represents an extreme version of a reaction we’ve all felt towards the world at one point or another. So put a smile on that face and enjoy this Wisecrack Edition on the Philosophy of the Joker.

There are a lot of explanations for just how the Joker got to be the Joker. The first account of the Joker’s origin was revealed in Detective Comics #168 back in 1951, and over the past six decades most versions have followed more or less the same plotline: a two-bit villain known as the Red Hood loses a fight to Batman, falls into a vat of skin-bleaching, and hair-brightening chemicals, and emerges as something entirely new. Over time, DC built on this origin story. Alan Moore’s 1986 magnum opus The Killing Joke made the Joker’s origin a lot more tragic, making him a reluctant villain who lost his humanity after “One Bad Day” — where he failed as a stand-up comic, was informed of the death of his pregnant wife, got framed by the mob, and only then fell into a vat of disfiguring chemicals. The entire premise of The Killing Joke was that the Joker hoped to turn Commissioner Gordon into another version of himself.

by giving Gordon a similarly bad day — to prove that even the best of us are never more than one bad day away from becoming, well, whatever the Joker is. More on that later. While The Killing Joke is technically not
a canonical story, and the Joker gives a strong indication that he has no idea whether this version of his history is accurate anyway, the comics, animated series, and games have mostly stuck by Alan Moore’s depressing version of the Joker’s origins ever since. Batman and the Joker have something in common: Both live their lives as responses to traumatic, world-view-shattering events, events that represent an existential crisis that most people have to deal with sooner or later: How do you respond when life destroys your sense of meaning? Batman reacts to his parents’ death by dressing up in a bat-eared leotard and battering criminals, which seems reasonable enough by comic book standards. But the Joker’s One Bad Day led him, with equal passion, to embrace meaninglessness and violence

after all, if moral nihilism is correct, then nothing is right or wrong. According to the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, recognizing the meaninglessness of existence forces us to realize that we are responsible for creating our own meaning. Choosing how to deal with this loss of meaning animates the entire Batman universe. Batman decides to uphold some form of conventional morality as a vigilante; the Joker chooses to abandon it entirely; and the villain Two-Face splits the difference, literally flipping a coin to decide whether he’ll uphold conventional morality or rebel against it. Although the Batman persona is usually presented as a response to personal trauma, not nihilism, more recent versions of the character have begun to sound more and more existential. The Joker is aware of this distinction between himself and The Dark Knight, and in recent iterations of the character, he even feels a kinship with him. This places Batman and the Joker in an existential struggle:

Batman is trying to convince the Joker to accept conventional morality, while the Joker is trying to seduce Batman into abandoning it. 1989’s Batman connected the characters even more directly, making two-bit mobster Jack Napier the original killer of Batman’s parents. And it was Batman who later sent Napier tumbling into the chemical vat, turning him into the Joker. They gave birth to each other. In Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2005), Batman and the Joker are already fully-formed by the time they meet. Heath Ledger’s Joker was different from any version that preceded him — different from any other villain in cinema, really. As an elemental force of chaos with supernatural charisma, planning, and dumb luck, he didn’t have or need a consistent origin story. He was more of a demon summoned by Batman’s enemies to fight him. A demon they soon learned that they couldn't control. In other words, in the world of The Dark Knight, the Joker’s presence in Gotham City is entirely Batman’s fault.

By introducing oppressive justice and order, he has thrown the moral universe of Gotham out of balance, and created opportunity for a new kind of chaos and evil to emerge. This idea of society without balance is central to the philosophy of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. In The Transparency of Evil, he argues that the kind of moral progress Batman seeks would be impossible because even as he seeks to uphold justice by making criminals his bitch, he creates a more extreme versions of order for criminals to challenge and subvert — thus giving birth to a radically antithetical version of Batman’s brand of justice — The Joker. In trying to completely sanitize Gotham of evil, Batman essentially created a supergerm, a kind of autoimmunity disease in the form of The Joker. In Baudrillard’s words: According to Baudriallard, evil isn’t the opposite of good. If something unpleasant happens to you, that doesn’t mean it's evil. Evil is characterized by a radical indifference to good.

This is essentially The Joker. Instead of merely making bad things happen
to people like other supervillains, the Joker has a more sinister goal: to completely destroy
the concept of what “good” even means. Nobody ever labels themselves as “evil,”
everyone considers themself to be good. So the Joker tries to seduce Batman, Gordon,
and others into abandoning their moral foundations and do something they’d never see themselves doing, thereby corrupting their understanding of “goodness.” His mischievous passion for breaking down people’s confidence in the division between good and evil is EXACTLY what makes the Joker
so intriguing. Most other villains combat good with the opposite. The Joker destroys good. In the end, Batman wins the fight, but the
Joker wins the argument: The once idealistic Harvey Dent is now completely indifferent to the distinction between good and evil. Whether he’s trying to leave his deadly imprint on the world around him or just break down one character’s moral compass,

the Joker’s objective seems to be to show us that our pretenses to love and morality are phony, and that we’re a lot more self-serving than we let on. But I suppose the question still remains: why does he bother? It’s a cop-out to say the Joker is mentally ill. The common classification of the Joker as insane seems to just be a way of demonstrating how little we understand about how his mind works, and why it takes a similarly dark and eccentric character to figure him out. What makes the Joker violent, in other words, isn’t a psychiatric problem; it’s an existential one. He is pathologically sane, and he's seen how fragile conventional morality is. He believes that no one is more than one sufficiently bad day away from total depravity. But the Joker doesn’t just abandon traditional moral codes; he subverts them with a sinister kind of humor. The Joker is a joker, just like it says on the tin.

He resembles a clown. He has a huge permanent grin, and he’s been known to use elaborate, slapstick-based murder weapons. It’s his gimmick. And for most of the character’s history, it’s been just a gimmick. But starting with the publication of The Killing Joke in 1988, and continuing through the release of The Dark Knight in 2008, there’s been a darker undertone to it. He enjoys doing wretched, horrifying stuff. It’s funny to him. The Joker jokes because, from his point of view, everything is trivial. And while it’s easy to write him off as a sadist, his regular attempts to tempt people into doing things that upset their own sense of right and wrong and reveal their hypocrisy may speak to the very heart of what humor is. In Book I of his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, German Philosopher and Prodigy “Firestarter” hair model Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that:

The idea of finding humor in nihilism isn’t really new, and
in smaller doses, it can be a great survival mechanism. In Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism, the contemporary American philosopher John Marmysz argues that laughing at the void can be a really healthy thing to do. Because the Joker is an active and even joyfully fanatical nihilist who sees it as his duty to confront imposed moral order with the reality of chaos, his entire life revolves around identifying incongruities between what we say we are (moral, righteous, GOOD citizens) and what we actually are (selfish, savage creatures) — and he’s having a great time doing it. According to the Joker, conventional morality and the social structures built around those ideas are flimsy and weak. He believes that nobody is ever more than one bad
day away from abandoning it. His entire career as a villain centers on
giving people that one bad day he thinks they need to end up just like him.

The Joker’s signature weapon, Joker venom,
is a deadly gas that kills its victims by forcing them to laugh themselves to death, while their face contorts into a rictus grin just like his own. And Joker venom is as old as the character;
he used it in his debut appearance in 1940’s Batman #1, and most versions of the Joker
use some version of it. Proving everyone’s capable of becoming what he is, both morally and physically — it's the Joker’s greatest pleasure and obsession. And it has made the character terrifying and
relevant for most of the past century. It’s his killing joke. It’s hard to resist the temptation to glamorize
the Joker a little bit, partly because he’s been around so long that we’ve developed a certain amount of affection for the guy. And when you look at the scale of human suffering,
injustice, hypocrisy, and greed, it’s easy to relate to the Joker’s commitment to proving
we’re not as noble as we pretend to be.

But he isn’t heroic either, and he isn’t supposed to be. There have been some stories where the Joker did seemingly heroic things that were consistent with his character. In the 1996 Marvel/DC crossover Batman & Captain America, he turned against Red Skull and refused to join the Third Reich. And in the 2006 conclusion of DC’s Infinite Crisis, he brutally executed the near-omnipotent Lex Luthor for being too much of a control freak. But in both cases writers cleverly avoided having him turn over a new leaf, giving him plausible selfish motives that justified his uncharacteristic helpfulness. But the Joker wouldn’t make a very effective villain if we didn’t all have a little bit of him in us. We’re suspicious of other people’s moral codes, we’re liable to fixate on their hypocrisy at the expense of our own, and we all have moments where we just kind of want to watch the world burn. He’s still smiling at us.

The Philosophy of The Joker – Wisecrack Edition

Wisecrack

조커의 철학: 만화책에서 대형 스크린으로: 조커의 철학

조커는 1940년 첫 등장 이후 만화, 만화, 비디오 게임, 영화에서 저명한 인물로 활약해 왔습니다.

종종 비극적이고 충격적인 사건과 관련된 그의 기원 스토리는 수년 동안 일관되게 유지되어 왔으며, 특히 앨런 무어의 "더 킬링 조크"에서 강조되었습니다.

조커의 캐릭터는 의미 상실에 대한 극단적인 반응을 나타내며, 트라우마에 대한 배트맨의 반응과 대조적으로 많은 사람들이 직면하는 실존적 위기를 반영합니다.

도덕적 허무주의는 옳고 그른 것은 없다는 믿음으로, 배트맨 세계관에서 볼 수 있듯이 개인이 자신의 의미를 창조할 책임이 있다는 생각으로 이어집니다.

배트맨, 조커, 투페이스의 캐릭터는 전통적인 도덕에 대해 서로 다른 반응을 보이는데, 배트맨은 도덕을 지키려고 하고 조커는 도덕을 버리려고 하며 투페이스는 둘 사이에서 갈등합니다.

장 보드리야르의 철학에 따르면 배트맨과 조커의 관계는 실존적 투쟁을 일으키며, 조커가 고담에 존재하는 이유는 배트맨이 억압적인 정의를 도입했기 때문이라고 합니다.

조커의 주요 목표는 다른 사람들이 도덕적 기반을 버리도록 유혹하여 선에 대한 이해를 타락시킴으로써 '선'의 개념을 파괴하는 것입니다.

다른 악당들과는 달리 그는 선과 싸우는 데 그치지 않고 적극적으로 선의 파괴를 추구합니다.

조커의 폭력성은 기존의 도덕이 허약하다는 믿음에서 비롯되며, 불길한 유머를 사용하여 전통적인 도덕 규범을 전복합니다.

조커의 세계에서 허무주의적 유머의 힘

철학자 존 마미츠는 허무에 웃는 것이 건강한 생존 메커니즘이 될 수 있다고 주장했습니다.

광신적 허무주의자인 조커는 기존 도덕의 부조리를 폭로하는 데서 즐거움을 찾고, 누구나 혼돈을 받아들이는 데는 단 하루밖에 남지 않았다고 믿습니다.

조커의 독을 사용하는 것은 누구나 자신처럼 될 수 있다는 것을 증명하려는 그의 집착을 상징합니다.

조커가 지난 세기 동안 무시무시한 캐릭터로 사랑받는 이유는 인간 본성의 어두운 면을 드러내려는 그의 집념에 있습니다.

조커는 때때로 영웅적인 행동을 하기도 하지만 항상 악당 본성을 유지하기 위한 이기적인 동기를 가지고 있습니다.

이러한 행동은 관객의 어두운 성향을 반영하여 캐릭터의 큰 변화를 막기 위해 교묘하게 쓰여졌습니다.

조커의 복잡한 도덕성은 도덕률에 대한 사람들의 의심과 혼돈에 대한 매력에 공감을 불러일으킵니다.