In On Evil, Terry Eagleton argues that Freud’s concept of the death drive can be synthesized with traditional theological accounts of evil, particularly those of Augustine and Aquinas, to define evil in terms of death and annihilation. As portrayed in The Dark Knight, the Joker perfectly embodies this theory of evil. The Joker embodies nihilism, chaos, and fear because he has no ordinary motive, such as wealth, power, or revenge. He destroys others for no other reason than his perverse enjoyment.

Nihilism and the Death Drive

At the end of his introduction, Eagleton says, “evil is indeed all about death–but about the death of the evildoer as much as that of those he annihilates” (18). The Joker is obsessed with death, both his own and that of others. During the bank robbery with which The Dark Knight opens, the Joker nonchalantly shoots one of the men he hired to perform the heist. In fact, he gives each member of his crew the order to kill another of the thieves once his role in the robbery is complete. Throughout the film, the Joker kills police officers and gangsters alike, and arranges the assassinations of a judge, the police commissioner, and, of course, Rachel, the mutual love interest of Batman and Harvey Dent.

Beyond his destruction of other human lives, the Joker exemplifies the drive toward his own annihilation. According to Eagleton’s reading of Freud, the death drive is the idea that “human beings unconsciously desire their own destruction. At the core of the self is a drive to absolute nothingness” (108). The Joker exemplifies this kind of nihilism. At Gotham General Hospital, he gives Harvey Dent a gun and presses it against his own head–had Harvey’s coin landed on the other side, he would have pulled the trigger. At the climax of the car chase, the Joker and Batman advance toward each other–Batman on the Bat-cycle and the Joker on foot. Although the Joker has a gun, he does not shoot at Batman. As Batman races toward him, the Joker mutters to himself, “Come on. Come on. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. Come on. Come on hit me. Hit me. Hit me!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGisF2GgKHM

Eagleton says, “The evil are in pain” (103). Three times the Joker asks, “Wanna know how I got these scars?” He tells two different stories–and would have told a third had Batman not interrupted him–about the origin of his gruesome trademark. Neither anecdote the Joker shares about his scars is true, but they both point to the foundational truth that he is a profoundly maimed individual or, as the Joker riffs on a famous Nietzsche quote, “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger.” The Joker’s humanity has been brutally warped by the abuse and suffering–whatever form it actually took–he has undergone.

Eagleton argues that evil, in contrast to the more common wickedness or immorality, is “supremely pointless” (84). Evil has no utilitarian goal; it is irrationally unconcerned with money, sex, and power. It is wicked to kill someone for money, but it is truly evil to kill someone for no reason at all, for the enjoyment of it. Eagleton calls this “obscene enjoyment” (100) as it is the sado-masochistic element of evil. Hence the Joker puts the “laughter” into “slaughter” as is emphasized on the side of his eighteen-wheeler.

Augustine’s Privation Theory of Evil

The classic description of the pointlessness of evil comes from Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine describes stealing pears as the nadir of his sinfulness because he stole them not for the sake of eating them–he threw them away afterward–but simply for the enjoyment of the sinful act of theft itself.

Augustine’s views of evil developed partially in opposition to Manichean dualism. The Manichees believed that the universe was the battleground of Good and Evil, which were equal but opposite cosmic forces. Evil, thus, was its own substance, independent from Good. In the words of Peter Brown’s landmark biography of Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, the Manichees believed that “God was good, totally innocent” and “so convinced were they that evil could not come from a good God, that they believed that it came from an invasion of the good” by a “hostile force of evil, equal in power, eternal, totally separate” (47). For a time, Augustine identified as a Manichee, but once Manichean beliefs proved hollow to him, he abandoned them.

According to Augustine’s later views, as well as those of Aquinas, evil is a “deficiency of being” and a “lack, negation, defectiveness, deprivation” (125) as Eagleton summarizes. Like darkness is a lack of light and hunger is a deprivation of food, evil is fundamentally an absence of the Good. God is the source of all being, all existence; evil is a corruption of the Good, with no independent existence of its own. As the Joker illustrates, the greater the deprivation of the Good, the more twisted and destructive one becomes.

The Joker, the Nazis, and Logistics

The irony of the pointlessness of evil is that the most evil figures, from the Joker to the Nazis, are often capable of incredibly rational thought and organization. Eagleton argues that one of the “most grotesque features of the Nazi death camps was the way in which sober, meticulous, utilitarian measures were pressed into the service of an operation which had no practical point at all” (96-97). The extermination of Jews during the Holocaust had no utilitarian function (in fact, it was anti-utilitarian, as German resources necessary for combating the Allies were wasted killing Jews) but was carried out in the most efficient, utilitarian way.

The same is true for the Joker, who is a logistical genius. Although his murders have no practical purpose other than inspiring panic, he plans them with incredible forethought and the greatest attention to detail. He makes his getaway from the bank in a school bus amidst a line of other school buses; he disguises himself as a nurse to infiltrate Gotham General; he arranges for a burning firetruck to block the path of the police convoy and force it down onto Lower 5th (a.k.a Lower Wacker in Chicago). Knowing that the police will be watching for snipers during the commissioner’s funeral procession, he sets a timer on a window shade overlooking the parade route, so that it flashes open to distract the cops, while he shoots at the mayor from the ground (again in disguise, this time as an officer). He surgically implants a bomb in a criminal’s stomach so that he can detonate it via a cell phone and make his escape from prison. Using masks and fake guns, he dresses hostages up like his own men, while giving his thugs doctors’ lab coats to wear to confuse the police. If he were not a few clowns short of a circus, the Joker could certainly work as the Chief Operating Officer of a major corporation.

In planning a strategy to stop the Joker, Bruce tells Alfred “Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. We just need to figure out what he’s after.” Bruce is correct that most criminals seeks something rational, like money, power, or revenge, but the Joker is no ordinary criminal. As Alfred tells Bruce, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical . . . some men just want to watch the word burn.” In contrast to Gotham’s mobsters, who seek wealth and power, the Joker seeks simply to annihilate everything and everyone. Thus, toward the end of the film, the Joker sets fire to an enormous stack of money and proclaims his superiority over the mob, “All you care about is money. This town deserves a better class of criminal.” The Joker acknowledges that he is a man of simple taste–“dynamite, gunpowder, and gasoline”–those things which burn best. His motto is “everything burns,” which suggests that life is meaningless–the basic claim of nihilism. The Joker’s nihilism is self-fulfilling: if he can cause Gotham to descend into chaos, then he was right all along.

It is out of his own inner lack that the Joker’s violence springs. It is the absence, the “terrible non-being” at his core that drives the Joker to destroy everything around him. Eagleton contends that the “obscene enjoyment of annihilating the Other becomes the only way of convincing yourself that you still exist” (100). The Joker turns his inner feeling of nihilism outward.

Eagleton further argues that in the evil person, the death drive is “turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being. Yet this furious violence involves a kind of lack–an unbearable sense of non-being, which must, so to speak, be taken out on the other” (127). This is why the Joker has “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint,” why he frequently kills even the thugs who work for him, and why he blows up a major hospital.

The characteristics of the evil which the Joker represents is what makes him so difficult for Batman to defeat. In the interrogation scene, which may be the most wrenching moment in the film because it shows Batman at his most vulnerable and humiliated, the Joker mocks Batman, even as Batman slams his fist into the Joker’s head, by saying, “You have nothing to threaten me with. You have nothing to do with all your strength.” Unlike any other villain, Batman ultimately cannot defeat the Joker through force because the Joker cannot be deterred by pain–he relishes it. Because of his nihilism, the Joker does not fear anything. Through a combination of technology, determination, and physical toughness, Batman can crush most opponents into submission, but the Joker will never stop.

Christopher Nolan has given evil a new face for this generation in the Joker. Yet, the evil which the Joker embodies has important precedents in both history and fiction, from Nazism to Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello and the Witches in Macbeth. Iago’s nihilism springs from his irrational desire to engineer Othello’s destruction, while the Witches relish the chaos that results when they give Macbeth their prophecy. In his drive to annihilate Gotham City, the Joker seeks to make the world look like the gaping wound in his own soul.

Sources:

Terry Eagleton. On Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Peter Brown. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.