Joker’s Techno-Scientific Delights: Mannerist Science and Technology in the Animated Joker Universe

Fig. 1 - Detective Comics #1023 (September 2020).

Allowing for the unanticipated to occur and offering “a particular field for rethinking the relation of the virtual as not opposed to the real, but as wholly real in itself” (Thain 2016, 5), the medium of animation is able to go beyond reality, and (in so doing) allows new artistic expressions at the intersection of body and movement, the renegotiation of the human being and its relationship to machines, and experimentation with the cultural meaning of science and technology. Numerous animated Batman films explore our cultural fascination with new visionary technologies and sciences (for an overview of the role of animation in Batman’s long history of multimedia storytelling, see Carter 2015; Martin 2020). While much has been written on Batman’s futuristic vehicles, technological gadgets and techno-stunts, the Joker’s way of representing fantasies of our technological future and scientific extravaganzas has barely been discussed. In this article, I want to spotlight the power of the Joker in animated adaptations of the Batman story (direct-to-home-media releases in the ‘DC Universe Animated Movie’ series) to participate in, and contribute towards, complex cultural inquiry and transmedial discourses around technology and science. As we will see, Joker’s science worlds are mannerist worlds, and thus expressions of a particular facet of fantasy.

Science for Intoxicating Fun

The Joker is one of the most iconic supervillains of the DC Universe. He is a homicidal clown intrinsically linked to popular entertainment, amusement and humour (whether funny or not; see Jürgens, 2014; 2020a/b). He is prone to exaggeration; his activities and fantastical, extravagant, bizarre style privilege tension and instability rather than balance and clarity. He topples logic and common sense with the explicit objective to entertain. These are fundamental qualities of circus and clown aesthetics (see Jürgens 2020c) – and it is also a mannerist strategy. The term mannerism is a subject of discussion among scholars of different fields; however, it is generally notable for refined virtuoso qualities, intellectual sophistication and artificiality. Traditionally mannerism is applied to a style in European art that exaggerates such qualities as proportion, balance and ideal beauty by celebrating asymmetry, virtuosity and fantasy. For some scholars mannerism is a transmedial/transhistorical strategy that combines artistry, striving for expression (effect), and pursuit of impact on a recipient (Zymner 2020, 10). This is one of the qualities of ‘Joker science’ (Fig. 1).

Fig. 2 - “The Last Laugh” (1992) episode of Batman: The Animated Series.

An array of Batman stories suggests that before becoming the infamous clown, the Joker character was a chemist or lab worker, e.g. in The Killing Joke (Sam Liu, 2016), in which Joker worked in a chemical plant before turning into the killer clown (this 2016 animated film was originally intended to be released directly on home video, but due to its popularity also simultaneously appeared in theatres). According to what is probably the best known and most frequently interpreted origin story, the Joker is a creature born from chemical waste. However fantastically he was brought into being, from the very beginning the Joker has been associated with science, particularly chemistry, biochemistry and microbiology, and their use for the creation of vicious weapons. For instance, in the 2016 animated film Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (Rick Morales, 2016) Joker develops a lethal poison (10:27); and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Jay Oliva, 2012-13) features Joker’s poisonous lipstick (30:14). In “The Last Laugh”, the 4th episode of Batman: The Animated Series (Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and Mitch Brian, 1992) (Fig. 2), Joker uses a wicked gas (emanating from toxic waste on a boat) to turn his victims into “foolish lunatics.”

Fig. 3 - Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (Curt Geda, 2000).

The countless “Joker gases,” “Joker toxins” and “Joker poisons” tap into speculative, creative aspects of scientific thought and curiosity. In general, science may add plausibility, a sense of (scientific) realism, as well as drama and visual splendour to a film’s story (Kirby 2011, 9), and may equal authenticity the same way that the arcane nature of scientific language adds legitimacy to a story’s plot (no matter how fantastic everything else in the story may be). However, ‘Joker science’ is ostentatiously presented, virtuoso staged, and often creates an overwhelming impression (beguiling Gothamites and even Batman). Almost outwitting Batman and team, in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (Curt Geda, 2000), for instance, Joker masters futuristic biotechnology by encoding his DNA and consciousness on a genetic microchip that he implants in another person, who slowly turns into a Joker replicate (Fig. 3). What these different examples of Joker science have in common is that the ‘realism’ of science can be understood as thoroughly flexible, provisional and uncertain; and that their ‘sciences’ are extremely refined, overblown or utterly grotesque. Why creating gothic substances and complicated procedures[1] instead of using simple, but highly ‘effective’ chemicals to kill or maim some victims (such as cyanide or mustard gas)? Why not simply train younger ‘future jokers’ instead of embarking on super-sophisticated biotech adventures? Such exaggerated science, it seems, is another vehicle for showing how the Joker character pushes beyond the limits and transgresses conventions, how he strives for expression and the production of wonderment and surprise in the spectator (including us). In other words, his science is a form of mannerism. In line with this, when inhabiting ‘science spaces’, Joker does not live in a laboratory in the basement of a university but in spectacular over-the-top settings – such as in Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm’s 1993 animated movie Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (a spin-off of the animated television series, which draws itself from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman adaptation, see Robb 2014, 324).

Experimenting with the Cultural Meaning of Science and Technology: Joker’s “World of the Future”

In Mask of the Phantasm, Joker lives in the decayed remains of Gotham’s Science Land, the once-wonderful grounds of Gotham’s World’s Fair. His ‘home’ looks bleak: rusty robots, ramshackled mechanical rides and a dilapidated “House of the Future” only give a vague idea of its former splendour. Originally dedicated to the theme of the “Dream of the Future”, the space can be read as an ironic homage to the popularity of the pleasure grounds of a modern industrial age – amusement parks and World’s Fairs – and to the modernist imaginings of technological and urban progress that they epitomised. While historical World’s Fairs from the early 20th century represented the “unbridled vision and Machine Age optimism” (Maffei 2012, 141), the unquestioning faith in technological progress, and growing conviction that mankind could control the future, Joker’s place is the future past of these visions.

Fig. 4 - Screenshots from Mask of the Phantasm (Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm, 1993).

In a crucial fighting scene unfolding in this space, Batman chases Joker into a large hall with a scale model of Gotham city, which, as we see for a split second, is called “Futureama” – indicating that Mask of the Phantasm directly refers to the “stupendous, gigantic, super-magnificent a greatest-show-on-earth” (Gelernter 1995, 13) of the 1939 New York World’s Fair; more precisely to the famous Futurama exhibit, a gigantic model of New York’s future. This historical exhibit was at that time “the largest and most lifelike model ever constructed” (Morshed 2004, 89) and contained 500,000 individually designed buildings, 1 million trees and 50,000 motor vehicles, of which 10,000 were in actual operation over super-highways, speed lanes and multidecked bridges (Morshed 2015, 154). Comfortably sitting in moving sound chairs on a suspended, winding conveyor belt, patrons travelling around the Futurama exhibit on a multisensory eighteen-minute ride looked out on an American utopia as it might appear in the year 1960 (21 years in the future) in a day-to-night aerial journey. This exhibit was an incarnation of urban utopian spectacle, a theatrical vision of virtual kinesthesia and technological progress.

In the animated film Mask of the Phantasm, the Futureama scenery becomes an active dramatic agent; for example, miniature skyscrapers serve as weapons (Fig. 4). Featuring movable, towering architectural stage structures, spectacularly illuminated by electrical light, and doing without the presence of ‘real’ human actors, the scene is reminiscent of what visionary stage designers from the early 20th century envisioned as the theatre of the future and the ‘ideal’ stage character in a medium that creates non-realist art and more complex possibilities for movement (see Jürgens 2020b for more detail on these phenomena). Through the exquisite medium of animation – which allows animated characters to be placed on such an abstract architectural city stage – Mask of the Phantasm transports modernist thinking into the 20th century. The animated film thus reveals itself a medium for ahistorical time travel and a vehicle for transmedia storytelling. And if “postmodernism = avant-garde + pop culture” (Genis 1999, 203-4), we can conclude, Mask of the Phantasm is its incarnation and underlines that tradition does not mean stagnation.

In sum, Joker is an animator’s dream – as writer and producer Paul Dini has already recognised, who is best known for his work on Warner Bros. animation projects, including Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. Through animation, Dini explains, everything the Joker could be can be maximized, his potentials are virtually unlimited (or only limited by “the imaginations of the artists”: 2020, 227). “Like the medium of animation itself,” Joker “remains colourful, ever in motion and always ready to spring another surprise” (Dini 2020, 229). Joker science is such a surprise. Whether engaging with, or living in, ‘science worlds’, Joker embodies the unforeseen and unpredictable deregulation of the aptum (or ‘normal’, see Ueding 1998, 115) in favour of strong vividness, extreme looks and the artificial. Like his style (and many other qualities) Joker science in the animated films discussed in this article represents a mannerist facet of fantasy and a form of fiction: it is a bold “act of overstepping”, illustrating how the fictional work “oversteps the real world which it incorporates” (Iser 1990, 939).

**Article published: November 27, 2020**

Notes

[1] For a much more detailed discussion of Joker’s connection to science and its use, e.g. in the form of Joker-viruses in comic book narratives, check out the forthcoming book chapter “The Cheshire Clown: Joker’s Infectious Laughter” and the paper “Spreading Fun: Comic Zombies, Joker Viruses and Covid-19 Jokes” (both in preparation), which will soon be listed here.

References

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Biography

Anna-Sophie Jürgens is an Assistant Professor in Popular Entertainment Studies and Science in Fiction Studies at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science of the Australian National University. Her research draws upon the history of (violent) clowns, mad scientists and clown robots, Joker and science connections, and comic performance and technology in culture. Follow her Facebook page to find out more about her work!