Batman #1
Bill Finger, Bob Kane y Jerry Robinson
He announces the crime on the radio, then commits it under police guard.
Deterrence TheoryIn his first appearance, the Joker is a killer and jewel thief who hijacks the radio to announce whom he will murder and what he will steal at midnight. The police surround the victim, who dies anyway with a ghastly grin, poisoned in advance. It is a head-on challenge to deterrence: since Beccaria, what curbs crime most is the certainty of being caught, and this Joker turns that certainty into a sideshow so he can mock it. He has no origin and no trauma yet: he is pure criminal will.
Batman
Tim Burton · Jack Nicholson
A gangster who climbs out of the chemical vat as an artist of crime.
Cultural criminologyJack Napier is a career gangster who falls into a vat of chemicals during a fight with Batman and comes out disfigured. From then on he presents himself as an artist of homicide: he poisons cosmetics with Smylex, hijacks television with his own commercials and turns Gotham’s bicentennial parade into a trap. Katz and Ferrell’s cultural criminology reads him well: crime as thrill, style and media image rather than a means to an end. The cash he hands out at the parade is just a prop.
The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan · Heath Ledger
No past, no greed: he only wants to prove that order is a facade.
Social controlNolan strips away his origin on purpose: the Joker tells two incompatible stories about his scars and neither is confirmed. Nor is he after money: he burns a mountain of mob cash. His great experiment is two ferries rigged with explosives, one full of civilians and one full of prisoners, each told it can save itself by destroying the other. It is Hirschi’s question put to the test: if most of us obey the rules because of the bonds that tie us to others, what happens when those bonds are stretched to breaking? The passengers prove him wrong.
Joker
Todd Phillips · Joaquin Phoenix
A city that promises dignity and shuts every door that leads to it.
Anomie / StrainArthur Fleck is a party clown who dreams of doing stand-up, lives in poverty with his mother and has a neurological condition that triggers uncontrollable fits of laughter. Budget cuts shut the social services programme that supplied his medication. The film piles humiliation on humiliation until he snaps, and his violence ends up sparking a revolt. It is the Mertonian reading KRIMINIS gives him: promised goals, denied means. The film hints at a link between his illness and his violence; current evidence does not support the idea that mental illness, on its own, explains crime.
The 1940 Joker mocks the police; the 1989 one turns crime into spectacle; the 2008 one stress-tests the bonds that hold us in place; the 2019 one points at a society that cuts and humiliates. The explanation has moved from the criminal to the structure, just as public debate began to talk about inequality and mental health.
The archive reads them with Anomie / Strain · Read the case file →
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki · batman-on-film.com/3956 · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · slashfilm.com/joker-scars-story · en.wikipedia.org/wiki. All the villains with versions.