'Free'

In Grant Morrison’s 1989 graphic novel “Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, the psychotherapist Ruth Adams muses on the Joker: “It’s quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here.” Later in the story, Dr. Arkham, founder of the Arkham Asylum, devours his wife and daughter after their brutal murder at the hands of an escaped asylum patient. He thinks to himself: “It all seems perfectly rational. Perfectly, perfectly rational.”

Morrison published “Serious House” because he wanted to kill Batman. Specifically, he wanted to kill the then-latest incarnation of the character, popularized by Frank Miller in the mid-1980s. Miller wrote Batman as a grizzled, violent, Freudian Vietnam vet, an iron-fisted punisher and pummeler of black and brown drug dealers and trannie hookers, the vengeful soul of ’80s white America, the defender of order and sanity in a cataclysmic age.

This was the Batman Morrison wanted to kill. And to do so, he let loose the Devil itself: that agent of chaos, the Joker.

The first time Joker’s face appears in the graphic novel is upon Batman’s arrival at Arkham Asylum, where the collection of super-criminals and psychopaths imprisoned there have gotten loose. The Joker’s eyes are framed by red done up in a sweeping cat-eye; Their lips are stained with bloody lipstick, their face powdered a dainty bone-white. They cry: “Aren’t I just good enough to eat?” At one point, they give Batman’s ass a tight squeeze, calling him “honey pie” and “dear.” When Harvey Dent pisses on the floor, they screech “You trying to ruin my heels?” At another point, they grab one of their male hostages tight and begs “Kiss me, Charlie! Ravish me!”

It wasn’t until I read Morrison’s notes on his original script that my sneaky sense of déjà vu, of recognition of — God, dare I say it — kinship began to make sense. In Morrison’s original script, the Joker was dressed “as ‘Madonna,’ in a black basque, seamed tights and lace-up stiletto boots.” Morrison writes that “he should look simply grotesque,” but that somehow, dressed to the nines in drag, the Joker possesses “a bizarre kind of attractiveness and sexuality.”

In other words, Morrison’s Joker is a trans woman.

This trans Joker wants to kill the image of Batman that Frank Miller created. Or, rather, in their words to Batman:

“We want you. In here. With us. In the madhouse. Where you belong.”

The Joker wants Batman to admit that sanity, the ironclad justice Frank Miller built him to crave, is an illusion. Morrison frames the struggle between Batman and the Joker with the story of Dr. Arkham. Arkham opens the asylum to conquer irrationality, aberration, psychic abnormality, to assert the calm and cleansing light of rational thought and male European wisdom into the dark maternal crevices of the insane mind. But in the end, he collapses in the bloody remnants of the Old World Order, locked up in his own asylum. In the end, sanity comes crashing down.

In “Madness and Civilization," Michel Foucault argues that the modern notion of mental “illness,” mental “not-rightness,” is not objective medical science. It can be used as a concept and tool for those in power to oppress, a corrective principle of condemnation for those who do not fit society’s schemas. In this form, it is deeply connected to the creation of marginalizing categories. Transness was once a mental disorder. Dysmorphia was a sign of mental unhealth, not to be met on its own terms, reckoned with, and adapted to, but to be erased, fixed, corrected. Blackness was considered a morphological and biological disorder with mental consequences (such as those elucidated by Frantz Fanon). “Hysteria” as a diagnosable mental disorder was created to pathologize womanhood. And LGBTQ+ conversion camps manufacture queerness as a state of mind to be corrected. In these cases, mental unhealth is constructed to be a placeholder for, an admonishment of, social abnormality.

Ruth Adams links “super sanity” to a lack of “control over the sensory information [received] from the outside world.” The Joker is left with a “chaotic” flow of pure input, detached from schemas, orders, and structures that orient, categorize, and command — structures like gender. This might be understood as insanity, but Adams wonders: Could this not be its own kind of profane hyper-clarity? Could the Joker’s insane gender-play not be its own wild, dangerous, ferocious rejection of the colonizing, oppressive forces of the institution, the asylum, the Man?

The Joker wants to kill Batman. They want him to admit, as he finally does, “It’s only madness that makes us what we are.” Reading his final admittance of his own insanity, I saw Batman transformed, murdered and reborn: no longer a bastion of the hyper-anxious New Right; no longer a plague on Black folks just trying to get by; no longer a defender of the high and the beautiful and the white and the light. I saw Batman become, like the Joker, a symbol of the tectonic disruption of all that we are told is good and holy.

I saw hope, hope that even the most rigid and demonic notions — the vigilante, or the mad(man), or the villain — could be resuscitated. And in this project of resuscitation lies the power of low art. Just as the stale and hyper-rationality of Batman could be transformed into a subversive paean to the power of transness, so too can pleasure, ugliness, and minstrelsy be transformed into vehicles of liberation. In Morrison’s Batman, I saw hope that the forces of hegemony and order and the gaze of the White Man could be escaped, and a world built beyond their grasp.

In the end, the Joker bids adieu to a now “cured” Batman, ready to embrace the War on Crime with a new, decidedly kinky, irrational, and subversive tilt. They wave at his receding back as he strides away from the madhouse, and they crow:

“Enjoy yourself out there. In the Asylum.”

Down with the laws of taste and beauty! Down with any demand to be anything! Down with good art! Down with hegemonic forces of whiteness and gender and class! Down with sanity! Down with the madhouse! Down with the creation of concepts, the institutionalization of intelligibility, the demonization of all that is different!

Up, in Miss Joker’s words, with the real world!

—Contributing writer Nicholas P. Whittaker’s column, "Low End Theory,” digs deep into the archive of bad, taboo, and ugly art, seeking political liberation in the low.