This is an interesting little thread about how therapy would do nothing for the Joker. They also discuss the “one bad day” philosophy from The Killing Joke. Here is the quote written by Alan Moore:
“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.” -Joker in Batman: The Killing Joke
(via: Pinterest)
The point of the Joker movie didn’t obviate the nature of the Joker at all. If there’s one thing it shows, it’s that nothing anyone can do in terms of therapy has ever been able to help the Joker. He knows, deep down, that he is truly and horribly bent, and hopes for a solution because he’s been taught that it’s because he’s mentally ill.
Until the day comes when the penny drops, and he starts to realize that he was never ill at all, but only horribly bent out of any ordinary shape into something society couldn’t understand. At that point, he accepts his warped and twisted evil as his inherent nature, and stops trying to seek a cure. He instead goes out of his way to live up to it, murdering first his insulting co-worker, then the TV host who mocked him, and then in Arkham the psychologist who tried to treat him once again.
Oh sure; he killed the three guys on the train before all that; but that was self-defence. And he initially wrote off his lack of regret at killing them as simply a part of the fact that it was in fact a matter of self-defence. A normal person would have felt regret, at the very least for the fact that such a horror proved necessary, and that its performance fell upon their shoulders. But the Joker feels only justified, and doesn’t regret killing them AT ALL. He only conceals his involvement out of a realization of the consequences if it becomes known that he was responsible. The Joker makes that plain when he responds to whether the killing of the young men on the train was funny. “Yes it is, and I’m tired of pretending that it’s not.”
Yes, the movie shows the Joker as the product of horrific childhood abuse. But the question is left open as to how much that abuse made him ill, and how much it simply made him warped; as well as the question as to how much of what he was had always been there as an orphaned child and to what degree it was simply compounded and refined by that abuse.
The Joker blames society for making him through its disregard; but that’s merely his justification for what he is. Plenty of others have been treated with equal and even more horrific abuse in their early life; most of whom come out of it severely damaged, but not monstrous. And the untreatability of the Joker’s “condition” only underscores that what’s going on is less about mental illness (which as you say is treatable) and more about an inner monstrosity for which there is no cure.
We’re shown throughout that the Joker simply doesn’t respond in any way to the drugs being used to treat him; and yet, a mentally ill person would to at least some degree respond to something in that ever-changing cocktail. We’re meant to see in that lack of medical response (which is totally unrealistic, as even the warped but not mentally ill would be affected by all of those drugs in real life) that this is not a matter of a mental illness at all. It’s something far deeper, far darker, and far more intractable: an inborn malice and evil that no medical intervention can even begin to touch. A superficial reading sees mental illness; but that error is in the eye of the beholder alone.
Some key things: first the Laughing Man. Gotham is cursed by a demon called the laughing man that finds hosts in the forms of the mentally ill. it resides in Slaughter Swamp and was sealed by the natives who lived there until colonizers broke the seal in the name of expanding Gotham, mostly out of greed.
2nd. The one bad day. Can any of you honestly say that having your dream destroyed losing all the people you love and being kidnapped, forced into crime and then assaulted and surviving a chemical bath of god knows what will leave you with your usual mood. Please try to survive that. WITH your original personality and moods intact. i’ll wait. because if you think surviving all that wouldnt change you you clearly dont understand how trauma works.
3rd: Joker is a NIHILIST!!!!! he has sen the futility of living a good and ethical life and now is driven by a COMPULSION to educate others, namely Batman. Batman went through the same amount of trauma and it also changed him. its why in the dark multiverse there is a Bruce who became mayor and in so doing failed at being Batman but actually cleaned up all the super crime in Gotham, including Joker by using his resources wisely.
4th:Joker is WEALTHY. He has made millions off his crimes AND pays his taxes. He is actually contributing to his society and provides jobs and such to his goons. So if you think youre solving chaos by solving Joker youre really just breaking capitalism.
5th:Batman is facist and Joker is nihilist. NEITHER OF THEM ARE GOOD PEOPLE!!! And to see it in that dichotomy misses the fundamental failures of both characters. Also without Joker, Batman DESTROYS Gotham. He would have nothing keeping him occupied. and we have proof of this in the form of the Grim Knight