Carnivalesque Culture And ‘The Joker’ as a Narcissistic Social Character in Liminal Space

The Liminal Dance

“Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”—Eric Fromm, Fear of Freedom, p. 158 (italics in original).

“Sacredness homes us against horror…the sense of losing touch with reality.”—The good Professor, Dr. John Vervaeke, in Sacredness: Horror, Music, and Symbol.

The purpose of this critical philosophical essay is to make the unintelligible intelligible by analytically applying two important concepts of the carnival and liminality to interpret the fictional character Arthur Fleck in the film “Joker”(2019). All mythological identities represent patterns in existence of some life principle or value. The conceptual lens of carnival and liminality allow us to grasp deeper patterns of cultural-historical meaning stored in this encoded fictional story of what at first appears to be the idiosyncratic neurosis of a criminally narcissistic character named Arthur. On one level “Joker” is meant to be an interpretive understanding of life in modern advanced industrial society today. Also, the Joker character can serve as a useful mnemonic tool to learn and retain many analytical concepts developed by various schools of thought in sociology, political economy, and psychology.

I will draw heavily from a 2000 essay written by Professor of Sociology, Lauren Langman, titled, “The ‘Carnival Character’ of the Present Age.” As a reference point, Langman’s essay was written before the 9/11/2001 terrorists attacks--nineteen years ago! He applies the concept of the European medieval Carnival as a symbol for privatized hedonism of modern industrial mass consumer society that provide endless Carnivalesque cultural spectacles resulting in “narcissistic character disorders,” and a false self based on consumer culture. [1] First, Langman understood the carnival concept as representing “cyberfeudalism” in a synthesis of modern technology and feudalism. Secondly, he argues that privatized hedonism is “a new mechanism of escape.” The carnival provided medieval people a space of liminal playfulness where the political and erotic combined in a controlled ritualized escape from their dominated damaged lives. Liminality is the key concept for understanding Arthur Fleck and his deviant Liminal Dance scenes. The paradigmatic Fleck persona can clarify and even further develop Langman’s analysis of consumer society using the important concepts of carnival and liminality. We will see Arthur Fleck metamorphose from a natural conformist, to unhappiness, to urban neurosis, and then to the demonic Joker. The narcissistic Arthur Fleck who transforms into the master criminal Joker began his life as a tortured unhappy child suffering from stunted maturity.

Surplus Repression and Repressive De-sublimation

There are additional concepts needed to understand the meaning of the carnival and liminality. Herbert Marcuse takes the term “repression” from Freudian instinct theory to mean “in the non-technical sense to designate both conscious and unconscious, external and internal processes of restraint, constraint, and suppression”(Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 1955, p. 35). Marcuse wanted to develop a theory to explain why revolutionary consciousness failed to emerge from the working class in capitalists societies, but instead turned to fascism. A key concept of the Marcusian critique is “sublimation” that describes the diversion of psychic energy derived from instinctual impulses--such as sexual desire or aggressive energy--into other creative activity. Freudian psychology views sublimation as a defense mechanism for the psyche. Herbert Marcuse also adopts this concept of “sublimation” from Freud, but instead uses the confusing synonym “Repressive De-sublimation.” Both of these terms mean the gratification, or release of instinctual drives directed, or redirected within the limits of the dominant social norms. “De-sublimation” would mean to release unacceptable impulses and drives without restraint. Marcuse also used the term “Surplus Repression” defined as the necessary societal repression and control needed in a capitalist mode of industrial production: “The difference between basic and surplus repression is an index of both unnecessary alienation and political domination…modern capitalism depends upon surplus needs, surplus labor, surplus repression, and surplus aggression for its very survival” (Herbert Schoolman, The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse, New York University Press, 1984, p. 96). The union of psychoanalysis and politics was not received enthusiastically in the 1960s because of the rise of positivistic Operand Behaviorist Psychology in American academia.

One goal of The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was to reconcile Freud and Marx in an attempt to understand socialization in modern capitalist society. Specifically, Eric Fromm was a Marxist Neo-Freudian Revisionist whose task was to understand how mass discontent of the working class is neutralized in capitalism. The Frankfurt School sought to use analytical social psychology as a tool to examine socio-economic structures and their effect on basic human instinctual drives under capitalism. Fromm believed conscious and unconscious aggression is diverted by purposeless rituals of pseudo-liberation and conformity by an ideological “culture industry”(Horkheimer). The culture industry suggests “…symbolic satisfaction to the masses, guiding their aggression into socially harmless channels” (Martin Jay, “The Dialectical Imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School And the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 by Martin Jay, Little, Brown & Company, Canada, 1973, p. 91). Interestingly, Eric Fromm was a very religious person coming from an Orthodox Jewish family. His favorite Old Testament books were Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea.

The Carnival as Repetition and Reversal 

of Time and Space

“My clown name was ‘Carnival.’ ”—Arthur Fleck

Time overcomes the category of Life as existence moves toward the inescapable sequence of birth to death—from growth to decay. This Life-process, Tillich notes, “cannot be reversed, but it can be repeated.” The circle is the Ancient Greek symbol for space because it represented the “circular motion of continuous repetition” which diminishes the power of time over Life, but the circle of the Law of Life and Death cannot be overcome in existence so that space always dominate Life (Theology of Culture, p. 31).

Philosophical critique is a kind of unmasking. The carnival as a festival can ultimately be traced back to medieval folk culture and their concern for not wasting food especially for perishables such as butter, milk, and meat. “Carnival” literally means in Latin “take away the meat.” The carnival festivals were held just before the season of Lent in March or February (Pre-Lent) when Christians fasted for 40 days in recognition of Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice and resurrection (Easter). After the fasting there would likely be food shortages so the festival goers would consume all the leftover perishable food including alcohol which was not perishable. This pragmatic aspect of the festival become more and more salient for dominated feudal people. Overtime the carnival ritual became a secular event throughout the world degrading into gluttony and sexual orgies even in contradiction to the local cultural norms. This contradiction is known in Christianity as the battle between Carnival and Lent. Religious rituals often become reified transforming symbols that refer to themselves as signs instead of pointing to the Holy that is the dimension of ultimate reality. Symbols are not identical to the Holy. Rather, symbols initiate participation with the Holy. All holy objects, doctrines, and rites are always in danger of becoming demonic. Tillich writes, “All idolatry is nothing else than the absolutizing of symbols of the Holy, and making them identical with the Holy itself (Theology of Culture, p. 60). Religious festival goers attended the carnival as a hedonistic orgy in anticipation of scarcity following Lent, which defeats the original purpose of the religious ritual.

“When, for example, the thing you are required to do is to walk, it is no use at all to make the most astonishing inventions in the way of the easiest carriages and to want to convey yourself in these when the task prescribed to you was...walking.”—Kierkegaard, “Attack Against Christendom,” (1854) p. 100.

The most interesting characteristic of the carnival festivals is the satirical ritual of social status role reversal. Participants wore bizarre masks, painted their faces, and constructed costumes with absurdly exaggerated noses, mouths, and other body parts. People would dress as the opposite sex. They believed in Apotropaic magic (from από- "away" and τρέπειν "to turn" away) to wart off evil influences. Obscene language was permitted even toward the ruling class engaging in gross and degrading acts that glorified the erotic, the profane, the vulgar, and bodily excreta. There were ritual fights, and in some countries Jewish people from ghettos were publicly humiliated by being forced to perform degrading acts. Senseless acts are sometimes committed publicly to uncover some conflict, or grievance. The carnival was meant to temporarily reverse the social hierarchy of power (reversal of space). The carnival was not total chaos, but rather organized repressive de-sublimation.

In Spain the carnival evolved to symbolize the battle between Good/Evil (Zoroasterism) and Light/Darkness (Manichaeism). During the Holy Week celebrations Spanish crowds would carry a grotesque twisted effigy of Jesus appearing as a Tragic/Comic figure to which people would direct insults and show complete disrespect. All the conflicts within the souls of humanity are symbolically represented in the sublimated grotesque deformed body of a crucified Christ. Severe psychological stress often sublimates into seemingly unrelated physical ailments (psychosomatic illness) such as a backache, or limp: they are the incarnations (from Latin “carno” literally meaning “meat”) of psychic contradictions. The purpose of the crowds’ insults toward the effigy of a clown like Christ is to reaffirm the Holy. Easter Season represents the serial events of Resurrection, Liminal state, and Rebirth. However, the carnival reverses this temporal order; “King Carnival,” Liminal state, and Death. Mircea Eliade wrote, “Any new year is a revival of time at its beginning, a repetition of the cosmogony”(The Myth of the Eternal Return, pdf., p. 54).

The ancient conflicts of life sometime reappear wearing new clothing making them unrecognizable to a newer generation. Arthur Fleck, whose last name refers to a meaningless speck, is a creature of the Carnival—the mask, and the involuntary laugh that represents his real sublimated emotions of anger, fear, and tragic sadness. Langman interprets the carnival as representing mass consumer culture designed as an escape mechanism from personal feelings of anxiety and powerlessness. A Carnivalesque culture is a “culture of amusement,” which functions as a method of domination to repressively de-sublimate feelings of discontent by redirecting them to some other controlled arena—such as a lifestyle completely based on consumption of industrial commodities. Consumer capitalism has developed a technical apparatus which enables it to enforce social conformity by simply organizing society in a way that repress certain desires, create false needs, delimits thinking, and ideologically manipulates language to construct a false self and reality. It is from a “consumer based selfhood” that narcissistic borderline personalities emerge in society. Arthur is the story of how managed repressive de-sublimation gradually resulted in unrestrained de-sublimation—or a crime spree.

“Every neurosis represents a moral problem. The failure to achieve maturity and integration of the whole personality is a moral problem.”—Eric Fromm, “Man for Himself,” pp. 225-226.

A lack of identity is Arthur’s most urgent existential problem that prevents him from communicating with others, or having meaningful relationships. He has no meaningful life narrative because he is unable to define an identity or intelligible world. He is out of attunement with everything around him. However, his meaning making cognitive abilities are still functioning until a series of increasingly devastating events wear down his resilience that give rise to parallel liminal transformative trances. The only narrative Fleck can construct is one of tragic cruelty which in the reverse realm of the carnival would be a comedy. In the film’s beginning, Arthur is a humorless introverted conformist at heart and even displays some heroic underdog characteristics. He is a clown for hire (wage laborer) that sometimes suffers stage fright. Wearing a costume and makeup is a job requirement that intensifies his lack of personhood and alienation: he entered an arena in which he lacks any of the skills needed for even minimal success. Fleck works as a nonsensical clown in a blurred anomic reality around unhappy dangerous people with a profound sense of insecurity. Arthur is existentially homeless. His sense of rootlessness expresses itself as a sublimated twisted disfigured thin body. At one point Fleck attempts to gain a self-determined identity by believing he is the illegitimate son of the wealthy Gotham mayoral candidate Thomas Wayne. Arthur is an overly enthusiastic fan of a well-known TV comedian, Murray Franklin, and attempts to gain a self-identity by mere association, but both efforts fail causing even greater psychological disintegration.[2] Arthur is a non-person with no sense of what is real or illusion which enables the movie viewing audience to vicariously participate in his feelings of alienation, moral ambiguity, existential confusion and uncertainty.

[1]Chris Hedges develops this critical theme of spectacle in his 2009 book, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and The Triumph of Spectacle.” The first chapter is about his experience at a World Wrestling Entertainment tour—the same carnival business that Donald Trump had been involved for years.

[2] Fromm studied authoritarian personalities and identified three general personality types that form as defense mechanisms against feelings of anxiety, frustration, and powerlessness: A.) Authoritarian, B.) Destructive and, C.) Conformist. Fleck’s transformative evolution exemplified all three general character types at some point in the film.  Fromm also identified four more specific social character orientations classified as 1.) Submissive conformist orientation, 2.) Exploitative aggressive orientation of dynastic elites, 3.) Hoarding wealth-accumulating orientation, 4.) The Marketing self-selling managerial bureaucrat. With that said, Fleck does not really meet all the modern criteria of a narcissist.

…to continue as “The Liminal Trickster.”

Insomnia