College Students, the Joker, and a Suggestion for the News Media



AURORA, CO - JULY 20: People light candles at a makeshift memorial during a vigil for victims at the Century 16 movie theatre where a gunmen attacked movie goers during an early morning screening of the new Batman movie, 'The Dark Knight Rises' on July 20, 2012 in Aurora, outside of Denver, Colorado. According to reports, 12 people were killed and 59 wounded. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

I (Dr. "Toffee," that is) am breaking into Rhonda's research journal at this point for a couple of reasons.  First, I don't see how she can avoid commenting on what happened Thursday night in Colorado; I expect that there will be something about it in the journals of all of my real, non-fictional students.  Second, I actually have had 4 or 5 students over the past few years who chose to analyze The Dark Knight for their film analysis project (not to mention a number of class discussions on the film), and all of them wanted to focus on the Joker specifically, so I have done some thinking about this already.  In fact, I spent a lot of time with a couple of them who came to my office to talk about their projects on several occasions. 

What did I learn from these discussions and the papers?  Well, don't panic -- I did not find any of them wanting to use the Joker as a role model.  What they wanted was to understand the character's motives.  They all looked at the scene where Alfred tells Bruce Wayne the story of the man he had hunted years before.  Alfred ends this with a line that's something like "Some people just want to see the world burn."  (Obviously, the filmmakers knew that they had to say something about why anyone would do what the Joker does.)  

In some of the best of these papers, the students, who were usually taking a cultural studies approach (one took a myth crit approach, examining the Joker as a variant on the Satan archetype), saw the Joker as the embodiment of the terrorist mindset, after you strip away whatever ideological trappings may exist.  The film took on a new importance for them once they came to this conclusion, which let them examine how they felt about terrorism in general.  There were some surprising insights about how people try to understand acts of terror.  And, eventually I came to value the film in a way I hadn't before I saw it through their eyes.  It says that the motivation of the terrorist is meaningless, that the terrorist --any terrorist -- is simply evil, and evil must always be fought.  Not a bad message overall for a movie.  

However, the real-life tragedy of the lives lost in Colorado is horrifying to the point that the association of a movie to it feels like an insult added to the overwhelming injury already inflicted.  If anything, it makes these murders even more evil.  And, yes, I said "murders":  the news media all seem to want to use the term "massacre" or something like it, but that, I would argue, diminishes what actually happened.  Every one of the people lumped together by the word "massacre" was an individual, and they deserve to be seen and remembered that way, not as a statistic remarkable only for its size. 

I am a graduate of Northern Illinois University (MA 1999, PhD, 2004).  Perhaps as a result of that, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how the news media cover this kind of murder story, how the coverage emphasizes the murderers and relegates the victims to a subordinate position, how it makes celebrities of these killers and, to a degree, normalizes their crimes as a typical response to some kind of personal stress.  I have a suggestion as to how we can counteract this, and I think it's about time we put it or something like it into effect.  From now on, I would like to see the news media refer to all convicted murderers (of however many people) as "prisoner number . . . , the killer of  . . .."  Yes, it would take a long time to list all the names, but so what?  We need to remember who they were, and the murderers need to be shown that they are themselves meaningless. 

The Huffington Post has posted a list of the victims along with some details (heartbreaking, for the most part) about them in an article that does not mention the alleged murderer by name.  I shouldn't be surprised, but I am, that this did not come up on my Zemanta feed, nor that when I searched for the info, every source was drawing on that posting.  So, kudos to The Huffington Post for doing the right thing.  The victims, Veronica Moser,  Gordon Cowden, Matthew McQuinn, Alex Sullivan, Micayla Medek, John Larimer, Jesse Childress, Alexander Boik, Jonathan Blunk, Rebecca Ann Wingo, Alexander Teves, and Jessica Ghawi, are far more worthy of attention than the unnamed (by me) murderer.  I do not have a list of the wounded, but I would not list them anyway as they probably want their privacy right now. 

And now, back to Rhonda's thoughts.  As always, they are based on similar ideas expressed by my students.           

Related articles

• New Batman Animated Series Won't Include Joker (ign.com)
• A Dark Night at Dark Knight (pastorjeffcma.wordpress.com)
• 'I'm the Joker' (imaginedrealms.typepad.com)