The Joker and his Jollies

“It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

My father grew up in Bastrop, Louisiana. As did I. It’s a small town of maybe ten thousand people. About thirty minutes from Arkansas, and an hour from Mississippi; it’s an area of tall pines and putrid waterways. The ArkLaMiss they call it. Prime spot for International Paper and the pulp and paper-mills it plops down in any wooded area. Maybe you’re aware of them, maybe you’re not. But if you’ve ever been to Wisconsin or Maine or Georgia or anywhere in the world where trees grow, you’ve probably seen their smokestacks. Seriously, they’re everywhere. Europe, Africa, India, China, Japan and Indonesia. Truly worldwide. My grandfather (my dad’s dad) worked for I.P. for forty-five years in that little town of Bastrop. My mother worked there for a short period of time. It was essentially the only game in town. A tin-sided monolith looming over the town. Pearl, white smoke plumes burling skyward twenty-four-seven. It was especially ominous at night. And the smell, the smell was its own thing. There was a paper mill and there was a pulp mill. The pulp mill stunk up the town something awful. It was somewhere between three-day-old-soiled diapers and the sweet shock of sugar and Sulphur. It covered the whole town in a blanket of sour molasses. A volcano in three shifts. All in the name of paper, and its subsequent products.

South of town, on the way to Monroe, there’s a creek you cross on Old Monroe Rd, that was playfully referred to as “Stink Creek”. My mother would warn my brother and I about what would happen if you accidently fell into that dark stream. Acid would burn your skin off, she would say. She said the creek was a run-off from the mill. All kinds of dangerous chemicals were discarded in there. Every time we made the trip to Monroe on that road, I’d hold my breath as we went over Stink Creek, praying the car and driver were steady and we wouldn’t all end up taking an acid bath. It was just one of many motherly tales to keep us scared-shitless at night. But my mother’s old tales (nightmares) are another story entirely.

No, this is a story about my father and Bastrop and Batman and cancer.

In the summer 1989 my father was living in Dallas, TX working for a printing company. He was thirty-seven-years-old, and his two sons had come to visit him during their summer vacation. We were twelve and fourteen and excited to see the new Batman movie playing that summer. Our father was a stone-cold nerd. A geek who had shoved comic books our way any chance he could get. We were well-versed in the histories and mysteries of the Marvel and DC universes. Our father grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and had harbored and addiction to comics. Funny books, he called them. He was an avid reader of anything to do with Science Fiction/Fantasy.

Before Dallas, my father had lived in Monroe, LA. (that big city to the south of Bastrop, Pop. 50,000 folks) where the local comic-shop would keep a pull-pile for him every week. It was a pretty simple pull-pile; just put everything that came out that week in the pile. And do that every week. He had a compulsion. A lifelong draw to the art of sequential storytelling. He had collected all of the flagship Marvel comics; Spider-Man, Thor, Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, Avengers and the X-Men, from the first issues to well into the 160’s. Then he had to sell the whole collection in the late 70’s to put food on the table (it was a bit of theme throughout his short life, money woes). Sacrifices create resentments and regrets. Marriages crumble in the weight of them.

So, there we were visiting him in the summer of 89’. Batman on the screen, waiting to be watched. A father nerd and his two sons (who might be nerds, time would tell) ready to geek out on a live-action comic book.

Tim Burton’s Batman is a dark neo-noir. It harkens back to those gangster movies Warner Bros made in the 30’s and 40’s. It’s a period-piece, but it isn’t. A Michael Curtiz film with the Batmobile and computers. It’s a perfectly tough fantastical film. At times horrid and at times goofy. Unnerving and brooding. Those kids who grew up on Looney Tunes are all grown up now (Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was released in 88’). Burton had just made Beetlejuice the year before. An original kaleidoscope of madcap horror. Michael Keaton creating a kind of demonic Chaplin that might be his best work. He would do Edward Scissorhands with Johnny Depp the year after. A three-year period of confounding, but wonderous milieus.

People (fans) might’ve thought Burton was the perfect filmmaker to helm Batman, but they didn’t think that of Keaton as the Dark Knight. They never do. They have what they have in their comic-book-mind’s-eye and never the celluloid shall meet. Batman fans in this case, had the printed page, where Batman is a Greek God in leotards, who is a master of all physical and mental capacities. Adam West played him in the 60’s; a TV show that was all camp, and everyone loved it. West was a robust lead. Handsome and athletic. He was great for a daylight Batman. But Burton was making a different super-hero movie with a different lead. He was reaching back and digging in the comic-book boxes and finding the noir that influenced Kane and Finger when they created the character. Keaton didn’t have the Doc Savage-like physique. But he had an edge and he could brood. The rest could be taken care of by a rubber suit, a hushed voice and shadowed lighting.

Batman was a huge hit. Everyone went to see it. Even my dad’s boss at the printing company went to see it. Not that I knew the man well, but I could get a sense that he wasn’t a comic book guy. These are things you can just feel about people. Not to any detriment or judgement of one’s character, but back then you knew fellow nerds at first vibe. But I remember very well a conversation my father had with his boss about Batman that summer. About how dark the movie was. My dad’s boss, at first, being mystified by its noirish tendences, but then remembering something about the early comics being about a hero who creeped around at night. Not the boss’ words exactly, but the tone of the movie was markedly different than the Adam West Batman. Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s Batman debuted in 1939. He was wholly a creature of the 30’s. A reflection of depression-era pulpiness. Crime being fought by billionaires. The Shadow and the Phantom were predecessors. Rich men with fetishes, striking out at night to make the world better. What else should they do with their money? It’s a manifest destiny dreamed up by poor artists. Or if Elizabeth Warren had her way with billionaires.

My father didn’t make a lot of money in his life. And when he died at the age of forty-five, he didn’t leave us with much. Not that he was supposed to. But he did struggle towards the end in the earning money department. He was an artist that never made it. A doodler, that had a dream to write and draw his own comic strip. At the age of forty, after working in graphic design in one way or another for twenty years, he found himself yet again without a job. It was 1992, unemployment was at almost 8%, and my father decided to take a year off and work on his passion project. A comic strip that he’d been piecing together over the years that was autobiographical. Snippets of life as a forty-year-old white male with a ponytail, hitting his mid-life crisis in a sad stride. The artwork was simple, and the jokes were corny but filled with an aw-shucks pathos. He sent the strip off to every major newspaper and got rejection after rejection. So, it goes. He could’ve kept at it, but he chose to go back into the work force after that productive year and essentially give up on his dream. A dream of a poor artist.

Gotham City in Tim Burton’s Batman is its own thing. A character with as mean and dark as any mise-en-scene there is on film. A matte painting of a belching, industrial, chemical plant sears the frontal lobe. An image that stays with you after the movie. Or it did in my case. Being partial to more matte paintings in film might be why (please bring them back film world) but it might be more to do with the smoke coming out of those stacks. The matte paintings depict a chemical plant owned by a company called Axis Chemicals. Fittingly named, it serves as a fulcrum for the movie. That at which everything ripples outward. It’s Gotham’s heart in a way. A diseased and worm-filled heart, but it’s heart all the same.

Axis Chemicals is a company that has ties to gangster Carl Grissom (a ham-filled Jack Palance) that the Gotham police are targeting. When Grissom gets wind that GCPD are about to move in on Axis Chemicals, he sends in his “number one guy” Jack Napier to get rid of some documents. But it’s all a set-up. Grissom is killing two birds with one stone (Napier’s been shtupping his moll). And it may be an end to Jack Napier, but a beginning for the Joker. Napier falls into a vat of boiling, green chemicals after failing to hold onto Batman’s slick, leathered hands. A causal loop is formed. Batman creates the Joker. But later on, Bruce Wayne finds out that Jack Napier was the criminal in the alley that kills his parents. Jack Napier creates Batman. Batman creates the Joker.

But it’s the chemicals I’m more interested in rather than the psychosis that brings about vigilantes and villains. Chemicals as a causal loop.

Napier seemingly drowns in that nasty vat of hot, green chemicals. But there’s a run-off. Axis chemicals seems to be dumping their excess in Gotham Harbor. Just like the Paper Mill in my hometown did with Stink Creek. Run-off. It’s something we know about, living in a modern society made of metal and glass and plastic. We’ve seen in films like Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action and Dark Waters. All this industry takes its toll. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. You can’t build a society without a bunch of people dying from cancer.

The earliest descriptions of cancer appear in Ancient Egypt, circa 1600 B.C. But it was a rare disease back then. The name Cancer comes from Greek descriptions of the tumors outside the body. Karkinos (Carcinos). Due to the veins stretching out on all sides like a crab. Through the years there have been all sorts of diagnosis. What causes cancer and where does it come from? A German professor believed that breast cancer was caused by a milk clot in the mammary duct. A Dutch professor believed that it was the lymphatic system was the cause. In 1775 a British surgeon discovered the first cause of cancer. Cancer of the scrotum was a common disease amongst chimney sweeps. Chimney sweeps. Smokestacks. Great flues funneling chemical burn-off into the sky. The Industrial Age had seemed to cause a rise in cancer.

At the age of forty-three my father got up one night to go to the bathroom and there was blood in his urine. Kidney cancer. They took his kidney, and then he did chemo (more chemicals) and went into remission. That process took about a year. Then he relapsed, or the cancer moved to his brain. Another year and two brain operations and he was gone. Dead at the age of forty-five. I was twenty years old at the time and had spent the last five years living with my father and his second wife and his sister, my aunt. There’s a certain destruction of the soul, when you’re a bystander to cancer. You can’t help but view it as this random, unstoppable, roaming beast. This all-consuming gas floating around the cosmos, ready to devour at will. (Think Galactus in 2007’s Fantastic Four). Healthy and unhealthy dying from it, alike. You can be a carnivore or a vegetarian, or a runner or a coach potato, there’s just no rhyme or reason when it comes to cancer.

But there are things that cause cancer. Those chimney sweeps with the sick nuts proved that. Smoking cigarettes causes cancer. Asbestos causes cancer. So does arsenic, chromium, nickel and plutonium. Avoid them all and maybe, just maybe you’ll have a chance. A chance at a long life. If you eat right and exercise. Avoid inhaling chimney smoke or pass up that job in the coal mine.

If that matters to you. To live a long life. I think it mattered to my father, but I truly don’t know if it did. Looking back over the past twenty-five years without him, I’m not so sure it did matter to him.

He smoked Marlboro Light 100’s. Most of his adult life he was trying to quit. My stepmother, his second wife, pleaded with him for most of their marriage for him to quit. She’d recruit my brother and me to help her in her quest for a healthier life for our father. Which was what? Us saying, “Dad don’t smoke?” He would just go off for long bathroom runs and smoke and read comic books. You’d go into that bathroom later and smell the cigarette’s and accuse him of smoking, and he would deny it. Always saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He was a good liar, even when the evidence was stacked against him. It makes you wonder what else he lied about. But that’s another rabbit hole to avoid for now.

The rabbit hole that Jack Napier comes out of has left him chemically altered. His skin is bleached white, and his hair is green like the scalding water that swallowed him whole. His face lifted by crude surgical tools in one of the most noirish scenes in the film. But he recovers quickly, accepting that he’s some kind of joker. Someone able to laugh at the violence caused by chaos. He’s a malignant spore moving through space and time.

But the Joker is not Galactus. Some ancient celestial being bent by an epic hunger. No, the Joker is here for the shenanigans of a loopy artist living on the streets. The streets of Gotham. They have a bit more dirt and grime than a surfboard made of chrome. The Joker’s (Nicholson’s anyway) bent is more artful mayhem. Napier for some weird reason was a talented chemist. A strange trait for a career gangster. But it’s all pleasingly on the nose, thematically. It just works with the Axis Chemical vibe. The Joker concocts a plan to poison the population of Gotham through their daily household regiments. Toothpaste, mascara, deodorant, hair spray and any other manner of self-care are to be avoided, or you’re likely to turn up a smiling corpse.

It’s a clever amalgam of things that might cause cancer. And Batman breaks the code. It’s not just one of those self-care methods but a combination of them. A conspiracy of chemicals that bring you to your doom. Or a hastening of the breakdown of the body. All these things we do to ourselves. The things we put into or on our bodies. The food we eat, the lotion we put on our skin, the roll-ons under the armpits and the product we put in our hair are used for a desired effect. But there’s always a flip side. Adverse reactions. Some things shouldn’t be put in or on the body. Just ask the Joker. Well, the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman. He’s fallen through the chemical loop of purgatory and come out on the other sided to show us just how malignant and grotesque or excesses have reached. His brutal, red smile reflecting a certain serenity in knowing what lurks on the other side. Chaos and death. Mutated nothingness.

I guess that’s what you could call heaven. Mutated nothingness. To an atheist, that is. Which my father was an atheist. Or so, he said he was. He wasn’t always a non-believer. He grew up in the Baptist church. I mean to say, his parent were believers and dragged he and his sister to church like most parents in the Fire & Brimstoneville that is Northeast Louisiana. I think he might’ve been a believer, that is, until his mother died.

It started as a rough spot, an abrasion on her eyelid. The doctors totally whiffed on it. It was Cancer and eventually she had her eye removed. She refused any kind of treatment. The Cancer moved into her brain and that was all she wrote. A startling death to think about. She was only forty-five. The same as my father when he died. Forty-five years isn’t a long time. Especially when you’re still trying to figure out what you believe. I’m forty-four and feel I’ve just become comfortable (give or take some days) with who I am as a person. To die on the cusp of that seems unfair. Or, just unnatural in this modern world.

The modern world my father grew up in was the post WWII baby boomer drive of the 50’s. The Eisenhower years of sunny days and white picket fences. It was time for good, clean living after The War. But underneath all that ease and prosperity was anxiety and psychosis. It’s what film noir was trying to work out. This engrained dread that ran through us after two atom bombs were dropped on Japan. The pins and needles of waiting for the cold war to warm up. Russia was there, waiting for you to crawl out from under your desk in grade school.

My dad loved Spam in a can. A piece of battlefield chow that had made its way into the American grocery stores post war. He’d slice it up and cook it on a griddle topped with Kraft cheese slices. Make sandwiches out of it as he watched the twelve-inch TV in the kitchen. Another post WWII malaise was to have a TV in every room. A necessary tool of distraction. Voyeurism at its zenith can take your mind away from the ruination that might drop from above at any minute. But not so healthy. Although, he read a bunch, my father watched just as much TV and film. He ate the Spam in a can and Fritos and every other processed thing he could find. He used a deodorant called Mitchum. An insane chemical mix that prevented any kind of moisture under the armpits from happening for days. It wasn’t all that a healthy living. And it didn’t start out that great for him either. As a newborn he had a heart issue that led doctors to cut his back open for an operation. He was a sick kid. By the age of thirty he’d lost all of his teeth except for two. Imagine yourself with full-on dentures at thirty years old. Living in the nuclear age is hard on some. It brought on luxury with a cost.

It brought on mutated nothingness. Something, I think Nicholson’s Joker is to the core. His Napier to Joker is transmogrified chaos. And his gift with chemistry allows him to manipulate the true form of what cancer may be in the post-industrial age. A combination of interactions that seemingly makes life easier to the detriment of our health. Nicholson’s Joker is obsessed with beauty and myriad ways of destroying it. So, he attacks the self-care industry with his take-over of Axis Chemicals. By using hair spray with deodorant or any other series of combinations of things we put on, or in our bodies every day, we court the rictus smile of death. Cancer. Avoid the amalgam, and possibly you’ll avoid cancer.

Or so, I’ve hoped. For years, I’ve tried to unlock the code of cancer. Why had my father and his mother (whom I never met) died at the same age from it? Would I or my brother have to fear that age? Could we somehow avoid a combination? Avoid Spam in a can and Fritos and Mitchum and Marlboro Lights 100’s and maybe we would live past forty-five years old. Or had Bastrop and its pulp-mill and its run-off of Stink Creek already done its damage? Maybe it was too late to avoid the long reach of Axis Chemicals. My dad and his mother spent most of their lives in Bastrop. Well, my father twenty some-odd years (half his life), and my grandmother probably her whole life. Breathing the toxic cloud that rippled out of those smokestacks, day in and day out. Drinking the water and eating the canned food. My brother and had only lived in Bastrop ten or so years until we moved away. Hopefully that was a minimal amount of time. Hopefully we will avoid the killer smile. Only time will tell.

I’ve wondered over the years if Batman meant anything to me. Some old comic book character in tights and a cape, scaring people at night. A super-hero as a mythical god, but more accessible. A man of the streets, rather than the clouds. But not someone looking to solve the problems of criminality, but to somehow blunt the forces of chaos. In Burton’s film he’s there to figure out a way to minimize the Joker’s damage. He cracks the chemical concoction crippling Gotham. He’s just a loophole against the carnage of the universe. An idea of hope. Fitting that the end happens at a church. Batman as a Holy Redeemer, both savior and silencer. But the Joker has the last laugh, making our hero that much more human. And I guess that’s why people keep coming back to Batman. He’s just an idea.

In the summer of 1989, I was twelve years old, and I wasn’t thinking about how the Joker and his shenanigans were a metaphor for cancer. I wasn’t thinking about metaphors or cancer at all. My dad was still healthy and vibrant. A man with a quick wit and gregarious leanings. For my brother and I, those hot summers in Texas were a favored dream. We spent most of our days in the swimming pool and then in the cold AC reading comic books and eating chips and salsa. Going to Texas Rangers games and taking sips of Turbo Dog and Tecate at Pappasitos and Pappadeaux’s. Dallas is the mecca of chain restaurants and fathers who believe that if their sons can die for their country at eighteen than they can surely have a beer at twelve and fourteen. Sickness and death were not things we were thinking about in those burning days of our youth. We were mesmerized by a big city and our father’s place in it. Two kids who grew up in Bastrop, LA seeing that their father had escaped the yoke of chemical regret, to show them that there was more to the world than tall pine trees and smokestacks. The summer of 1989 was time for all of us to be young and hopeful.

The paper mill in Bastrop is no longer there. International paper shuttered it in 2008. It’s just a huge amount of acreage up for sale now. Waiting for a causal loop of industry to arc back its way. But I don’t think it’s coming any time soon.