The Joker’s Origin && Her Relationship with Batman
A lot of people ask me about my thoughts on who the Joker was before she was the Joker, and my answer to that is twofold: Firstly, I think what people want out of this question is to unmask Joker, to reveal her humanity in a way that would take power away from the idea of the Joker, which is the reason V never removes his mask in V for Vendetta– you can’t kill an idea. Ideas are bulletproof. Secondly, I understand that in a superhero genre it’s customary to have a secret identity, but given Joker’s retrograde amnesia, she’s been essentially robbed of hers. She doesn’t know who she was before she was the Joker, which renders that entire personhood ultimately irrelevant to her as she is now. Subsequently, I’m disinterested in revealing any ideas I have regarding whomever Joker used to be before she was Joker.
The Joker was born like Athena, fully grown and aware of the world. She came into existence in a vat of mystery acid in an Ace Chemical plant, and her first memory is being fished out of this vat by the Batman– which, without context, is kind of a terrifying first memory. She doesn’t remember it well. Her first clear memory is waking up in the hospital. No one was able to identify her or explain how she came to be in Ace Chemical, and obviously Batman isn’t available for comment. I’ve written a separate but relevant headcanon previously about Joker having toxic encephalopathy resulting in various symptoms and health problems, all of which she was experiencing acutely in the hospital while doctors asked her a million questions she had no answers to. She has no idea who she is, where she lives, or who her emergency contact is.
Following an arduous recovery, the hospital releases her with anti-seizure meds and a huge medical bill. Joker has no identity, no money, no place to go, and no one to turn to. From the second she left that hospital, she was homeless and in tremendous debt. Not only that, but she was obviously bleached, and her albino-like appearance was extremely off-putting for others, making it difficult for her to make friends or form allies. Life in Gotham has never been easy, even if you’re the Waynes, you could get shot point blank outside the opera house, so for a homeless outcast, life was intense, merciless, and increasingly violent. In order to survive, Joker had to toughen up and toughen up quickly.
One can see direct parallels between Joker’s general psychology and this time period in her life: the all-importance of power and control, the unwillingness to ever be a victim again or to be powerless or at someone else’s mercy, and the idea that she owes the world nothing. Joker learned to fight and steal when the stakes were basically to learn this and learn it well, or you go hungry and can’t defend yourself. All the while, she’s increasingly isolated and coping with brain damage, so she’s strongly motivated to apply all of her intelligence and ruthlessness toward becoming an accomplished criminal and manipulating others into helping her. As soon as she makes any headway, she starts hearing about a masked vigilante called the Batman who is beating the shit out of anyone trying to commit crime in Gotham City.
Joker knows that she is supposed to fear Batman, she’s aware that others fear him and that she should fear being caught by him, and she resents the hell out of this, just as she resents any fear in general (or any other emotion that attempts to control her). The stronger she becomes, the more traction she gets in the criminal world, the more settled she is in her new identity– that of the Joker, in which she uses her physical deformity to channel fear in others, and also uses it as a tool to help others underestimate her. She is building this concept from nothing, and sees Batman as her only link to a past she doesn’t know or understand, which is extremely disturbing to her. She knows she literally would not exist if he hadn’t pulled her out of that acid bath, but she also has no context or explanation for that memory. Furthermore, she’s afraid to even ask about it (although she would never admit it) because she’s afraid to know who she was before she became the Joker. There is an identity crisis there where the thought of being someone else before being the Joker directly threatens her current sense of identity and self because she is only able to build the concept of the Joker specifically because she lacks any societal ties (no family, no teachers, no friends), and therefore has nothing anchoring her to reality.
This means that Joker’s first connection with Batman is one based in fear: the fear that Batman represents, the threat to herself and others like her, and the fear of herself and her true identity. Confronting Batman is a surrogate for confronting Joker’s fears, and in that confrontation, she finds something that she can respect: another psycho acting out of the courage of his own convictions. The more he doubles down on his pseudo-noble nonsensical bullshit, the more Joker wants to challenge and derail those beliefs, to see how tightly he holds onto them. If he had buckled and realized his own folly, she could have dismissed him outright, but it is his firm belief that what he is doing is not only necessary but compulsory that really fascinates Joker. She respects his commitment and therefore sees him as the only real force in Gotham City to contend with, the only real equal she has.
Secondarily to his ties to her identity-related fears, Joker also recognizes that Batman essentially birthed her, and therefore blames him for her own pain-filled existence– which is reason number two that she would never let him die, and why she would certainly never kill Batman herself. She wants to punish him for bringing her into the world and for simultaneously making it impossible to live through his crusade to fight the disenfranchised for just trying to get by however they can, and on a more personal level constantly getting in her way. Letting Batman die at any given time would still be too quick for Joker because her goal is to inflict the maximum possible amount of pain on him, to torture him slowly. To her, death would be an escape she can never allow him. So long as she has to live her own tortured existence, so must the Batman. For her, it is a kind of suicide pact, or perhaps even the opposite of that.
