The Joker’s charisma depends on refusing any origin story or interior motive.

Evidence

The Joker was always fascinating because, unlike most if not all big-time supervillains, he was pure surface, motiveless madness, devoid of any origin or backstory — until Moore obligingly filled one in, as is his hamfisted pseudo-literary wont. There are a couple of great scenes in The Dark Knight where Ledger’s Joker mocks cod psychoanalytic reduction: “See these scars… I got them because of my father.” “See these scars… I got them because of my wife.” (This reminded me of nothing so much as Ian Bannen’s chilling burst of explosive laughter in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, in response to Sean Connery’s question: “Was your father a big man?”) If The Joker aligns himself with anything it is “the freak”, which cannot but remind us of freak events, that is, events which appear to happen without proper causation. By evacuating The Joker of all interiority, by refusing anything which would contain the Joker’s wildness or compromise the autonomy of his face-painted persona, Ledger’s performance (and Jonathan Nolan’s script) do justice to the freakish. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 578

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes ch10 on the surface over depth, and ch21’s schizo-narration which voids interiority; connects to Fisher’s persistent anti-psychoanalytic-reduction stance.
• CANDY: The freak-coinage link — ‘freak’ joining unpresentable persona with events lacking proper causation — is a compact conversational nugget.