I was able to get my notes from Halberstam‘s Queer Art of Failure but I couldn’t do it justice until the proper medium. This movie was a perfect medium to perform this mental autopsy. These are the analysis with quotes I’ve amassed from Halberstam’s book.
(the) Joker is more than just the origin story of a villain, it’s a confrontation with the darker side of humanity, an exploration of what happens when societal norms break down, and an individual is pushed to the margins. Arthur Fleck’s transformation into the Joker is portrayed not simply as a descent into madness but as a rejection of the world’s standards of success and normalcy. Through the analysis of Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, we can see Arthur’s (not The Joker quite yet) journey as an embodiment of queer failure, a defiant stand against the structures that define what it means to be worthy or acceptable.
Alienation
From the opening minutes of Joker, Arthur Fleck’s life is portrayed as a continuous cycle of suffering: emotionally, physically, and psychologically. His uncontrollable laughter on the bus, stemming from a neurological condition, is met with scorn and confusion. This reaction from society is a stark reminder of how quickly those who deviate from the norm are dismissed. Halberstam’s idea that “queerness has been cast as the dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility, and awkwardness” perfectly encapsulates Arthur’s existence. His life is marked by these very traits, his failures are not just personal but are reflections of a society that fails to understand or support those who do not fit into its rigid structures.
“Following Brooks’s aesthetics and Crisp’s advice to adjust to less light rather than seek out more, I propose that one form of queer art has made failure its centerpiece and has cast queerness as the dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility, and awkwardness. Obviously nothing essentially connects gay and lesbian and trans people to these forms of unbeing and unbecoming, but the social and symbolic systems that tether queerness to loss and failure cannot be wished away, some would say, nor should they be.”
Arthur’s experience as an outcast mirrors the way queer identities have historically been tethered to loss and failure. As Halberstam notes, embracing this connection to failure rather than rejecting it is a form of resistance to the mainstream’s demand for positivity and progress. Arthur’s repeated failures and his eventual embrace of his role as the Joker represent a kind of queer defiance, an acceptance of his place outside societal norms and expectations.
Salt
Arthur’s transformation is akin to Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah, as discussed in Halberstam’s reference to Heather Love. Just like Lot’s wife, who becomes a “pillar of salt” by refusing the future offered to her, Arthur is bound by his inability to escape his trauma. His backward gaze constantly reliving the abuse, the neglect, and the indifference of those around him. It solidifies his fate as an outsider, a symbol of destruction. This act of looking back, of refusing to let go of the pain that shaped him, is what ultimately transforms him into the Joker.
“Brassai located these images in a section in his collection titled ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ and labeled them ‘homosexual,’ thinking, obviously, that he had captured a lost and forbidden world of sinful inversion. The title refers to the biblical myth of orgiastic realms selected for destruction in Genesis. Heather Love uses the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah to think about the backward look that Lot’s wife casts while leaving the sinful cities. This look turns her into a pillar of salt: ‘By refusing the destiny that God has offered her, Lot’s wife is cut off from her family and from the future. She becomes a monument to destruction, an emblem of eternal regret.’”
Arthur’s fixation on his suffering and his rejection of societal norms mirrors the act of turning back to embrace the forbidden, the disqualified, and the non-normative. In this way, Arthur’s journey is not just a tragedy but also a critique of the society that created him, a society that, as Halberstam might say, “qualifies and disqualifies, rewards and punishes” based on a rigid code of normalization.
The Queer Art of Failure
Arthur Fleck’s transformation into the Joker is a powerful example of what Halberstam describes as a resistance to “mastery” and the traditional markers of success. Arthur’s life is defined by failure: his failed career as a comedian, his inability to connect with others, his rejection by society. But instead of striving to fit into the mold of capitalist success, Arthur leans into his failures. He rejects the societal expectations that demand productivity, stability, and rationality.
“I would add to their theses the following. First, Resist mastery. Here we might insist upon a critique of the ‘all-encompassing and global theories’ identified by Foucault. In my book this resistance takes the form of investing in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing.”
Halberstam’s idea of failure as a “refusal of mastery” and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing aligns with Arthur’s journey. The Joker’s chaotic laughter, his unpredictable behavior, and his embrace of his role as the ultimate outsider are all acts of defiance against a system that values conformity and success. His transformation is not about becoming powerful in the traditional sense; it’s about disrupting the order, defying the expectations, and embracing an identity that society deems as worthless or deviant.
Antidisciplinary
Drawing on Halberstam’s concept of antidisciplinarity, Arthur’s transformation into the Joker represents a shift away from the structured, disciplined forms of knowledge and power that define Gotham’s elite. His chaotic nature and his rejection of societal norms reflect what Halberstam describes as “undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers.” The Joker embodies a form of knowing that exists outside the bounds of rationality and discipline—a challenge to the “all-encompassing and global theories” that try to impose order on a chaotic world.
“Foucault provides a context for his own antidisciplinary thinking and declares the age of ‘all-encompassing and global theories’ to be over, giving way to the ‘local character of critique’ or ‘something resembling a sort of autonomous and non-centralized theoretical production, or in other words a theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity.’”
Arthur’s laughter, which at first seems like a disability or a flaw, becomes his weapon against the rigidity of society’s expectations. It’s a laughter that doesn’t conform to the Protestant work ethic or the capitalist demands for productivity, it’s a form of resistance that refuses to be normalized or commodified.
Queer Failure
In Halberstam’s view, queerness is often linked to negativity, awkwardness, and the rejection of the polished success narrative. Arthur Fleck’s transformation into the Joker is not just a descent into madness, it’s a deliberate embrace of these traits. His journey aligns with Halberstam’s idea that failure can be a radical act of dissent, a way of refusing to play by society’s rules.
“We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers.”
The Joker’s laughter, now fully detached from any joy or humor, becomes a haunting reminder of what happens when society’s failures are internalized and turned into a force of chaos. His existence is a critique of a world that punishes deviation and enforces conformity. In his refusal to conform, to succeed, or to fit into any prescribed role, Arthur Fleck becomes a queer icon, not in the sense of his sexuality, but in his embodiment of a life that rejects the normative and embraces the subversive.
Embracing
Joker serves as a compelling narrative that ties into Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. Arthur Fleck’s journey is not merely a fall into villainy but a radical rejection of societal norms. His life as the Joker is not about seeking approval, success, or mastery it’s about embracing failure as a form of rebellion. He transforms his pain and alienation into a chaotic force that defies the world’s attempts to control or categorize him.
In Arthur’s laughter, we hear echoes of a queer refusal to fit into the tidy boxes that society constructs. It’s a laughter that mocks the notion of progress and success, a reminder that sometimes the most radical act is not to win but to refuse to play the game at all. In this way, Joker becomes more than a film , it’s a reflection on the power of failure, the limits of societal control, and the potential for chaos to create new possibilities beyond the bounds of the normative.
Joker, 2019: Very Good. Would Recommend
Book recommendation:
The Queer Art of Failure, by Jack Halberstam
Discipline and Punish, by Foucault
Cruising Utopia, by Muñoz
Precarious Life, by Butler
Timeline and comments
Now Watching, the joker
7:50
- I just don't want to feel so bad anymore
- his laughter on the bus. Uncontrollable
- Feel bad for him 2 mins of scene and we got empathy
10
- atmosphere, dark saturation
- Super Rats in the news. Hahahaha
22
- don't you hav to be funny to be a comedian?, ooooof by his mother.
29
- bro brought a gun to a hospital
39
- Thomas Wayne is capitalist as fuck
1:00
- Thomas Wayne calls protesters as clowns, going back to the jester symbology
1:15:00
- severe abuse, never cried. Always laughing instead. Even as a child.
- You really feel bad for this dude. Like damn son.
- ohhhh the love was an illusion, a hallucination.
- Medication withdrawal
- I feel uncomfortable. The laughter, very empathetic acting. 🎭
- I haven't been happy my entire life fuckjg life
- Casually murders mother.
- rip mother.
1:40
- his humor is very similar to the Joker and the comics or the animated series. His jokes doesn't make people laugh. He just laughs. He doesn't produce jokes. He produces laughter and laughter is the only thing that he cares about because he does not have the ability to feel anything else besides laughter.
- It's a very evil type of laugh. It's a very dissociative I think.
- When laughing becomes a visceral reaction towards all forms of emotions and emotional output.
- The laughter of war, the laughter of cynicism and despair? The laughter of so fuck up.
1:47
- the movie is very much a portrayal of what the United States and the world was going through. A decade of discontent between the working class and the 1 percent. Including Wayne enterprise.
- the outsider, the alien, the other, is all symbolized by the jester and joker.
- The joker archetype is used through western media as a form of a divine force of the gods. Randomness, or queer, is a rebellion against the upper class.
- One of the joker wannabes killed Bruvh's dad.
1:50
- the reason the joker is so deviously evil, and scary as one of dc comics most terrifying characters isn't his power, but his mind. His mind being a representation of chaos and anti social behaviors. A force outside of the normative. This is the force that can't be controlled, or disciplined. A force against neoliberalism, or the west, that cannot be controlled trolled. When the mind goes into a level of unbridsl instanjjth, that becomes real.
- you wouldn't get it.
- Literally their mode, their mind and mental model of the world is worped into an endless difference.
- A comparison would be when a person is in an altered state, under the influence of psychedelics, your other selves come out.
The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
Halberstam, Judith
October 8, 2024
Brassai located these images in a section in his collection titled “Sodom and Gomorrah” and labeled them “homosexual,” thinking, obviously, that he had captured a lost and forbidden world of sinful inversion. The title refers to the biblical myth of orgiastic realms selected for destruction in Genesis. Heather Love uses the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah to think about the backward look that Lot’s wife casts while leaving the sinful cities. This look turns her into a pillar of salt: “By refusing the destiny that God has offered her, Lot’s wife is cut off from her family and from the future. She becomes a monument to destruction, an emblem of eternal regret” (2009: 5). Brassai
October 8, 2024
Following Brooks’s aesthetics and Crisp’s advice to adjust to less light rather than seek out more, I propose that one form of queer art has made failure its centerpiece and has cast queerness as the dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility, and awkwardness. Obviously nothing essentially connects gay and lesbian and trans people to these forms of unbeing and unbecoming, but the social and symbolic systems that tether queerness to loss and failure cannot be wished away; some would say, nor should they be. As Lee Edelman, Heather Love, and others have argued, to simply repudiate the connections between queer- ness and negativity is to commit to an unbearably positivist and progressive understanding of the queer, one that results in the perky depictions of lesbians in The L Word or the reduction of gay men in film and on TV to impossibly good-looking arbiters of taste.
October 8, 2024
In this witty refusal of the dogged Protestant work ethic Crisp makes the crucial link between failure and style and, in his own effeminate persona, embodies that link as gender trouble, gender deviance, gender variance. For
October 8, 2024
And so in The L Word we see that in order to make “lesbians” appealing to men and straight women, the specific features which have stereotypically connoted lesbian in the past—masculine appearance and interests and jobs—must be blotted out to provide a free channel for commodifi cation. Indeed commodifi cation as a process depends completely upon a heteronormative set of visual and erotic expectations.
October 8, 2024
It certainly requires what some have called oppositional pedagogies. In pursuit of such pedagogies we must realize that, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once said, ignorance is “as potent and multiple a thing as knowledge” and that learning often takes place completely independently of teaching (1991: 4).
October 8, 2024
I would add to their theses the following. First, Resist mastery. Here we might insist upon a critique of the “all-encompassing and global theories” identified by Foucault. In my book this resistance takes the form of investing in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing.
October 8, 2024
These forms of knowledge have not simply been lost or forgotten; they have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical or nonconceptual or “insufficiently elaborated.” Foucault calls them “naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity” (7)—this is what we mean by knowledge from below.
October 8, 2024
Foucault provides a context for his own antidisciplinary thinking and declares the age of “all-encompassing and global theories” to be over, giving way to the “local character of critique” or “something resembling a sort of autonomous and non-centralized theoretical production, or in other words a theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity” (6). These
October 8, 2024
Disciplines qualify and disqualify, legitimate and delegitimate, reward and punish; most important, they statically reproduce themselves and inhibit dissent. As Foucault writes, “Disciplines will define not a code of law, but a code of normalization” (2003: 38)
October 8, 2024
We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers.
October 8, 2024
it also points to an argument for antidisciplinarity in the sense that knowledge practices that refuse both the form and the content of traditional canons may lead to unbounded forms of speculation, modes of thinking that ally not with rigor and order but with inspiration and unpredictability