The Joker and Goya’s Saturn

By Theresa Rézeau Villains in popular culture are usually driven by recognisable desires: power, revenge, domination or wealth. The Joker in The Dark Knight wants something stranger. He wants revelation. His ambition is not simply to rule Gotham or enrich himself, but to expose the city and prove that beneath its laws, institutions and declarations of morality lies something far less stable. Almost two centuries earlier, Francisco Goya painted a god devouring his own child. The subject came from ancient mythology, but Goya stripped it of heroic distance and transformed it into something closer to nightmare. Francisco Goya (1746–1828), the Spanish painter who had witnessed war, political upheaval and profound changes in his country, created Saturn Devouring His Son between approximately 1820 and 1823. It belonged to the fourteen works now known as the Black Paintings, painted directly onto the walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo, outside Madrid. These were private images rather than public commissions and were transferred to canvas decades later. Today, Saturn hangs in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. The image remains difficult to look at. Saturn emerges from darkness gripping the mutilated body of one of his children. His eyes are wide, his fingers press into flesh and his mouth meets the body he is consuming. There is none of the classical dignity that might place the horror at a safe historical distance. In the Roman version of the ancient myth, Saturn devours his children because he fears being overthrown by them. Goya reduces that mythology to its terrifying psychological core: power becomes frightened of its own future and attempts to consume it. The Joker would understand the logic. In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), violence repeatedly becomes a form of experiment. The Joker does not merely want people dead. Again and again, he constructs situations in which people are forced to reveal something about themselves. He targets institutions and symbols precisely because their destruction can demonstrate more than the death of an individual. His argument is that morality is conditional, civilisation is fragile and sufficient pressure will expose what people are really capable of doing. Harvey Dent is therefore irresistible to him. Dent is Gotham’s White Knight, the public face of lawful reform and the alternative to Batman’s masked vigilantism. He represents the possibility that justice might operate openly and legitimately. Destroying a corrupt man would prove very little; breaking a good one could prove much more. After Rachel Dawes is killed and Dent is horribly injured, grief and rage begin transforming him into Two-Face. The man who once represented justice eventually allows chance to determine life and death through the toss of a coin. The Joker appears to have proved his point: apply enough pressure and principle can fracture. This is where Goya’s Saturn and Nolan’s Joker begin to resemble one another. Both inhabit worlds in which fear destabilises order. Saturn possesses immense power, yet his actions arise from terror at the possibility of losing it. The horror of Goya’s image lies partly in that contradiction. The figure capable of destroying another body is himself governed by fear. The Joker applies fear differently. Rather than being consumed by it, he manufactures it in others. He removes safety and certainty, places people inside situations where consequences become immediate, and waits to see what they will do. He presents himself as someone who has escaped society’s illusions, although the film never gives us reason to treat his account of himself as reliable. Even the stories he tells about the origins of his scars change. His philosophy reaches its clearest expression not through Batman or Harvey Dent, but through two ferries. One carries civilians and the other prisoners. The Joker has rigged both vessels with explosives and tells their passengers that each boat possesses the detonator capable of destroying the other. If neither acts, he threatens to destroy them both. The proposition is brutally simple: survival can be purchased through somebody else’s death. Saturn has already accepted that bargain. He destroys his children because their existence threatens his own position. On the ferries, the Joker offers ordinary people a version of the same logic. Destroy the other group before they destroy you. The civilians debate whether they should detonate the prisoners’ boat. A vote is taken. Fear, suspicion and self-preservation enter the discussion. On the other ferry, a prisoner takes possession of the detonator and appears capable of making the decision himself. Everything seems ready for the Joker’s thesis to be confirmed. Neither boat destroys the other. This is the point at which The Dark Knight becomes more interesting than the proposition that the Joker is simply correct about humanity. The film could easily have made him its secret truth-teller, a villain whose methods are monstrous but whose diagnosis proves accurate. Instead, the ferry experiment produces evidence against his certainty. Human beings can fracture under pressure; Harvey Dent does. The passengers reveal another possibility. They experience fear without allowing fear to determine the final act. The Joker understands something real about human vulnerability, but mistakes vulnerability for inevitability. Goya offers no comparable interruption. Saturn remains suspended inside the act of consumption. There is no second figure reaching for his hand and no witness intervening. By the time we encounter the image, the moral decision has already been made and the future is being eaten. Yet Goya also makes Saturn’s power look strangely pathetic. The god is enormous in relation to the mutilated body he holds, but nothing about him appears secure. His eyes do not communicate the serenity of authority and his posture is frantic. He possesses power and remains terrified of losing it. The contradiction reaches beyond mythology. Power frequently presents itself through displays of certainty: institutions, laws, monuments and rituals of authority. Yet the desperation to preserve power can reveal how insecure power actually feels. Saturn destroys what threatens his future and, in doing so, allows fear to govern his present. The Joker approaches power from the opposite direction. He claims little interest in conventional authority. What fascinates him is the possibility of proving that everyone else is governed by forces they pretend to have mastered. He wants Gotham to see itself without its preferred illusions, which makes him less a conventional conqueror than a provocateur of collapse. If people can be persuaded to stop believing in justice, institutions and one another, destruction can continue without him. Harvey Dent appears to confirm that philosophy, while the ferries contradict it. Batman occupies the uncomfortable space between them. By the end of the film, Dent has committed murder, threatening not only his own reputation but the public ideal Gotham has constructed around him. Batman and Commissioner Gordon respond by concealing the truth. Batman accepts responsibility for Dent’s crimes and disappears into the role of villain so that the image of the White Knight can remain intact. Visually, this places him almost opposite Goya’s Saturn. Goya drags horror into visibility. The mutilated body is illuminated against the darkness; nothing about the act of devouring is permitted to hide. Batman moves in the other direction. He takes what Gotham cannot bear to see and carries it back into darkness. The choice is morally compromised because public hope is preserved through deception. Yet the direction of sacrifice has reversed. Saturn destroys another life to preserve himself; Batman allows his own public identity to be destroyed in an attempt to preserve something beyond himself. He devours his own legend. Goya exposes the monster. Nolan asks what happens when someone chooses to wear its image. This is why Goya’s painting and Nolan’s film belong together more deeply than their darkness initially suggests. Both ask what fear reveals about power, but their answers diverge at the moment when destruction becomes possible. Goya created the Black Paintings after living through extraordinary political and social upheaval, including the violence of the Peninsular War. Yet the paintings resist simple explanation, and Saturn should not be reduced to a single political allegory. Its terror reaches beyond any particular historical event because it gives physical form to an ancient human anxiety: the fear that what comes after us will eventually replace us. Every future contains, in some form, the disappearance of the present. Children succeed parents, generations replace generations and ideas overturn those that preceded them. Saturn cannot tolerate that knowledge, so he attempts the impossible by trying to consume succession itself. The Joker conducts a related experiment. He wants to demonstrate that civilisation merely restrains what human beings truly are and that sufficient fear will make them destroy others in order to preserve themselves. The ferries place that proposition before ordinary people without allowing a superhero or institution to make the decision for them. They are given the opportunity to survive through another group’s destruction, and they refuse. The ferry scene offers no grand verdict on human goodness. Gotham has already shown too much cruelty for that. Its significance lies in the brief interval between fear and action, when people who have every reason to protect themselves still retain the capacity to decide what they will not do. Goya denies us that interval. Saturn is already eating. We arrive after fear has become violence, whereas Nolan allows us to remain in the preceding moment: the hand near the detonator, self-preservation offering its justification, another person’s destruction appearing to provide an escape. Then the hand withdraws. The distance between civilisation and collapse may sometimes occupy precisely that space. Fear remains present. Self-interest remains persuasive. The possibility of violence does not disappear. What changes is the decision made before possibility becomes action. Goya leaves Saturn forever inside the darkness of his appetite, attempting to preserve himself by destroying what comes next. The Joker tries to persuade Gotham to do the same, but for a moment two boats floating in darkness are given the opportunity to accept his logic and refuse it. Maybe that is where the distance between Saturn and Gotham finally opens: the refusal to finish the meal, and the choice to let the future live.

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