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.

The full essay continues in the Membership Archive, where Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son and the Joker become a reflection on violence, madness and what happens when darkness consumes the self.