The Honors Platform
Vol I, Issue I, Spring 2013 44
psychiatric hospitals on the mentally ill. One study of 35 mental hospitals by psychiatrist Dr. Lucy Ozarin led her to the conclusion that “much of the pathological behavior of the patients is a result of their hospital experience rather than the manifestation of the mental illness” (Wallace 9). This observation supports the theory that The Joker’s time spent in Arkham Asylum serves only to make him more ruthless, essentially fueling his criminal activity and allowing his super-sanity to thrive. If Ozarin’s observation proves true for the rest of the criminally insane housed in Arkham, The Joker not only draws from them, but potentially knowingly contributes to their psychosis. This behavior would create ideal conditions for an escape or at least serve as a distraction for The Joker in the future. Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is set ten years after Batman’s last sighting, signaling a stop to fighting. Interestingly enough, The Joker has also been lodged successfully in Arkham Asylum for a decade. This comic shows The Joker having manipulated a psychiatrist into finally releasing him under the pretense of blaming Batman for The Joker’s actions, pegging him as “a victim of Batman’s psychosis” (Miller 126). Reclassifying The Joker’s crimes as an outcome of Batman’s insanity has its own advantages, as the psychiatrist responsible for this realization exhibits The Joker to the world, bringing him onto a talk show to discuss the psychiatrist’s new findings. This goes according to the Joker’s plan, as he now can commit a great mass murder (Miller 129). Having spent 10 years in the isolation of Arkham means he distanced himself further from his victims. At this point, The Joker doesn’t recognize people as individuals with lives, but, as he observes backstage of the talk show, “so many faces—so different from one another…so few smiles” (Miller 125). He has completely detached from humanity, indulging others in conversation as one would indulge an ant before stepping on it. The beautiful irony of it all, and that which the asylum psychiatrist didn’t understand, is that asylum life fostered The Joker’s super-sanity, allowing him to create an identity capable of planning something as elaborate as a legal release from Arkham. The environment of a mental hospital could drive any sane man to irrationality, as, observed by Eugene Talbot and Stuart Miller, “deviancy is normal and normality is deviant, so a patient entering the hospital is encouraged further to succumb to deviancy” (Wallace 132). With such an observation, one cannot help to think about how The Joker’s mental state is affected in such an environment. To reiterate, he is not insane, but neither is he sane, functioning under a super-sanity with which he sees his actions and their consequences as a thirdparty, accounting for their horror and doing them anyway. Isolated and driven further inward, The Joker lost