By Mackenzie Bryan
William Chavez, a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, has studied exorcism, dark fantasy and science fiction. Currently an Engaging Humanities Graduate Fellow at UCSB, he has been exploring terrorism’s links to nihilism – an absence of morals, values or beliefs - and how both are incorporated into the Joker, a fictional supervillain created in the 1940s for the comic book Batman.
After two years of research and writing, Chavez and Luke McCracken, another Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies Department, recently published an article in the Journal of Religion and Film: “He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, and Jokers.
William Chavez, UCSB Religious Studies doctoral candidate, in a T-shirt depicting a 1973 Batman comic.
In a virtual interview, Chavez discussed the difficulties and triumphs involved in creating and publishing their piece, at the intersection of film and religious studies.
Q: What sparked the idea for this article?
A: In March 2018, I read Olivier Roy’s Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State. This observation, that radical nihilism need not stem from political and religious ideologies, planted a seed in my mind for a future project on domestic terrorism, for which Roy expertly paves the way given his discussion of the Columbine High School shooters.
Q: How did you and your colleague decide to work on this together?
A: Fast-forward to Friday, Oct. 4, 2019, after seeing the Joker film on opening day I sent a text to my friend and colleague, Luke McCracken: ‘Go see Joker.’ Luke studies death, nihilism, and unhappiness, all of which are key components of the film. Luke goes to see it and on Monday, texts me that he thought the movie offered a rich commentary, not just on nihilism but the subjects of capitalism and mental health service. I pitched him the idea of doing a co-authored project. He would bring the philosophical expertise regarding nihilism and I the pop culture analysis of the Joker, as well as a larger contextualization of the film’s place within the study of American culture.
Q: Why did you focus on this film, which was criticized by some as too sympathetic to the villain?
A: What are our cultural conditions such that we fear the Joker as a concrete possibility in our society? This question motivated the entire article. To us, this is the Joker’s legacy. A fictional comic book villain has become so realistic that he presumably has the power to corrupt his viewers via the nihilistic path to madness to radicalize the impressionable into terrorists. Ultimately, this is perceived as bearing responsibility for their acts of self-destruction and social mayhem.
The recent film inspires audiences both to empathize with the Joker’s mundane plight and to fear his radicalization. His narrative of psychological degeneration and eventual recourse to violence represents a possible and regrettably familiar outworking of actual contemporary conditions.
Materials used by Religious Studies doctoral candidate William Chavez to write his recently published article “He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, and Jokers.
Q: Did the Isla Vista mass shooting tragedy in 2014 play a role in your piece?
A: The 2014 Isla Vista killings were always in the forefront of our minds when writing this article. In addition to the fictional villains that saturate Western popular culture, we felt as if we were writing about another type of stock character. A real-life supervillain called Lone Wolf. In the same way that the Joker is regularly deconstructed and reconstructed in films, comics, and video games, producing several iterations of the same character, we wanted to present ‘lone wolf’ terrorists as continuing iterations of criminality and resistance to institutional power. Such terrorists find recourse in philosophizing through socially destructive means. The resentful— those we studied and whatever future iterations they inspire— attempt to disrupt the ideological market through terroristic entrepreneurship. And we fear their mass appeal.
Mackenzie Bryan is a third-year communication major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this article for the Writing Program course Journalism for Web and Social Media.