by Chris Feil
By now the grim discourse surrounding the arrival of a new version of the beloved Joker feels like a ceaseless, depressing spiral. In the years since Heath Ledger’s genius and revolutionary take on the character, the social context for the clown terrorist has only gotten darker. After a tattoo and grill-clad iteration in Suicide Squad to now Joaquin Pheonix’s take that hews closer to the unwell men who find inspiration in the character in our isolative online era, we seem to be losing the character’s sense of fun in every conceivable way. This franchise needs an enema [kazoo sound]!
The mad balance between Joker’s violence and vibrancy is so skewed, it feels like we need to bring back a different kind of extremity. Like the kind that accompanied Jack Nicholson’s version, that hasn’t gotten its fair share of side-eye. I’m talking about the technicolor earnestness of Prince’s Batman concept album.
However you could still argue that this Prince tie-in, another part of Warner Bros. groundbreakingly massive marketing push for Tim Burton’s first take, was just a different kind of corporate cynicism. When Batmania struck prior to the 1989 release, the merchandising and promotional blitzkrieg was unavoidable, and here Warners enlisted their biggest music artist for the cross-media impact. Clearly, they wanted to recreate those Purple Rain dollars, even if the pairing of Burton to Prince otherwise makes no sense. But it’s perhaps exactly the kind of chaotic energy to serve the Joker. And it feels like comparatively forgivable capitalistic cynicism.
In all of the gauche excess of the album, both artistically and for its mere cross-promotional existence, Prince actually adopts more of the Joker’s persona than Batman’s, despite the album title. Or at least his more mischievous side, without the specter of violence. It’s an album that invokes cityscapes and a heavy dose of sleaze, almost like an assemblage of propaganda tunes for when Nicholson’s Joker eventually deceives the citizens of Gotham. Burton scarcely uses the Prince tracks (aside from the closing credits sending the audience home in a cascade of ironic sexiness with “Scandalous”), but when he does, it is to serve this exact purpose - like the float scene set to “Trust”.
If nothing else, aligning Prince’s musical buoyancy almost exclusively to the Joker in Burton’s dark vision only further underlines the balance that Nicholson walks. His Joker is both hilarious and terrifying, the two traits symbiotically keeping us on edge whenever he is around. He doesn’t just enact physical violence, but comedic violence. Take the museum “Partyman” sequence, where he and his gang deface priceless art with neon wit after gassing everyone in the room, only to prey on Vicki Vale. We’re sucked into the groove of the song as we are the appeal of his evil humor, only to be confronted with his less amusing viciousness when the song cuts out.
The album remains one of the strangest pop cultural artifacts, one that’s corporate strong-arming still doesn’t diminish its sincere good-time fun. It may be the cheesiest thing about Burton’s straightfaced vision (though Prince was certainly not his idea), but why have we forgotten that the Joker also likes cheesiness with his anarchy? Or more simply, in reassessing this sometimes maligned soundtrack: why so serious?
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