An Outcast’s Identity Is No Joke: the Myth of Sisyphus in Joker

Abstract

Mental illnesses, in their dyadic nature as entities in a liminal space between medically defined pathologies and cultural representations, are often too obscure and abstract to be properly defined. Most often, even, those pathologies as understood by the medical community differ wildly from the mythical representations thereof in society. This article explains why and how those terms are recurrently misused when mass media try to diagnose literary and film characters in a pathologizing process, and why analyzing characters through a cultural, mythocritical and psychoanalytical lens is more appropriate. These ideas are expounded and practiced with the analysis of Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019), and how its protagonist, Arthur Fleck, can be read as a revisitation of Albert Camus’s Sisyphus in his The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which informs the main character’s katabasis, or descent into the depths of society and his own psyche in a quest for identity.

Keywords

• joker
• myth of sisyphus
• psychopathy
• process of individuation
• identity
• outcasts.