Stop clowning around

Clowns are becoming more prominent in popular culture, and that’s bad news.

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of the psychopathic clown, a new archetype of horror in North American popular culture. Batman's arch-nemesis The Joker and Rob Zombie's blood-soaked Captain Spaulding are classic examples of this trend. These creatures occasionally seem to step out of our fantasies and into our waking reality. Consider John Wayne Gacy, an American serial killer who raped and murdered thirty-three young men and boys between 1972 and his capture in 1978. Gacy often performed for children as an amateur clown at block parties in his community, and he enjoyed painting portraits of clowns during his stay on Death Row. "A clown," Gacy once said, "can get away with murder." The fear of clowns has become widespread enough to warrant giving it the diagnostic label "coulrophobia". It seems that when Bart Simpson moaned, "Can't sleep, clown will eat me," many viewers knew exactly what he was talking about. Psychopathic clowns have achieved a mythic status in our cultural zeitgeist, and what they mythologize is the relationship between humiliation and sadism, a relationship that too often structures our religious imagination, as most clearly seen in the case of Christian Fundamentalism in the USA.

Just as vampires are driven by trauma and hunger, psychopathic clowns are driven by extremes of humiliation and hatred. In Alan Moore's acclaimed graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), we learn that The Joker lost his mind only after suffering a series of humiliating and devastating losses. In House of 1,000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil's Rejects (2005), Captain Spaulding is depicted as the Satanic patriarch of a socially despised hillbilly clan. This pattern isn't surprising; after all, clowns are supposed to be targets of ridicule and agents of mockery, qualities that storytellers can easily magnify to pathological proportions.

In stories about psychopathic clowns, humiliation is often a form of diabolical revelation. Through humiliation, the clown's mind is opened up to the demonic face of the divine. The clown encounters the God of jealously and genocide, of madness and the macabre. This is God's shadow-side, a side well-documented in Jonathon Kirsch's book, God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism (Viking, 2004). Kirsch argues that according to the founding myths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God's emotional life isn't governed primarily by love or mercy, but rather by a particular type of rage. God is depicted, over and over again, as a cuckolded husband whose "beloved" people have humiliated him by "whoring" after other gods. The myths of the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Armageddon, and Hell show that no punishment is too bizarre or horrible for God to inflict upon the "unfaithful." His followers often inflict these torments on living flesh, as witnessed by monotheism’s history of religious wars and persecutions.

There are Buddhists who believe that the ego is psychological scar tissue. Just as a physical scar is a crude and inflexible system of cells that defends damaged tissue from further physical insult, the ego is a crude and inflexible system of mental habits designed to defend a damaged (though ultimately illusory) self from further psychological insult. The ego therefore seethes with humiliation and vengefulness. If God is the ego writ large, then God must embody these unfortunate attributes. Stories of psychopathic clowns are so effective because they draw upon this mythological reservoir. Through profound abasement, the wicked clown's ego harmonizes with the cosmic ego, turning the clown into a caricature of God. The psychopathic clown then starts aping God in the same way that court fools aped their medieval kings.

These speculations have relevance outside of the narrow confines of the horror genre. Many American Christian fundamentalists appear to worship a "jealous" and "wrathful" God. They also seem obsessed with the humiliations secular society supposedly subjects them to, the policies they support are quite sadistic, and their histrionic televangelists, with their make-up and heavily-sprayed hair, certainly look like deranged clowns to those outside the fold.

To understand fundamentalism, it helps to examine the subtext underlying stories about psychopathic clowns. If the "divine" refers to ultimate reality—that is, to the reality underlying and transcending human perceptions and concepts—then the divine often tears us to shreds. Because the universe doesn't cater to our wishes, pride and hope are forever accompanied by shame and despair. The tighter we cling to our egos, the more humiliated and angry we become, and the more suffering we create for either ourselves or others. If we project our own egos onto the universe, we'll inevitably project these qualities as well as our more virtuous features. If, in polytheistic fashion, we project a multitude of egos onto the universe, then there's some hope of dividing these qualities among a host of characters and thereby mitigating their destructive power. If, however, we project a single ego onto the universe, then we'll end up creating an omnipotent maniac and condemning ourselves to the cruelties inside His Big Top.

As a third option, we can refrain from saddling the universe with any ego at all. Although this might sound atheistic, Karen Armstrong, in A History of God: The 4000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), demonstrates that this last option has been endorsed by philosophers and mystics in each of the major monotheistic traditions. The most sophisticated expressions of monotheism refer to an egoless Godhead rather than an egoic God; that is, they refer to the divine ground of being” rather than to a divine ruler of the cosmos. The term "Godhead" is similar in meaning to "the Tao" and the "Buddha-Nature." It doesn't have a personality because it's not a person. It doesn't "intervene" in the workings of the universe because it is the universe. We are children of the Godhead in the same way all things, from the bacteria in a cockroach's kiss to the thermonuclear reactions in the sun, are children of the Godhead. All phenomena, even our dreams and nightmares, are finite expressions of the infinite, and all partake of infinity’s glory.

We perceive the Godhead to the degree that we relinquish the ego and its projections. The more we’re humiliated, the harder this becomes. The widening gap between the rich and the poor, the disappearance of the middle class, the weakening of the labour movement, and the abandonment of the working class by left-of-centre political parties creates an intensely humiliating environment for the majority of people. Fundamentalism thrives in such a psychologically toxic setting, smearing greasepaint over grieving faces and stretching grimaces into artificial smiles. Coulrophobics beware: the circus is coming to town.

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