Remember? Ooh, I wouldn’t do that! Remembering’s dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place. “The past tense,” I suppose you’d call it. Ha ha ha. Memory’s so treacherous. One moment you’re lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candy floss… The next, it leads you somewhere you don’t want to go. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp, ambiguous shapes of things you’d hoped were forgotten.

I completely understand why some people may object to the new Joker movie, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips. On some level, you might argue that it legitimizes or justifies unacceptable incel behavior. But, I’m not here to provide a movie review today. Rather, it’s more about the lessons we can learn from a certifiably insane character like the Joker.

While the new Joker movie is a new story, it borrows inspiration from several past works. Notably, we can draw several parallels between the new film and Batman: The Killing Joke, a graphic novel first published in 1988. It’s also worth noting that Alan Moore wrote The Killing Joke; he’s the same man responsible for Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Seriously dense and thought-provoking work.

In the passage above, the Joker explains to Commissioner Gordon why our relationship to the past can be so troubling. We may view some memories through rose-tinted glasses, only to blindsided by a horrific memory, something you’ve long since tried to forget.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently said, “We are prisoners of the present, in perpetual transition from an inaccessible past to an unknowable future.” It’s true. Until we figure how how to travel through time, we are perpetually “stuck” in the present. There is nothing but the present, though we can certainly learn from the past and plan for the future.

Memory can indeed be “treacherous.” We all have skeletons in our closets we’d rather keep buried, past transgressions we’d rather never happened. But, for better or for worse, a lot of who we are today is the product of who we were and what we’ve experienced in the past. You are not your past, but you also cannot escape your past.

So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly certain I don’t want to activate that option. I don’t think I’d do very well in Arkham.