ADULTS ONLY

 recently read something about Heath Ledger’s journal while he was preparing to play the Joker in The Dark Knight.

There was a post on Instagram showing pages from it—images, scribbled thoughts, disturbing references, fragments of things he was apparently studying while trying to crawl inside the head of Gotham’s most maniacal villain.

It was fascinating.

It was also fucking dark.

First off, I should establish that I’m partial to Jack Nicholson’s Joker.

Picture five-year-old Jamie with undiagnosed ADHD watching an evil, sarcastic clown dressed in purple and neon green parade around Gotham with a bunch of goons, destroying everything in his path, laughing hysterically and trying to murder the hero while Prince provides the soundtrack.

“Partyman! Partyman!”

Of course I loved him.

That’s basically the story of my twenties and thirties.

I was going to say “with better wardrobe choices,” but Time Out Chicago once happened to be at Subterranean’s hip-hop night on a Tuesday and voted me worst dressed, so apparently not.

Jack Napier’s monster and I may have had more in common than I’d like to admit.

The original Tim Burton Batman somehow gets better every time I watch it. Now I watch it with my own five-year-old son, which is a strange full-circle moment. He’s more partial to Batman: The Animated Series.

Not a bad choice.

The kid has taste.

But Heath Ledger’s Joker was something entirely different.

Nicholson’s Joker seemed like he was having the time of his life.

Ledger’s looked like he hadn’t slept in six months.

He was terrifying because there was no wink.

There was no cartoonish master plan.

He didn’t want the money. He proved that pretty definitively when he set a mountain of the mob’s cash on fire.

He didn’t really seem to want power either.

He wanted to prove something.

That underneath all the rules and manners and jobs and mortgages and school drop-offs, everybody was potentially just as fucked up as he was.

All they needed was a little push.

Michael Caine’s Alfred explains the Joker better than anyone else ever could:

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

That line always stuck with me.

Probably because, in retrospect, it was a fairly accurate mission statement for my twenties and most of my thirties.

I wasn’t trying to take over Gotham.

I didn’t have a philosophical objection to organized society.

As I’ve said before, I just really liked fire.

Metaphorically.

Usually.

There were years when destruction didn’t need an objective. Chaos didn’t have to accomplish anything. Sometimes the fact that something could go completely off the rails was enough reason for me to give it a gentle shove and see what happened.

Why?

Fuck if I know.

Entertainment?

Adrenaline?

Self-loathing?

Undiagnosed mental health issues?

Substances?

An apparently lifelong commitment to making tomorrow morning significantly more difficult than it needed to be?

Probably some combination of all of them.

But I understand the impulse.

Sometimes you don’t want the money.

Sometimes you don’t want the power.

Sometimes you just want to see the pile burn.

That was the part of Ledger’s journal that sent me down a different rabbit hole.

There’s been plenty written and speculated about his preparation for the role and his mental state around that period, and I’m not interested in pretending I know what happened inside the head of a man I never met.

I don’t.

But I understand the impulse to go looking for darkness when you’re making something.

I do it constantly.

I paint macabre shit.

I take memories I spent years trying to bury and drag them back upstairs because suddenly they might look good on a ten-foot canvas.

Which, when you say it out loud, is a fairly bizarre occupation.

“Hey, how was work today?”

“Great. Revisited some deeply unpleasant shit from 2019 and painted a dancing skeleton over it with a fetal pig dissection cross-section underneath.”

“Wonderful. What do you want for dinner? Chicken or, uhhhh… chicken?”

But that’s art.

At least my version of it.

It raises a question I’ve become increasingly fascinated by:

Are dark thoughts something certain people have more than others?

Or do we all have them and most people are just smart enough not to give them a microphone—or, in my case, a paintbrush?

Maybe the difference isn’t having darkness.

Maybe the difference is what you do with it.

Because there are thoughts that come into the human brain that don’t deserve a soapbox.

They don’t require analysis.

They don’t need to become part of your identity.

Sometimes your brain throws something horrible across the screen and the appropriate response is basically:

Well, that was fucking weird.

And continue unloading the dishwasher.

But artists are terrible at that.

We see the weird thought and go:

Hold on.

Come back.

What was that?

Let’s put some lighting on it.

Maybe add music.

I spent twenty years producing music and now I paint, and creativity has always required me to wander into the back of the video store in my head—the section behind the curtain that explicitly says:

ADULTS ONLY.

The problem is, I spent years living back there.

That’s different.

There’s a difference between visiting Arkham and signing a lease there.

I know that difference now.

I didn’t always.

For a long time, chaos wasn’t something I studied.

Chaos was my personality.

I worshipped unpredictability.

I thought self-destruction was interesting.

I confused instability with creativity and recklessness with freedom, all while saying “fuck everyone” both literally and figuratively.

That was basically my mantra.

If something felt dangerous, inappropriate, excessive or completely unnecessary, there was a decent chance I wanted to see what happened next.

Turns out what happened next was usually expensive.

Sometimes medically concerning.

Occasionally required an apology.

And eventually required rehab.

One of my biggest fears when I got sober was that fixing myself would ruin me.

Take away the drugs.

Take away the alcohol.

Let the SSRIs start doing their job.

Stabilize the brain chemistry.

What would be left?

I genuinely worried I was going to become one of those numb, babbling mental patients you see in movies, staring peacefully out a window while somebody wheels me toward arts and crafts.

In retrospect, the arts and crafts part is actually pretty fucking accurate.

A lobotomy via chemical reduction.

Congratulations, Jamie.

You’re healthy now.

You also have absolutely nothing interesting to say.

That terrified me almost more than death—the bat in the shadows that has probably scared me most my entire life.

Because for most of my life, I confused the volume of my brain with the quality of what came out of it.

I thought if you turned down the mania, impulsivity, substances, darkness and constant need for stimulation, you might accidentally turn down the creativity with it.

Instead, something much stranger happened.

I was still me.

The strange shit was still there.

I still loved skulls.

I still liked disturbing imagery.

I still laughed at wildly inappropriate things.

I still wanted to make art that made people slightly uncomfortable.

Just through a different medium.

Literally.

Recovery can sometimes get presented like you’re supposed to bleach the crime scene of your personality.

Become serene.

Drink coffee.

Talk about gratitude.

Get my first pair of Skechers because apparently comfort matters more than drip now.

For the record, I do not own Skechers.

Start saying things like “protecting my peace” without irony.

And yes, peace is wonderful.

I’ve caused enough chaos for several lifetimes.

But I don’t want to become creatively neutered just because I’m sober.

I don’t want everything I make to suddenly become sunsets and inspirational quotes.

I don’t want to paint a fucking lighthouse.

The darkness is still interesting to me.

Maybe more interesting now.

Because now I can look at it without immediately volunteering to participate.

I can paint addiction without using.

I can paint death without wanting to die.

I can paint insanity without needing to prove that I am insane.

I can take something horrible out of my head, put it on canvas and—this is the important part—

leave it there.

That might be one of the greatest gifts recovery has given me.

Distance.

Not avoidance.

Distance.

I don’t have to pretend the monster isn’t there.

I just don’t have to feed him anymore.

Because deliberately exploring darkness creatively comes with a responsibility.

The monster needs shackles.

A chain bolted to the fucking floor.

You need to know exactly how much slack you’re giving it.

You need to know where the door is.

And you need to recognize when you’re making something out of the darkness and when the darkness has started making something out of you.

I’ve experienced both.

One produces art.

The other produces consequences.

There is a line between examining madness and romanticizing it.

Between using pain and worshipping it.

Between acknowledging the ugliest parts of yourself and deciding they’re actually the most interesting thing about you.

I crossed that line repeatedly for years.

I thought the fucked-up version of me was the authentic one.

The sober one seemed boring.

Responsible Jamie?

Jesus Christ.

Who invited this guy?

He answers texts.

He goes to work.

He coaches football.

He packs his children’s lunches and implores them to eat the sandwich crust because it’s the most nutritious part.

What an asshole.

But maturity isn’t killing the Joker.

I don’t think you can.

Everybody has some version of him.

The impulsive one.

The angry one.

The selfish one.

The one who whispers:

Fuck it.

God knows I understand fuck it mode.

I’ve indulged in it both positively and negatively my entire life.

Fuck it has made me take chances I never would have taken otherwise.

Fuck it has helped me walk away from things that were killing me.

Fuck it has made me make art.

Fuck it has also made me wake up and immediately wonder what the fuck I did the night before.

It’s an incredibly powerful gear.

You just shouldn’t drive around in it all the time.

Mine was stuck there for years.

Today I still let the Joker into the studio.

He can suggest colors.

He can pick the music.

Sometimes he gets the whole fucking canvas.

But he doesn’t get my car keys.

He doesn’t get my wallet.

He doesn’t get my children.

And he sure as hell doesn’t get to make decisions anymore.

That’s the arrangement.

Which brings me back to Heath Ledger.

I don’t know what was happening inside his head while he made The Dark Knight. None of us do.

And reducing his death to some mythology that “the Joker killed him” turns a real human being into a Hollywood ghost story.

But his journal still unsettles me.

Not because I think looking into darkness automatically destroys you.

I obviously don’t.

My entire career now depends on looking directly at things I spent years trying not to see.

What unsettles me is deliberately opening that door over and over again.

Studying the monster.

Giving it language.

Giving it mannerisms.

Giving it your body.

Giving it enough room to become useful.

Because at some point you have to remember that you’re studying the monster.

You are not the monster.

That’s the line I spent years unable to see.

So I’ll keep opening the door.

I’ll keep visiting Arkham.

I’ll keep digging through the ugliest corners of my brain because, frankly, that’s where some of my best work is hiding.

But I’m not moving back in.

The Joker can have the journal.

He can have the canvas.

He can have the fucked-up ideas at three in the morning.

But when I’m done working, I close the book.

I turn off the lights.

I lock the door.

And I sleep peacefully with the key in my grip.