I am normally a major skeptic of zeitgeist readings of films for reasons I’ve gone into at great length, but watching clips of the Joker from The Dark Knight pop up all over the Internet as a response to our current WTF political and financial situation, I’m tempted to reconsider.
Then again, I was on board with reading the Joker as purposeless chaos and cruelty all along. It’s really the political climate that seems to be tailoring itself to the character, not the other way around.
Also, remember that thing I said about politics that one time between 2003 and 2006 or so?
Then again, I was on board with reading the Joker as purposeless chaos and cruelty all along. It’s really the political climate that seems to be tailoring itself to the character, not the other way around.
Right, except Nolan said much of what he put into TDK (events, rather than characters, for the most part) WAS pulled from Our Modern Times. This was in the EW interview. It’s not crazy to consider the world around us when reading art, if for no other reason than knowing the people who MADE it didn’t do so in a vacuum.
Here’s how it goes, as I see it: guys like the Joker are elemental, even archetypal, and their “stories” are going on all the time, everywhere. That’s why they’re archetypal. It’s no great leap to say “he is chaos and nihilism” because that is his very essence… it’s just that this particular manifestation (Nolan’s script and direction + Ledger + pre-existing character lore) was so damn resonant.
The movie struck me as pretty centrist. Hard decisions have to be made, nothing is ever win-win.