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In The Dark Knight (2008), the second part of the Batman trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan, is Alfred, the faithful butler of Bruce Wayne, who gives the incontestable definition of the nature of the Joker: «Some men do not look for logical things, Like money You cannot buy them, or harass them, or reason or negotiate with them. Some men all they want is to see the world burn ».
In that film, the villain played by Heath Ledger was the vivid representation of evil without justification, without purpose, and that therefore went beyond even the agreed idea of what terrorism is. He just wanted to see the end of the world. No more To call him nihilist would be to fall short.
In 2008, the Great Recession began to appear around the world, and the apocalyptic and dystopian visions that populate today's pop culture have not yet been exacerbated. In addition, Al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers in New York were still relatively close in time, an action classifiable as "pure evil" that decisively influenced how we shaped the psychology of the Joker that Nolan portrayed.
If composer Karlheinz Stockhausen said that the true vanguard of the 21st century had to be sought in terror - in the sense not that terror was good, but that a new unknown form of terror had been discovered whose limits we still did not suspect - Joker was then an avant-garde of evil . So extreme that it didn't imitate life, but life ended up imitating that evil.
What happened with that Joker is that it caused impact, morbid fascination and even disgust, but it did not rise to the category of symbol. Nor is the villain of the third part of the Nolan trilogy, the imposing Bane, archetype of the populist politician of the future, so much that even Donald Trump himself plagiarized his phrases in his inaugural presidential address.
However, the new Joker played by Joaquin Phoenix under the orders of Todd Phillips (2019) has a much more powerful iconic potential, and his face - where the smile with two razor cuts has not yet been fixed at the corners of his lips - has begun to jump into spaces of politics, social conversation and the anti-establishment bullanga in a continuous and sustained way.
In Hong Kong street protests, in which China has banned the masks, some protesters put on makeup like the Joker. The same concealment of the face has also been observed in the revolts of Chile and those of Beirut , and there was even one of those nice procession specimens in Catalonia that, through Twitter, proposed that before going out to burn barricades in the streets of Barcelona people outside with Joker masks rather than balaclava. He appealed to the "force of the image."
If the Joker is a symbol adopted by both the left and the far right, what exactly is it a symbol?
Similarly, the face of the Joker has been adopted by the American high -right and by many followers of Vox, which complicates the thing, because if the Joker is a symbol adopted at the same time by such distant movements, of opposite political sign and incompatible with each other, what exactly is a symbol?
Exactly, what the 2008 Joker could not be, the one who wanted to see the world burn.
International policy expert Aidan McGarry argues that protest is reached when people feel excluded and marginalized or even "actively silenced or ignored." "These cultural artifacts and their iconography make them feel that they are part of something, it is a sign of solidarity," he told Wired magazine .
The Joker is thus the symbol of tiredness against any power , either precisely or in the abstract. It is not about creating chaos, but about being heard.
For certain movements that exert force on the street and oppose the police and a tough-handed political power, the Joker's mask - and who says mask also says memes, photograms or photomontages with the Joker as the protagonist that populate mostly Twitter - it is not different from the mask of Salvador Dalí used by the robbers of La casa de papel and another famous mask emerged from the comic, transferred to the cinema and converted into a symbol of modern anarchism such as that of Guy Fawkes popularized by V de Vendetta , Alan Moore's graphic novel later taken to the movies by James McTeigue.
Guy Fawkes attempted against power - the British parliament wanted to fly in 1605 and assassinate King James I - with the intention of restoring another previous power, that of the monarchy anointed by the Catholic Church; What symbolizes is the anti-system spirit, destroying the current order to impose a new, opposite and divergent one. I didn't want to see the world burn - with its connotation of destiny and end point - but that the previous scheme sank to make a reset.
The Joaquin Phoenix Joker is a much more flexible symbol. It represents the man without a future abandoned by an insensitive society that, as a result of fatigue, reaches a catastrophic limit situation - reason for which there were furious initial reactions to Todd Phillips' film for understanding that he justified actions such as those of the lone wolves that slaughtered shot at his high school classmates - but he is also a reference for the jaded, disappointed, unbelievable society of the transformative capacity in positive of power, and who has no special interest in seeing the world burn, but if it turns out that the world is He goes to the badge, he will not care much either because he is close to bottoming and he can no longer go much worse.
If the order is reinstated or replaced by another, it gives so much: it is in the midst of disorder when it seems that life makes sense
Which is still an irresponsible and immature reaction, based on an erroneous psychology, but one that wants to justify through extreme theories - that there is no possible change without violence, and also the thesis of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan according to the which crazy person is the one who is truly sane and sees reality as it is, just like our Joker-, so that he assumes, incidentally, that there will not be a positive reaction until the complete sinking occurs.
And that is another symbolic meaning of the Joker: it is the weight that pulls down, which accelerates the chaos process. If the order is reinstated or replaced by another, it gives so much: it is in the midst of disorder when it seems that life makes sense.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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