For the most part, the entanglement of the old rivals also presents two endpoints of United States politics, which are very different but intrinsically one. But today, things may be very different.
In the first part of the movie "Joker," Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck says in an interview with Robert De Niro's talk show host, "I don't have a political stance, I just want to make people laugh." However, he then pulled out his pistol and shot him in the head.
The film is trying to show you that "Joker" represents some kind of mad evil, a dangerous chaotic drive in human nature. It has no programme, no manifesto, only manic action. In the upcoming "Joker 2", it follows a similar path: it's more like a melancholic pas de deux performed by Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. You may think it's dull, but you can also feel it as a kind of shadowy political tension.
It's a trick to hide from the world. Vacate the context and make Gotham City a fictional utopia, where the Joker's dangerous expressions and crazy actions can naturally clear their name. However, how did this make it win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival? Isn't the core of the fear it succeeds in deceiving people that it's a false story, but it's all about what is happening in reality?
To understand the Joker series, we must first place it back on the political spectrum of present-day United States. You need to know the history of the Joker's evolution, and here of course you need to lead to his old rival Batman. When we understand the history of the image of this pair of rivals on the screen, we can understand how strange our world has become today. The history of the evolution of the image of the Joker (and his archenemy Batman) is, in fact, a chronicle of the ups and downs of contemporary politics in United States.
To put it bluntly, Joaquin Phoenix's clown actually represents a contemporary alt-right. He is a frustrated white male, whose frustrations in city life have left him insane, and his laughter is exaggerated and presumptuous. In the opening scene of "Joker," he is teased and beaten on the street by some pedestrians of color; This is accompanied by his extremely repressed sexual needs – Arthur the Clown has no partner, which gives him a burning heart, discordant body movements, and irrepressible expression management, which is typical of the contemporary Incel (involuntary celibacy).
And Arthur's "pistol" becomes a double (sexual) metaphor here. When it accidentally catches fire, it seems to open the floodgates of the catharsis of the clown's desires - he suddenly realizes that he has some kind of ability, he realizes that he is no longer a poor person forgotten by the world, but finally an arbiter who can control the fate of others.
The plight of the clown Arthur Fleck's life seems to represent the marginalized and sliding middle class that has become disillusioned with the existing system. those who believe that their interests are not represented by globalization and free market economies; the people of the Midwest who are angry at the wealthy social elites, the witty senators in Washington, and the systemic corruption; Conservative men who are fed up with the tone of the mainstream media and the "politically correct" discourse.
"Jokers" have been the shocking embodiment of lost whites in United States. This crazy and cunning figure can actually represent the once-well-dressed Republicans, who once upon a time were a symbol of the social dregs that Republicans had rejected. It's amazing how much the leopard has changed.
Turn the clock back to the late 1980s, when the so-called "Dark Ages" of United States comics were in the midst of the so-called "Dark Ages" when the image of Batman as we know it today was built. He said goodbye to the childishness of the character's beginnings, and cartoonist Frank Miller attached a dim hue to the hero, making him more adult and complex.
Tim Burton's film version of Batman came out in 1989, when neoliberalism swept the world, and just as political scientist Francis Fukuyama later declared "the end of history", a binary framework of good and evil seemed to be sealed by the film.
At the end of Burton's film, the Joker falls from a tall building, and the camera slowly descends from above to focus on his hideously smiling face. His long-lasting laughter echoed like a wisp of resentment, which hinted at the fate of an entire era. When we watch this somewhat old-quality film, it seems that we can still smell the smell of unease. The Other that collapsed with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did not die out completely. It's a reminder of this horrific laugh: the Joker will never be destroyed, he is an eternal Other, a symbol of the dark side of Gotham itself, a nightmare at the heart of the desires of United States's dreams.
In the film's most impressive passage, the Joker generously drops $20 million over Gotham City on live television in an attempt to reverse his reputation among the citizens. In Batman's view of Bruce Wayne, this is nothing less than a political bribe — a quick and brutal distribution of property that garners widespread public support.
It's reminiscent of the Cold War-era left-wing leaders who established legitimacy by peddling the promise of an egalitarianism. What does the Joker do in the film like Allende, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro? And Bruce Wayne, who represents neoliberalism, will be the arbiter of the broken deal, and rightfully the embodiment of "justice".
Unlike the system-changing Joker, Batman Bruce Wayne inherited his parents' inexhaustible fortune and is the richest presence in Gotham City. Batman doesn't trust government law enforcement, and he has a blind belief in personal abilities (even violence); He is imbued with the illusion of elitist salvation that the rich can defend order in the city with their private power.
Batman's premise of delivering justice only at night is reminiscent of the classical liberal "night watchman," the ideal role of government — it only appears in times of crisis, and mostly seclusion, ensuring that the free market runs smoothly without interference.
Batman and Joker, the old enemy, symbolize the order and chaos of United States society. Batman's public persona, which was inaugurated in the wake of the conservative revolution spearheaded by Barry Goldwater and later carried forward by President Ronald Reagan, largely represents the values of right-wing elitism. The Joker is a rebel against this order, projecting the political expectations of anarchists, socialists, and Cultural Marxists, as well as the street voices of the rebellious youth of the civil rights movement of the '60s. The clown of the post-Cold War era is the historical ghost of failed socialist practices; The post-911 clown symbolizes the potential threat of Islamic terrorism.
The Joker's devastated face makes him a chilling symbol that resembles what the V's in Vendetta means to revolutionaries — masking, self-obliteration, and disability of surveillance machines, a way to confront police brutality. Thinking from the perspective of Joker fans, isn't the covert, tacit cooperation between Batman and the Gotham police represented by Sheriff Gordon a symbol of the covert use of outsourced private violence by law enforcement?
In this sense, Batman has been a solid ally of United States' Republican values since its inception — his temperament carries the self-proclaimed morality of a white propertied person, a masculine masculinity, and a potential for violence that is usually concealed, and he is in the company of power, money, and order. Directed by Christopher Nolan, the 2008 masterpiece The Dark Knight is a solemn exploration of Batman's moral complexity, and it seeks to reveal a political dilemma that conservatives have to do as a last resort – when the chaotic believer Joker tries to test humanity and shake society's faith in freedom and goodness, Batman, the defender of order, needs to act equally beyond the norm.
United States writer Andrew Klavan, in his essay "How Bush is Similar to Batman," writes, "That's the real moral complexity...... Our artists are ready to show us that there are times when people have to kill in order to preserve their lives; Sometimes, people have to destroy values in order to preserve them; While movie stars are struggling, heroic, and flattering, the true heroes must be silent in the dark, depressed, and spurned — and only then will we truly respect what President Bush has done. ”
This can justify George W. Bush's war in Iraq, in which Batman defends order, sows civility, and bears public stigma by force, just as Batman gallops away at the end of the movie, leaving a good name to Harvey Dent and a belief in justice to the people of Gotham.
If you watch "The Dark Knight" with realistic concern, it is not difficult to find the metaphors buried by Nolan. The extradition of Chinese businessmen hiding in Hong Kong, the indiscriminate torture of Guantanamo-like confessions in prison, and the surveillance system he placed in the mobile phones of Gotham citizens are the intensive erection of the United States homeland security system in the post-911 era, which is almost a rehearsal of the "digital surveillance society" in which Snowden later broke the "prismgate" incident.
But in the Joker's view, Batman's morality and justice are actually a kind of decoration, a by-product of his status and resources. The Joker's goal has never been to defeat or eliminate Batman, but to dismantle his alleged morality and puncture the façade of his "civilization". To a large extent, Batman never understood the true cause of Gotham, and he did his own chivalrous deeds, but he did not really sympathize with the desperate people in the poor streets of Gotham. It is structural inequality that has led to the evil of Gotham, and Batman Bruce Wayne, the secret vigilante of Midnight, is in fact a vested interest in the structure, or in other words, he himself has created his enemies.
《新蝙蝠侠》（The Batman，2022)剧
Who does the clown represent? The classic opening scene of "The Dark Knight" is Heath Ledger's Joker and his gang ziplining down the building to rob a bank, and it was in 2008 that the financial turmoil swept from Wall Street to the world. The two are of course a coincidence, but who's to say that this is not the era of the movie characters themselves. The Joker is a Batman-derived shadow who is a blurred and even hideous, forgotten 99%. In a sense, Obama, who shouted "change," actually took over the mantle of the clown's revolutionary spirit.
And everything suddenly turned 180 degrees from one point to another. It was from the beginning of Trump's presidency that Batman and the Joker seemed to switch sides. In 2019, Joaquin Phoenix's version of the Joker became a popular image with right-wing populist characteristics, and Batman, once a hardcore Republican icon, is now being requisitioned as a totem by Democrats.
In 2022's "The New Batman", Batman played by Robert Pattinson is actually President Biden himself. Joseph Biden has said he wants to "be the president of all United States," which is the intention of "The New Batman," and although it still has a mechanical séance-like ending, the film generally presents a more humble gesture. The image of Batman adds a layer of guilt, and he becomes introspective because of his guilt-ridden family history.
What is this movie telling us? The signal it sends us can be simply summarized as:
Yes, there is corruption in Gotham, and the elites don't get their money right; Yes, Gotham is mired in great tears and polarization; Yes, there is a lot of anger over this system...... But you still need to have faith in Gotham's self-healing power, and you must not be incited by subversives; As elites, we need to begin to repent of history and forge a path of redemption from it, and you, the people of Gotham, need to remain united under my guidance.
As a result, the audience will begin to realize that this is the image of the reshuffling of the ecological niche of the Democratic and Republican parties. The Republican Party, which should have been more conservative in its policy advocacy, has now become radical and even fanatical; And the Democrats, who once demanded change, are now more cautious, as if they were on the edge of an abyss.
A still from Joker (2019).
The history of the Batman/Joker's love-and-kill and twisted struggle is in fact a presentation of the two ends of United States politics. For most of the time, they were distinct but intrinsically one, but now the situation is perhaps very different, and there is a growing tendency for them to go their separate ways.
This will probably be the perspective you'll need when you're going to be in theaters to watch Joker 2: Double Delusion. To paraphrase Godard's words, "You should not watch a political movie, but a political movie." This may also be the reason for the polarization of the word-of-mouth of "Joker 2", it will not be just a dull song and dance film, as some reviews say, and the real trembling is often wrapped in a layer of fog, and you need to pretend to be a Gotham citizen to pass through this fog to feel the chill from reality.