The Joker is one of the most recognized and beloved villains in the audience, its popularity is so great that it no longer needs Batman to be recognized, there is currently a new film in production whose script will revolve around his figure and feature Joaquin. Phoenix as the protagonist.
There are several actors who have given him life and this villain in particular, but highlights the Joker of Heath Ledger, whose performance earned him the wild Oscar and transformed both the character and the actor into icons of cinema, without leaving aside other great quality performances, such as that of Jack Nicholson. Cinema has contributed in large part to the joker’s mythical image by being associated with an eternal villain.
- “People.
- When they’re about to die.
- Show what they really are.
- So.
- Somehow.
- I got to know your friends better than you.
- -Coringa-.
Until the 1940s Batman belonged to Detective Comics and from that moment the character became independent, becoming the protagonist of a comic strip that took its own name, as every good superhero needed a rival, in this way the figure began to emerge from the Joker, whose paternity was quite contested.
This first Joker looked like the clown figure of the poker game that bears the same name; his interventions were less elaborate and he was presented with a typical villain.
Over time, his popularity grew and he seemed to be an indispensable figure in Batman comics, almost as if the two characters were two sides of the same work: good and evil, inseparable, indissoluble.
It was the idea that the famous British screenwriter Alan Moore tried to convey in The Deadly Joke: heroes and villains are not that different; Batman’s kindness is not so pure, nor the evil of the Joker, Mortal Joke arrives in a crisis situation, at a time when the old editorial rules no longer work, when the old man starts to tire and the Joker’s jokes lose their grace.
Moore has managed to take a radical turn, making the Joker acquire his true personality, without being a superficial and superficial character, but without losing his villain essence. Thanks to Moore, the Joker was no longer a supporting character who, although he presented interesting plots, was always delegated to the background and was therefore a complement to the protagonist, Batman.
From that moment on, interest in the villain increases, to discover his confused and dark past of which little or nothing is known, to see if the nature of the villain has always been there or, on the contrary, is the result of a bad day Moore managed to insert the missing pieces into the puzzle and drew the main characteristics of the joker’s true personality , the reason for his madness.
His physical appearance is a real mockery for Batman, a serious and dark character with a tragic past, which contrasts with the circus, eccentric and colorful look of the Joker.
Its physical appearance, explained in different ways throughout the comics, is due to a drop in a tank containing chemical residues that have disfigured his face and altered his skin, some authors usually add makeup, others explain that the color of his lips is due to contact with residue.
In this way, we do not have a clear or defined past of the character, but several versions that draw different possibilities and, in almost all, the past blurs. The Joker often invents his stories and manipulates them with the intention of achieving a goal, as in Mad Love.
We don’t know what’s real and what’s a lie, but we can have the intuition of a dark past, a perhaps not-so-different past from Batman, who with his sadism built the character we know today.
Sadistic, mocking, extremely intelligent, crazy, manipulative? Madness seems to be intimately linked to the character and he manages to pass it on to his entourage, as is the case with Harlequin: although she is his psychiatrist, he falls in love with him and His madness It is because the Joker has something charming, has a narcissistic, self-centered and cruel aura, but we cannot help but fall into this trap.
His taste for jokes, laughing at what no one would find funny, his mockery of life and death, his twisted but witty and elaborate plans make him the perfect villain, the absolute villain, so perfect in his archetype, who manages to fall. In love.
Without knowing his past and although Moore tried to associate good with evil, the joker is the perfect psychopath, the literary or cinematic villain with no external cause that has led him to take this path. There are many versions and the proposals are different, but everyone agrees to bring us an unscrupulous sociopath whose sole purpose is to sow chaos.
They tried to see the villain as something the hero is not or cannot be: if Batman is the order, the Joker is chaos; If Batman’s the good guy, is the Joker the bad guy?However, the villain’s figure is much more complex and has been studied in several fields; There are many types of villains and it is not easy to categorize them.
The villain’s archetype is found in artistic manifestations of a very different character; the villain is not always a character, it can also be an institution, a group, etc. It is usually linked to stories, to popular tradition, a place where archetypes are very clear, the characters form and form within it.
Vladimir Propp conducted an in-depth study of the morphology of the story, in which he spoke of a series of 31 common or recurring points in all fairy tales and, of course, referred to the villain and his relationship with the hero. they were used to build stories, to study narratology, and can be seen not only in fairy tales, but can also be found in larger works, even in the world of comics or cinema.
The hero figure appears to be essential in the morphology of Propp’s tale, and likewise, each hero needs a villain, a character who tries to sabotage the hero, insolin his family, destroy his plans, and contribute to the construction and mythification of the hero himself.
“It only takes a bad day to reduce the healthiest man to a madman; Is that the distance between me and the world?Just a bad day?