Understanding The Joker 101

That's the look for Joker in Dark Knight? Sweet!

I think that's Maelstrom's view Westend, because NOBODY knows what's coming in The Dark Knight yet! or do you mXm?? tell, tell, teeelll! heh. Anyway, I had to wipe a tear from my eye when I read that mXm, you made me feel sorry for The Joker, you sick twisted puppie!!! heh. Seriously it does make me think about the massacre at V tech. What if someone could have helped Cho, I mean REALLY helped him maybe the way Batman tries to help Joker with serious professional help? I know it hasn't helped Joker, and he wouldn't be Joker anymore if he could be helped, but that's literary license/fiction. I just read one of Cho's "plays" called Mr. McBeef, it's sick and twisted just as you'd expect, and I know this is not a popular thing to say at this time because of what a sick twisted disgusting man he turned into, and my heart goes out to all those that lost loved ones *sigh* but his play looks to me like a cry for help, I keep thinking that if someone had tried really hard to help Cho, this horrible situation have been prevented.

(- Westend -) Yes - it is supposed to be "the look" they're going for with The Joker in The Dark Knight.

but is it an actual photo of Heath as Joker?

or is it a modified photo of the 1928 film actor (that inspired the look of The Joker back when he was 1st invented -Ed)

if you click my profile then my images, you'll see the original conrad veidt photo, contrast and compare with this 2008 Joker teaser poster.

:D

But yeah it is the "look" they're going for.

Joker's in pre-design-development though, so nothing is set in stone, they could change their minds and go with a different look for Joker.

We'll 'ave to wait and see.

But I'm with you 'mate, I really love this version. Going for the original look is a perfect full-circle Joker design kinda thing. Heath has the big mouth to pull it off, probably needs some prosthetics to elongate his chin, but his face is already half way there.

(- LAgrrl -) Thanx! (I think) uh, can I lick your tears? oh go on, you know you want me to. oh bloody 'ell I feel another *slap* coming on.

*rub cheek*

Foiled again.

Yes that's *my* psychological profile of The Joker (and Batman - Ed) but you're right, I don't know if they're going to use it or anything close to it in The Dark Knight film.

They did mention The Killing Joke as a possible source, so if they extrapolate along a sim line they may come to a psychological evaluation sim to mine.

But I wonder if they would use it even if they did?

..for the very correlative reason you outline, I don't know what D.C is like now, but I remember the shitstorm that happened at D.C management when Warren Ellis/Mark Millar's The Authority started bucking their "corporate values" - The upshot: The Authority wound up canceled.

Point being, I think that D.C/Warner/AOL *might* have a clause that won't allow for too sympathetic (read: multi-dimensional - Ed) a villain/Joker, because it may go against their values (read: Government guidelines - Ed).

No doubt the Same big-brother'esque reason that we're all going to watch now as the big media outlets close ranks and slowly begin to refuse to examine what responsibility -other people- might have had in what happened in Virginia, or refuse to _seriously examine_ what could have been done to prevent this tragedy from happening in the first place.

In my observation, they always start off claiming they're going to look deeper into these things but invariably it's like a switch is pulled at some point and they wind up focusing on how 1 dimensionally "evil" the shooter/killer/sociopath etc was.

No doubt because they're afraid that if the killer is seen as too "human" people may identify with them.

The problem I have with this 1 dimensional "no, he was evil, end of story" approach is that it tells us that no one else could have done anything or more troublingly no one can do anything to circumvent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

Other than the usual "run faster" advice.

And that's just outright bullshit.

If this guy had >1< good friend, all those people would very likely still be alive.

But I'm with you LAgrrl, from what I have heard so far I cannot BELIEVE how Cho was handled. (read NOT handled - Ed). It seems like many people knew he was giving off disturbing vibes and yet they all just passed the buck onto someone else. Even the courts knew he was ill, this was well beyond "maybe he's just a sensitive/artist type in a dark phase" - assuming what I've read is accurate the courts even classified him as mentally ill, and yet they _still_ didn't do anything substantial to help him?

Norman Co-Ordinate.

Profilers must be smashing their heads against the wall saying "you have GOT to be bloody kidding me, it couldn't have been more obvious that this guy needed _serious_ help than if he had a sign around his neck that said "I need serious help".

It seems to me all the mechanisms were in place to catch and help someone like Cho, they all knew of him, the courts branded him mentally ill, so they essentially all (from school to dorm mates to court) stigmatized him with a "weirdo" label and effectively as a result made him a perennial outsider, and then they apparently felt that was enough to deal with him?

I find it mindnumbingly mindboggling. I thought it was commonly understood basic psychology, that if you don't help someone who is mentally ill AND you do nothing but further isolate them, so that they have no input other than what their own demented mind is telling them, that consequently something extremely violent (internal or external) is pretty well much what happens as a direct result .. every .. bloody .. time.

Is that not common knowledge?

I think as politically incorrect as it is to say it that a shit load of heads should roll; so many people just universally failed to do their jobs from the councilors to the teachers to the university because they were all passing the buck.

Yes, he's responsible primarily for his actions, he turned into a fukheaded piece of shitstink, but he was mentally ill, he needed serious help.

And from what I've heard so far, he never got any serious help.

Maybe it wouldn't do any good anyway, maybe he was too far gone, but it doesn't stop Batman from trying, and it shouldn't stop good people in the world from trying either.

I agree.

That was effing awesome, Maelstrom.

You've been a favorite read of mine for years and continue to be so!

While I trust Nolan to not let me down and like their works to this point, it would be refreshing to see a fan such as yourself lend a helping hand towards the Joker mythology with the amount of love you show.

I enjoyed it overall, but the part about Batman loving Joker like a brother seems a bit too hard to believe. Batman almost killed him in the Hush series after all. Great read though, and thus I have banged it.

mxm, I don't know how many comics you read. 52 / World War III is about Black Adam (well, 52 is partially) and we saw Black Adam trying to be a leader, a family man, and a protector - and we sympathize with what was done to him - and yet the monster he became after what was done to him was unjustified. I think that's more multi-faceted than you give WB and DC credit for.
In Identity Crisis, the big bad guy was one of the hero's ex-wives who cracked cause she wanted to be back with her husband. We saw Zatanna and part of the JLA wiping memories, even Batman's, and mystically lobotomizing Dr. Light.
In Infinite Crisis we saw Batman go overboard into paranoia about his fellow heroes, Superman pulling more and more distant from the world, and Wonder Woman kill a man on purpose. Wonder Woman.
That may not be Marvel and "the Patriot Act and Gitmo and torture and destroying habeus corpus are all cool" kind of "multi-faceted", but it is pretty dark, takes most of the heroes and villains out of being two-dimensional (or, as it is usually said, giving them some depth) and moving away from the simplistic "he's good, that's why he's a hero - he's evil, that's why he's a villain" model.

There have been so many writers and so many versions of Batman and the Joker, there's no way you can make an all-encompassing portrait of those two characters nor their relationship.

Your take is interesting, and often is probably right, but isn't always.

With characters that have been written for decades, under dozens of writers and editors, the best you can hope for is either broad generalizations or pin-pointing how a certain character is at a certain time period under a certain writer.

(- Dark Jedi -) Thanks DJ 'mate, appreciated. Right back atcha.

I trust Nolan likewise. I'm hoping he'll go a bit deeper into the Batman/Joker relationship than we've previously seen depicted on screen, but given Nolan's track record I'd lay at least 2 sacks of loot down that I'll be impressed with whatever aspect of Joker Nolan goes with in TDK.

re: "enjoyed it overall, but the part about Batman loving Joker like a brother seems a bit too hard to believe. Batman almost killed him in the Hush series after all. Great read though, and thus I have banged it."

(- Captain Gordon -) Thanks Cap,

You've never wanted to kill your (or someone else's - Ed) younger evil brother? :D

yes weeeeeeeell, it's possible I do see things through Joker's retinas some of the time..

(that explains 1. why it's subtitled "Maelstrom's view" and 2. the Salvador Dali angled house we recently moved into - Ed)

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*cough*

*tug down on purple shirt*

You're right Cap, there is no direct evidence to support that observation, IIRC the closest Batman got was telling Joker that he felt that if they continued along their current behavioral axis, that they'd wind up killing eachother.

And Batman wanted to make a genuine attempt to circumvent that.

I do see the relationship as sibling like, possibly more as seen through Joker's eyes.

Joker has had the drop on Batman a couple of times, yet he won't off Batman, invariably when he's moved through Batman's defenses and taken him by surprise and has him pinned with a gun to his face and Joker pulls the trigger, it turns out to be a water-pistol or bang-flag-gun.

Ditto, Batman has numerous extremely personal reasons (and opportunities -Ed) to take Joker out, but he won't.

But you're quite right, there no _proof_ that's anything more than insanity on Joker's part, and law-abidesmanship on Batman's.

(- Merin -) I agree, good point, DC comics (and their imprints in particular -Ed) most definitely do present their villains in multiple dimensions. That's not often the "corporate values" interference point. Not often in and of itself anyway.

The point I was trying to make was that the _parent companies_ have "corporate values" guidelines that effect what can be shown in what media. Generally, the larger the media/audience the more corporate-guidelines there are, the less freedom artists have in that environment. What you can get away with in a DC imprint comic for example you might not be able to get away with in a mainstream D.C comic; what you can get away with in D.C mainstream comic you might not be able to get away with in a Warner Brothers movie based on a DC comic.

et cetera.

Apparently because the parent or larger company's "corporate-values" come into play.

And it's arguably worse now, a lot of these companies are related to eachother now wot with all the mergers and buyouts and the like, and trickle-down economics and the bad-press trickle-up shrapnel-effect comes into corporate-concern-play. Consequently comics can get hit in the crossfire either when their movie rights are sold to a big studio or even just when their parent company is worried about mitigating the possibility of collateral negative damage to themselves. I used The Authority example because its original run was shit-canned ostensibly because in the post-911 climate it was felt its depiction of wide-screen violence was un-patriotic/offensive/insert PC argument here and point being: would upset a delicate corporate merger that was going on with D.C comics and a big media company (AOL Time-Warner IIRC -Ed) at the time. There's also an argument to be made in some circles that what also had factored into the corporate-values concerns leading to the cancellation of The Authority was it having blatantly displayed suspected homosexual superheroes kissing.

(to which Warren Ellis famously defiantly offered no apology and said "and? so fucking what?" - Ed)

Whatever the reason(s) when D.C tried to argue that The Authority was canceled because it wasn't doing well and couldn't sustain itself, fans knew they were lying because it was pulling in sales numbers consistent with long established superhero series and was in fact a best-seller. Even more impressively, The Authority wasn't a rerun or re-launch of a 50 plus year old established series like many of D.C and Marvel comics "new" series at the time were.

(it was a sort of evolution of Stormwatch, but Stormwatch was not pulling JLA/X-Men/Superman/et cetera numbers)

The Authority was effectively a brand new property, and in light of that, canceling a successful new series (particularly in the early 2000's comic book period where successful NEW properties were so rare that any company would take a bullet for one) ..it made absolutely no sense.

Until you looked into the parent companies financial dealings, and that's where you saw that The Authority had offended the "corporate values" of the major media company negotiating to buy D.C and therefore despite being the single most popular NEW comic book franchise at the time, The Authority was canceled and silenced.

(and was re-launched under new direction and management some time later -Ed)

That's what I mean by "Corporate-Values" based guidelines and their effect on what we see in media.

Can they depict a 3 dimensionally sympathetic Joker for example?

or must it stop at 3 dimensionally batshit loonie-tunes Joker?

more interestingly if they tried to, would there be a parental public outcry and/or a private phone call from a power broker telling them it's irresponsible and to shut it down or else they'll be shut down?

How prevalent (or consistent - Ed) those corporate-values and guidelines are at any given time, I don't know specifically. But I'd argue they're always there on some level. In the background. Occasionally shimmering with noble intentions, but also and more often, I'd wager, slithering with less than the purest intent.

-mXm

Post Script: Merin, the Last comic book series I read was Civil War. It was OK, certainly an "event" but I couldn't get passed Stark's rationale for the position he took. They might have ruined a character I've loved since I was a kid.

Stark's loaded, if he's going to go all Elliot Ness meets "ends justifies the means" on everyone's posterior I don't understand why he wouldn't try to use his money and personal connection to try to influence the law/politics.

Seems to me Stark in particular would have recognized he'd be of far more use trying to -change the law- (and public perception of Superheroes/Mutants/Metahumans via Public relations campaigns for example) than in wasting his energies trying to enforce a bad law and hurting a lot of good people in the process.

mXm

Civil War.

Don't get me started again. I've ranted enough about Civil War.