ABSTRACT
Joker (2019) is a timely reminder that we are all precariously close to the edge of madness under the horrors of twenty-first-century atomisation and neoliberalism. This chapter, examining neoliberal horror through make-up and the prevalence of television, explores the three iconic screen Jokers – Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), and Todd Phillips’ Joker – as social documents that explosively critique the systemic socio-political rot under the yoke of neoliberalism. Using make-up as an ever-present canvas to examine the Joker’s shifting subjectivity and disfunction, each Joker’s ‘happy face’ make-up registers the progression of socio-cultural malaise and its resultant madness under economic and authoritarian neoliberal practices. Unlike his antecedents, who use television as a means to reach the public to cajole, deceive, or frighten them as desired, Phoenix’s Joker registers our social abandonment to unrealised dreams in an age of overwhelming ‘legitimised’ deceits routed through the presence of television. Through Joker’s reinterpretation and extension of the Joker origins myths, Phoenix’s clown prince is traumatically reborn – aesthetically, physically, and subjectively – as near-broken under the weight of our current horrors, dancing on the edge of psychosis. In the end, Arthur reclaims himself from these delusions to which we cling through Joker’s s/laughter, and that is most threatening of all.
