The Eye of the Beholder
Sonny Bunch makes a good point around the double standards being applied to the Obama-as-Joker posters that have been making news lately vis-a-vis the response that similar Bush-as-Joker “art” received from certain quarters. I missed the Bush lampooning, largely because I was neck deep in work at the time and had little energy to pay attention to much else, but I’ll admit that looking at the two images side-by-side, the Obama visage elicits a different and more prominent reaction from me.
Other folks have already pointed out the general incoherence in terms of the poster’s message and I’m in agreement with Sonny and others who find the racial implications of the poster somewhat unpersuasive. As far as I can tell, the poster is an appeal to pure visual association and as far as that tool goes, the Obama version is much more effective and therefore much more emotive.
Look, what made Heath Ledger’s Joker so simultaneously captivating and disturbing was the reality of the presentation. Granted, the Dark Knight was not a movie grounded in an overwhelming sense of loyalty to realism, but Ledger’s performance was eery in its authenticity. You paid attention to every second that Ledger was on screen as the Joker because you could see that he had tapped into malevolent and largely subconscious undercurrents of raw and terrifying emotion that we expend no small amount of energy civilizing and socializing out of ourselves.
In short, there is an unresolved part of each of us that can identify with the unbridled animus towards destruction that Ledger’s Joker embraced and advocated. [Read more →]
August 4, 2009 30 Comments
