Description
Breaking Down Joker offers a compelling, multi-disciplinary examination of a landmark film and media event that was simultaneously both celebrated and derided, and which arrived at a time of unprecedented social malaise. The collection breaks down Joker to explore its aesthetic and ideological representations within the social and cultural context in which it was released.
An international team of authors explore Joker’s sightlines and subtexts, the affective relationships, corrosive ideologies, and damning, if ambivalent, messages of this film. The chapters address such themes as white masculinity, identity and perversion, social class and mobility, urban loneliness, movement and music, and questions of reception and activism.
With contributions from scholars from screen studies, theatre and performance studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, geography, cultural studies, and sociology, this fully interdisciplinary collection offers a uniquely multiple operational cross-examination of this pivotal film text and will be of great importance to scholars, students, and researchers in these areas.
Table of Contents
Breaking Down Joker: Violence, Loneliness, Tragedy
Sean Redmond
Section I: Divided Space
1. All the World’s a Stage: Reading Space(s) in Todd Phillips’ Joker
Deeksha Yadav
2. Joker and Gotham City: Identity Correspondence. The Political Value in the Evocation of New York City in the 1970s and the Imaginary of the New Hollywood Thriller
Ana Aitana Fernández-Moreno, Alan Salvadó-Romero
3. Joker: Madly Walking and Dancing Through Space
Sean Redmond
4. New York is Dead: The Joker Steps and Urban Melancholia
Sam Han
Section II: Mediated Uprisings
5. Send in the Clowns: Joker, Vigilante films and Populist Revolt
Scott Doidge, Adrian Rosenfeldt
6. Looking at and with Images: Crowds in Joker, Joker in the Crowd
Aylin Kuryel
7. Resisting Tyranny with Laughter: Joker and the Arab Revolutions
Abdelbaqi Ghorab, Ouissal Harize
8. Joker: Toxic Masculinity, the Instigation of (Political) Violence and the Protection of Minors in Greece
Liza Tsaliki, Despina Chronaki
Section III: Violating Genre
9. ‘Put on a Happy Face’: The Neoliberal Horrors of Joker/s
Sorcha Ní Fhlainn
10. Performance Crime, Trigger Warnings, and the Violence of Joker
Stuart Marshall Bender
11. The Perfect Crime? Anthropology and Liminality in Joker
Alex Wade
Section IV: Breaking the Ideal Man
12. "What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him?" - Madness and Power in Joker
Nicola Young
13. A Monster We (Re) Make: Family Violence and Monstrous Masculinity in Joker
Janine Little
14. The Joker and Man in the Mirror: Through Chaos to True Identity
Jenni Lehtinen, Valeriya Chistyakova, Malika Kanasheva
15. Lives of Precarity in the Age of Neoliberalism: The Tales Untold
Swapna Gopinath
