Looking at and with Images Crowds in Joker, Joker in the Crowd

In this article, I provide a ‘symptomatic’ reading of the film, Joker, by analyzing the complex dynamics behind the emergence of this supervillain narrative at this particular moment in history, focusing on the images and discourses of social movements to which popular culture cannot remain indifferent to and quickly embodies in different forms. I focus on the ways in which the widespread political restlessness across geographies and the increased visibility of inequalities and reactions to it generate visual and discursive patterns. These patterns in turn become parts of popular cultural narratives, from Beyoncé’s pose on a sinking police car and her dancing the white western canon away in Louvre museum, to Childish Gambino’s This is America clip and the Pepsi advertisement relying on a mixture of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements’ visual repertoire. Situating Joker in this larger picture allows exploring how the narrative engages with social reality and how it informs/is informed by it, without being limited to appropriation theories that would claim that popular cultural products deprive radical social content of its meaning and function. Within this theoretical framework, I focus particularly on two questions on the construction and circulation of Joker’s narrative: How is Joker’s embodiment of social reality symptomatic of an uneasy oscillation between potentially revolutionary class struggle-oriented leftist/anarchist mobilizations on the one hand and alt-right outbursts of anger centering around vulnerable white souls on the other? And what happens to the meaning and function of the narrative when the film spills out of the theater and is reclaimed in the streets, as in the case of people painting their faces as Jokers in Lebanon or Chile at the moment, while struggling against class society, neoliberalism and oppression?