THE JOKER: Reading Through Zizek's The Reality of the Virtual

The Moment When The Joker Sits Down

Near the End

And he whispers out loud to himself,

It is exactly the way I imagined it.

This is the moment when he exhibits

what Zizek has described as

The Reality of the Virtual Imaginary

He is sitting there and this time he is in control.

All IDEOLOGY has evaporated

and its veil has been shredded

"YOUR SON IS DEAD." JOKE

That's not funny says DeNiro.

No it's not funny says The Joker.

You decide what's funny, Murray.

Or to say it differently, the MEDIA decides what is funny and manufactures laughter. 

The audience laughs at their own manufactured humor.

The audience does not know what they desire or what is funny.

It is this manufacturing that Arthur Fleck intuits and verbalizes.

And in shooting and killing DeNiro as Host

The Joker kills manufactured humor

At least right now.

Virtual Reality as THE SCREEN seen by Baudrillard tells us that we are now in Simulated Reality hurrying as fast as we can to Virtual Reality as it seems no one wants Reality. Once we are in the Virtual there is no escape. It is easy to talk about this with Gamers as they understand it very well. In a game you cant get out.

UNLESS 

you unplug your computer. But in the world once you are fully in Virtual Reality, there is no escape. Baudrillard offers SEDUCTION which cannot be manufactured.

Deleuze puts down Baudrillard offering instead a REAL that is more Real than Real, a Nietzschean solution. In my opinion Kristen Stewart as an actress - I prefer the feminine as the French do in a synthetic language rather than the agglutinative English - as she is not a method actress but one who intends to be more real that the character she portrays as real. Elizabeth Taylor was another one.

Zizek however is fully Zizek in this, - reading through Lacan and Hegel as always.  

He assuredly asserts in this documentary 

that we have always been in 

THE VIRTUAL

And it is Arthur as The Joker who visualizes and exemplifies Zizek.

We will see when he escapes the police car and dances on the top of it 

MICHAEL JACKSON'S PERFORMANCE DANCING 

just as he enters the court where he is being charged with child sexual abuse. 

Or was it just after. 

And there are many other celebratory footnotes to other films embedded in this reading of 

The Joker.

He has entered the stage and planted a kiss on the middle aged woman guest reminiscent of that great moment when Adrian Brody kisses Halle Berry before presenting her with her Oscar

https://youtu.be/B4kzceTpmAY

And it begins. 

https://youtu.be/zAGVQLHvwOY

ZIZEK
There is so much more of ZIZEK in this film that can be exhumed from the gap it has fallen into covered by all the reviews using interpretive Freudian theology - and Lacanian mish-mash -  that I felt I must dig it out before it gets buried for decades.

https://youtu.be/RnTQhIRcrno

Review:Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises - Darren in Ireland at The M0vie Blog

The M0vie Blog 

I see no point in reproducing perfection so read Darren at his blog www.them0vieblog.com 

There are some things I wish to say about his review. 

Darren's awareness of the poignant absence of The Joker. Not even a throw away reference to him as Darren wishes.

 I agree with Nolan. The absence of The Joker is a void that is "Less Than Nothing" to steal from Zizek's book on Hegel. Nolan has invited Death as a presence in The Dark Knight Rises. The absence of The Joker resonates with the death of Heath Ledger, his irreplaceability, his singularity. Could there be any more beautiful memorial to Ledger than this film that mourns his non-being, depriving it of the focus that was his alone.

Darren has merged Bane and Wayne into an indivisible whole. As Babette Babich reminds us, each opposition includes its opposite. No division. Baudrillard will write an entire book on The Intelligence of Evil, how absolutely necessary evil is, which disappears in Simulated Reality. Ayn Rand tells us what evil is in her fictionalized character of Ellsworth Toohey, the man who would elevate mediocrity until our ability to perceive excellence disappears.  

Darren's recognition of masks, how they act as "floating signs" to affirm what they deny. How Wayne's mask and Bane's mask reflect each other in a mirror darkly. 

Nolan is teaching us our new world of simulation. He is addressing what DeLillo addressed in Cosmopolis, but what Cronenberg was afraid to touch. See here.

As Darren asserts, this is the first film to acknowledge the importance of Occupy, which Cronenberg misreads, thinking "they just want a piece of the pie."

Nolan plays on inversion which Darren recognizes. The mirror.

One discovers the same speculation in Baudrillard's concluding meditation on Borges' story of the 'mirror people', which prompts his suggestion that behind every reflection or representation 'a defeated enemy lies concealed'; a defeated 'singularity', which 'will one day rebel'. (Baudrillard in his The Perfect Crime quoted in Performance Research 1.3 - Richard Gough p.7)

Here begins the great revenge of otherness, of all the forms which subtly or violently deprived of their singularity,; henceforth pose an insoluble problem for the social order, and also for the political and biological orders.  

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms, and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off....shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. (Borges -T he Book of Imaginary Beings p. 67-8)

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A postscript.

Darren emphasizes the fact that Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises has an ending, breaking the trope of comic hero stories. And ending signals DEATH and Death does not belong to this genre.  Another tribute to Ledger or perhaps Ledger lodged it in Nolan's mind.