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
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| 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. |
