The Joker is one of the most recognized and beloved villains by the public. His popularity is so great that he does not need Batman anymore to be recognized. Currently, there is a new film in production whose script will revolve around his figure and will have Joaquin Phoenix as the protagonist.
In the case of a fiction film, it is one of the most important films in the history of the saga. quality, like Jack Nicholson's. The cinema contributed, in large part, so that the image of the Joker was mythified, so that it was associated with an eternal villain.
"People, when they are about to die, show how they really are, so in a way, I knew your friends better than you."
-Coringa-
The evolution of the Joker
Until the decade of 1940, Batman belonged to Detective Comics, and from this moment, the personage would be independent, becoming the protagonist of a c贸mic that takes its own name. Like any good superhero, I needed a rival. In this way, began to emerge the figure of the Joker, whose authorship was quite disputed.
This first Joker resembles the clown figure on the poker deck of the same name; his interventions were less elaborate and he was presented with a typical villain.
Over time, his popularity grew and he seemed an essential figure in the stories of Batman comics, almost as if both characters were two sides of the same coin: good and evil, inseparable, indissoluble.
This was the idea that the acclaimed British screenwriter Alan Moore tried to broadcast in The Murderous Joke: Heroes and villains are not so different; The kindness of Batman is not so pure, nor the evilness of the Joker. The Joke Kill arises in a crisis situation, at times when the old editorial rules no longer work, the old man becomes exhausting and Joker jokes are losing the grace.
Moore managed to take a radical turn, making the Joker acquire his true personality without being a shallow and superficial character, but without losing his essence villain. Thanks to Moore, the Joker ceased to be a secondary character who, although presented interesting plots, was always relegated to the background and, as a result, was a complement to the protagonist, Batman.
From this moment, the interest in the villain increases, to discover its confused and obscure past of which little or nothing we know, to see if the nature of the villain was always there or, on the contrary, is the fruit of a bad day. Moore managed to fit the missing pieces in the puzzle and outlined the main characteristics of the true character of the Joker, the reason for his madness.
Who is the Joker?
His physical appearance is a true mockery of Batman, serious character, dark and tragic past, which contrasts with the appearance of circus, Joker eccentric and colorful.
His physical appearance, explained in various ways throughout the comics, is the result of a fall in a tank containing chemical residues that disfigured his face and modified his skin. Some authors usually add makeup, others explain that the color of their lips is due to contact with the waste.
Therefore, we do not have a clear or establish the last character, but several versions that attract different possibilities, and almost all, the past is blurry. The Joker often invent their stories and manipulate them with the intention of achieving a goal, as in Mad Love.
We do not know what is real and what is a lie, but we can intuit a dark past, a past perhaps not so different from Batman's, which, together with his sadism, built the character we know today.
Sadist, ridiculer, extremely intelligent, crazy, manipulative - this is the Joker, no matter the version. The madness seems to be intimately linked to the character and he manages to transmit it to those around him, as happens with Arlequina: despite being his psychiatrist, she is passionate about him and his madness. That's because the Joker has something charming, has a narcissistic, self-centered and cruel aura, but we can not fall into this trap.
His taste for jokes, for laughing at what no one would find grace, his mockery in relation to life and death, his twisted plans, but intelligent and elaborate, make him the perfect villain. The absolute villain, so perfect in his archetype, who manages to fall in love.
The villain
When not knowing its past and although Moore tried to associate the good with the evil, the truth is that the Joker is the perfect psychopath, the literary or cinematographic villain without any external cause that took it to take that way. There are many versions and the proposals are different, but all agree to bring an unscrupulous sociopath whose only objective is to sow chaos.
They tended to see the villain as everything that the hero is not or can not be: if the Batman is order, the Joker is chaos; if the Batman is the good one, the Joker is the evil ... However, the figure of the villain is much more complex and has been studied in different areas; There are many types of villains and it is not easy to classify them.
The archetype of the villain can be found in artistic manifestations of very diverse character; the villain is not always a character, he can also be an institution, a group, etc. They tend to be linked to stories, to popular tradition, a place where the archetypes are quite clear, the characters are formed and configured within it.
Vladimir Propp made an in-depth study of the morphology of the story. In it, he spoke of a series of 31 common or recurring points in all fairy tales and, of course, to which the villain refers and his relationship with the hero. These functions served for the construction of stories, for the study of narratology, and not only we see them in fairy tales, but we can also find them in more extensive works, even in the world of comics or cinema.
The figure of the hero seems to be essential in the morphology of Propp's story and, likewise, every hero needs a villain, a character who tries to sabotage the hero, who harms his family, to destroy his plans and contribute to the construction and mythification of the hero himself.
"It only takes a bad day to reduce the healthiest of men to a lunatic, this is the distance between the world and me ... just a bad day.-Coringa-
