Repeated failure

Time, dressage and thingness in Joker (2019)

Bibliographic Data

ID21783287
AuthorsMerlin Seller (0000-0002-3781-3035, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume19
Issue1
Pages41-53
Publication date2021-01-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Review of Film and Television Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1740-0309 • E-ISSN: 1740-7923
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17400309.2020.1861881
OpenAlexW3133505839
LanguageEN
References cited27

This paper explores the relationship of history and comedy in Joker (2019) through a comedy theory of broken thingness and queer theory of failure – investigating the interplay of the film’s use of comic timing and signifiers of historical time in its diegesis. I argue that Joker uses its black humour to probe a disjointed affective relationship to masculine dressage, and the repeating crises of a city coded as 1970s New York. While arguably courting the ironising nihilisms of the alt-right, multiple points of disruption undercut a protagonist who is framed more as ‘lucky fool’ than ‘canny trickster’. Repeated comic and diachronic failure, I argue, exposes the ambivalent thingness of postwar urban masculinity – critically, derivatively, problematically and foolishly

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Carnivalesque · Comedy · Comics · Literature · Masculinity · Popularity · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Trickster · Cinema and Media Studies · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Social Psychology

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