Laughing Off Hollywood’s Representation Practices: the Joker’s Cultural Politics

Abstract

Hollywood’s popular hero films are infused with hegemonic representations and narratives that can potentially shape or maintain certain beliefs and attitudes. Superheroes especially have become ubiquitous and a fuel for the civic imagination. Such is the case of the Joker, a comic book anarchic supervillain, a criminal mastermind who antagonizes Batman, and a mythic palimpsest that evolves and adapts to the socio-political zeitgeist. The present research aims to qualitatively explore the Joker’s cultural politics and investigates two of the highest-grossing Joker films, “Joker” (2019) and “The Dark Knight” (2008), through semiotic and discursive analyses of their politics of representation and signifying practices, the purpose of which is to shine a light on the “Joker” symbol as represented in film. The results indicate that the Joker’s cultural politics is pervaded by markers of gender violence, sexism, ableism, and racism, thus embodying Hollywood’s mass-distributed discourses which are heavily informed by the same hegemonic masculinity, as well as race, gender, and disability stereotypes.