BaladasDemnevanni wrote...
drayfish wrote...
Arguing that the Joker indicates he's having 'fun', and building this out into a bedrock upon which to rest an entire understanding of a character and motivation is rather flimsy.
Can you explain his actions? Rationalise them? What his goals are? His intent? His endgame? That is his motivation. The joy along the way is a product of that ultimately unknowable intent.
In contrast, the defining contradiction of the character is that he remains at once methodical and utterly unpredictable. Anarchy personified; but meticulous and reasoned. He was just doing it for the lols doesn't explain his crusade to level the Batman, to test and pervert Dent, to challenge and destroy the mob. His actions are not random, nor are they knowable. He is a metaphorical literalisation of the notion of terror; and to claim that you can 'know' the motivations of terror is a nonsense.
And the impression I'm getting is that you simply don't like the answer, however simplistic. I can give you a million and one different lines uttered by the Joker himself which illustrates this and you would disregard it as "not good enough". I'm not suggesting that is all there is to the character. I'm suggesting that this is what we definitively know about the character regardless of his goals/ end game, it's more than enough to not place him on the level of Lovecraftian horror.
That you think the Joker sits alongside the Reapers is nonsense. The former takes pleasure in his wanton acts of destruction. The latter (as of ME1) refuse to give us absolutely anything on why they do what they do.
Obviously we are starting the spiral down an intractable squabble that is not going to go anywhere (and thankfully the conversation seems to have moved well past us by this point) – but I think the issue here is based around a miscommunication of this notion of 'motivation'.
You appear to be confusing narrative motivation (
why I do the things I do), with the by-product of such motivation (gee, I
enjoy doing the things I do). If that were sufficient for analysing the compulsions of fictional figures then all textual analysis would break down any time it appeared that a character was enjoying themselves. It's simply not expansive enough to capture the underlying psychology that drives their actions.
I mean, the Joker himself even calls out the lie at the heart of his claims to be 'motivated by fun' when talking with Harvey Dent – providing yet another contradictory reference to himself that collapses our understanding of his agenda in on itself (like the scars). He claims that he doesn't have a plan, that he's just a dog chasing cars, reacting instinctively to whatever momentarily catches his fancy.
But this is repeatedly proved patently, expressly
false.
He is methodical. His plans are intricate. Their victims are specific and targeted. He wants to present himself as a lunatic, howling nonsensically at the stars, but his actions are deliberative and complex. He is trying to remake society, to force it to test elemental truths about itself. What can lead a good man to fall to ruin? What can corrupt a symbol like the Batman? Just how flimsy are those notions of morality to which we cling?
'Doing it for giggles' does not capture any of this cohesion and planning, nor this political ramification. It does not explain why exactly he becomes so enraged and surprised when his plan to blow up the boats fails in the final moments of the film.
And this is true just at the level of the audience's engagement with the film too. Believing that he's just some deranged nutcase, randomly blowing things up just to watch it fall down, completely robs him of the power that his specific reasoned brand of terror engenders. It is not that he's physically dangerous that is so destabilising to viewer and fiction; it's that he
has an agenda, that he making a point, exposing the weaknesses he sees in us as a people.
He is terrorism personified: destructive, irrational, and ideological. Reducing him to a giddy thug with a can of gasoline undermines everything that he represents; and presuming to know what 'motivates' a character who intentionally, knowingly sloughs off all identity and history in such a manner misses the point of where his menace lies.
Modifié par drayfish, 14 mai 2013 - 02:17 .
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