Much of the criticism of the film has centered on the question of what effect it will have on such people. Every new Joker embodies the element of chaos his audience fears. Thirty years ago, in the age of the superpredator, Jack Nicholson’s Joker led urban-coded henchmen with a boombox into a Gotham museum to graffiti old works of art. In the last year of the George W. Bush administration, Heath Ledger’s Joker was a terrorist who inspired Batman to construct a surveillance state. The perennial significance of the Joker has made him an omnipresent reference online, both for sincere fans and for ironists.

Source: New York Times October 02, 2019 15:33 UTC