Joker
Methodical Sabotage

The Joker, Sabotage Incarnate

Drawn from a deck of cards, the Joker is that saboteur and buffoon that can adopt whatever value its player chooses to give it. It is therefore a potential card, a perplexing figure that doesn’t belong in the hierarchy of numbered and face cards, ensuring a disruption in the choices that determine the game. The Joker represents the ambivalent coexistence of an unexpected solution for some and an unlucky hindrance for others. The Joker sabotages the game because he has no intrinsic value, because he doesn’t follow the rules that govern the other figures, which he reconfigures. He stands at once within and outside a rational system that tolerates his irrational presence nonetheless. He is an integrated renegade.

In the second instalment of the recent blockbuster Batman series, The Dark Knight, the Joker is that parasitical counterpart whose existence is inextricably tied to his positive alter ego, Batman. The bacterial Joker finds somatic and psychic support in the culture defining the superhero, which he sabotages at every point, a contamination that spreads ­inexorably throughout the city and community of Gotham, affecting its spaces, its monuments, its imagination. Even when eradicated, the parasitical aura hovers still in unsuspected replications, extending suspicion to that which had been viable, healthy, and beyond suspicion, like the character of Harvey Two-Face. The parasitical sabotage dissolves the original Manichean configuration and overflows the framework of the cinematic narrative. The Joker perforates the medium and the IMAX screen by becoming the commercializing hero and spokesperson for megaproductions,¹ 1 - On this topic, see the development of websites involved in marketing the film, among them whysoserious. gaining both publicity space and mind share among spectators at the expense of the superhero himself, reduced to a title. He spoils everything, upstages everyone, on and off screen, disrupts and reconfigures the system like a deck of cards. In both the metaphysical and numeric sense, he is a play on values.