Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Marvelling in DC: Celebrating Joker in Diwali



Yes, it is again the same time of annual celebration of light, smoke and pollution. Perpetually, we are celebrating these three facets of an urban Delhi life consistently since last so many years. We have got used to the usual clamour and cacophony from all corners to stop this and come out of this deadlock. 

However this year it got a little different and an irrate, chagrin,  delirious tinge to it for me. While the AQI climbed up from 160 to close to 1000 from the noon to the night of Diwali, my delusion and state of an incoherence increased by almost a similar pattern on the next day. No, it was  not the impact of PM 2.5 on a physiological system. 

But a larger causal effect of this impact came from Todd Philip's Joker. Joachim Phoenix through Arthur Flake established frames which kept on reminding me about a book called - "DC Comics versus Marvel Comics" written by Ron Marz and Peter David between April to May 1996. In the book, batman wins over captain america and in a similar way while I was immersed in the trembling, jarring, coloured, darkish chromes of Joker, it only reminded me of a win of DC over the billion dollar weapons of mass destruction of Marvel.

While the ballet and contemporary body gestures of Joker in the silhouette of changing lights and frames of Modern Times in a luxury theatre of the bourgeois established in the social tensions of Gotham was a straight tight slap on our face, the frames strengthened the impact of cinema on us. 

As an immersive experience of cinema, I could not stop myself from loosing out from being dropped in the vacuum of a rabbit hole. While, the insanity of Arthur through a constant repression of a system on him was rising, the normalcy of conspicuous consumption of Modern Times by consuming Charles Chaplin through their laughter was also going up. 

The rise in the laughter however could not dominate the irate cry of the subalterns in the streets of Gotham as an outcome of the so called civilisational progress. The arrival of insanity through Arthur Flek in the minds of the society was like a definite progression of a meandering path of a basist and a drummer in a rock band. The cinema frames in a truthful, honest way showed this meandering progression of the meandering insanity of modern civilisation through a constant retrospective feeling and aura of 1960s, 70s and 80s. Role of media, politics, class consumption and the innate darkness of it was reflected and also stabbed on us intentionally by Joker. 

Hence, the starking vividity of the rise of such an insanity, incongruous mind state is also celebrated through the rise of Joker on the bonnet of the car bounded by a proletariat, subaltern crowd struggling to create a change to an existing history and story written against them. So, radical maddening eccentricity itself becomes a normalcy to them in such a moment and Joker rises up with a smile and turns back to the crowd in the visual frame. But Joker actually smiled back at the fact that while we are again annually celebrating smoke, light and pollution there are villages where they are not there at the same time due to absence of everything which creates them.

 The smile of Joker was meant to remind us that while we grow, develop, win nobel prizes, climate change continues, species deplete, inequality rises, abuses of all forms continue along with ethical bankrupcies in  varied forms under the garb of normalcy. Therefore, while we strive for peace by celebrating Gandhiji's 150th birthday, America celebrates , announces the abolishment of ISIS in Syria.  

Yes, Joker through delusion, crime, thriller, darkness showed us to smile at each of these facts of life on the planet. And, Marvel didnot Marvel, this battle through a cinema called Joker was again won by DC just like in April - May 1996.