How to Portray The Joker – Wisecrack Edition

What's up, kidding Helen? We talk a lot here about the decisions made by screenwriters and directors, but there is one part of the filmmaking process that today we are going to focus on the interesting, inventive and sometimes inexplicable choices that actors make and the way that choices can define a character in our collective imagination and we're doing it by looking at the most baffling character in pop culture, your favorite devilish clown, the Joker, why is he so serious? So, welcome to this witty

edition

, how to

portray

the Joker and no spoilers ahead, unless you somehow didn't know that the Joker is a criminal with a penchant for maniacal laughter, so for our purposes and no disrespect to the volkl legend that is Mark Hamill, we will focus on the four live and half action cinematic performances. of Gotham's most villainous clown, for some of this we're going to look at the work of academic Dan Hassoun, who made a really clever comparison of César Romero, Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, while complementing it with our own analysis and a look at Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix's interpretations of the role, let's start with the delightfully campy 1966 performance by César Romero, who also played the character on the TV show from 1966 to 1968.

Romero's

portray

al of the Joker fits neatly into the harmless clown camp. of circus that is a laughing

joker

he seems to be having. a fantastic amount of fun if you haven't seen the movie it's an interesting watch if only to marvel at how much the character and the series have changed over the times this version of batman features cheesy moments like this, the fight with shark repellent bat sequences like this and lines of dialogue like this appropriately for the campy tone Romero imagines the Joker as a cheerful criminal with a penchant for laughing out loud and saying things like his exaggeration skews the Marx Brothers a bit, even the Joker's portrayal of Romero fits his performance. strengths, as well as the broader cinematic approach taken in making this spectacular and strange debut Batman film, so what choices make Romero's Joker your own?

Let's start with Romero's background; He grew up as a dancer in nightclubs and musical theater where he was accustomed to employing all of his physicality. As an actor he became best known for his appearances in musical comedies and romances, making his comedic portrayal of the clown quite appropriate. There are almost mock-Shakespearean theatrical elements to Romero's performance, his arms are perpetually outstretched and he trolls her butt as we do it. I circle the earth a few more times so everyone can get a good look at my dish while they wait for my final ultimatum, which is an old theatrical trick to project the words clearly to the audience.

Every movement is injected with a surreal touch instead of walking. he appears to frolic rather than stare his eyes widen like a silent movie star overacting his laugh was never threatening simply reveling in his own depravity while adapting to his strengths as an actor Romero's style also fit the cinematic conventions of the period, especially in the way they were used in this film I assume notes that the way Romero was filmed in this film perhaps best communicates with the opening image of him, a long shot in which he wildly gestures with a bouquet of fake flowers before After running with the camera towards his team of bad guys, the camera proceeds to stay in wide to medium shots for the rest of the scene.

This setup was common for the Batman television show and indeed many shows at the time because it did not require any major lighting changes, which was a notoriously cumbersome task when shooting on film, plus the lighting scheme Low contrast and reliance on bright colors and high saturation means there's nowhere to hide any part of Romero's body that isn't visible; The important thing is that the film has a high average shot length with this scene averaging 10 points 8 1 seconds per shot, making it virtually impossible for Romero or any character to remain too static for too long and lastly, not We can talk about this performance without mentioning that Romero refused to shave his iconic mustache for the role saying that he would rather lose the park completely than lose his upper lip, particularly once the television show was digitally remastered, this resulted in a look especially unintimidating long before Henry Cavill Stache Gate compared Romero's antics to the sly one.

Jack Nicholson's performance in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, which sees the character descend from a not-very-nice mob boss to a positively diabolical clown. Hooda takes on art museums and poisons deodorant. Nicholson's performance comes with a perpetual raised eyebrow as if he's in on the joke and is creepy but funny, which keeps him from completely going over to scary, it's somewhere between Romero's eNOS camp and the depravity of the performance. by Heath Ledger. Nicholson is faithful to the cartoon character and even co-wrote the Joker's dialogue, the resulting performance transformed the character. during a bleaker time and a more sinister Gotham metropolis, he assumes that Nicholson's portrayal of the Joker also correlates pretty closely to the acting tradition he grew up in.

Nicholson honed his craft at a Hollywood crossroads during the 1950s, it was the death of the As a result, a tightly controlled studio system and the rise of method acting Nicholson is a somewhat transitional figure from old Hollywood to the new, while the Old Hollywood dictated the brands of its actors by encouraging them to take on similar roles to reinforce that brand. The new philosophy of method acting had actors. Diving into different pseudo personalities The acting method asked the actors to delve into their own emotions to find their character. Sometimes they improvise in the role of Joker, since in many of his roles Nicholson embodied the contradictions of Jack Nicholson's personality, that is.

For one thing, it fuses the old form of personality in which actors were firmly associated with the type of character they played, meaning you're not just watching the Joker, but also Nicholson himself and his wild brand of talking bad boy. slapping. injects the new methods of improvisation that gave his character a wildly unpredictable heir. Maybe in the same second he will laugh and dance like a crazy person. Plus, Nicholson was clearly having fun. He literally told other actors on set not to take the comic too. Seriously and rather let the Wardrobe do its thing, this is obviously an exaggeration.

Nicholson was acting a lot in every frame. He still expresses the fact that he saw the role as one of the at rakal 'ti, only unlike the lighter version of Romero, Nicholson. was a darker, slyer, and staunchly sarcastic theatrical depiction of the Joker, then there is the cinematography, unlike Romero Nicholson's, it is primarily filmed in medium or medium shots of a single character, leading Hassoun to describe his performance as more oriented. around the upper torso, the framing of the shot limits Nicholson's movements. Even his dramatic or energetic arm movements have to be strictly controlled to remain in the shot, as a result Hassoun describes his performance as relatively still in comparison to Romero's playful antics.

All of this means that Nicholson's performance exists largely in the movements of his face and arms. The importance of his They even telegraph his face to us in the film, which goes to great lengths to very dramatically reveal the Joker's transformed face as he steps into the light, the camera zooming in at a low angle, furthermore, the Dark, high-contrast lighting scheme means that aspects of the frame are less visible, as a result Nicholson's face filled with white makeup stands out, making him the true center of his character. This face-centric framing and acting would be further accentuated in arguably the most iconic Joker performance of all time, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, the actor, played the character with a new deadly seriousness and an almost reptilian air of psychotic evil.

His tongue was always moving his eyebrows, always twitching, his eyes perpetually moving. This was the darkest version of the Joker we had seen yet and many would. Say the best: how did Ledger achieve this, being immensely talented? the role of Joker isolating himself in his apartment where he wrote a diary for hours while the character filled a notebook with writings and disturbing images to evoke the character. 'soon to put it first Nicholson and Ledger show the evolution of Hollywood and its acting from star persona to improvisation and impersonation i.e. actors of the modern era are expected not only to find character through emotional introspection As method actors did, they actively inhabit their character's entire world, which often means that the actor undergoes significant physical transformations for each role as Ledger's Joker character.

At times it's funny to watch, it's clear that Ledger approached the role with complete seriousness; For example, you couldn't imagine him telling his co-stars to let the Wardrobe talk, even jokingly, but Ledger's performance is also pretty firmly grounded in itself. cinematic era, while an actor like Romero had luxuriously long takes for clowning, the average shot speed plummeted from 11 seconds between 1930 and 1960 to just a few seconds in the early 2000s. Film theorist David Bordwell He argues that this is symptomatic of the heightened continuity that the film industry has suffered which tends to lead to faster edits, perpetual camera movements and increasingly zoomed-in shots.

Leger had to convey entire emotional journeys in a matter of seconds. The fact that his performance was so outstanding shows how effective he was not doing. 1966's Batman for a second, as we saw that his film and television studios once relied primarily on the power of a master shot that captures an entire scene in a wide frame allowing all the action to take place within it. Think of this as the frame of the camera acting. like a theater set for variety or emphasis, directors would cut to closer shots of objects or characters, but for the most part the actors appeared from the waist or knees up, often then shots with multiple characters, but in recent decades The tight single plane has become king.

Close-ups take up more and more time in most films, as Bordwell says. Mouths, browns and eyes become the main sources of information and emotion, and the actors must escalate their performances through varying degrees of intimate framing, this is clearly demonstrated when the Joker is revealed for the first time in The Gentleman. Dark with a close shot that cuts across his forehead and chin and still chills you to the bone, as shown in this shot. Ledger's Joker will exist primarily as a face, an incredibly meticulously controlled face, in which the slightest movement of an eye or the redirection of an eyeball or the rays of an eyebrow or a flick of the tongue can do more than what most actors could do with their entire body.

Leger pushed all of the Joker's tortured gradations just below the surface, variously revealing the also-critical pain, torment, paranoia, anger, and joy. to the characterization is the octave change the voice inspired by the ventriloquist that gives the character a touch of unpredictability and instability the fluctuations of his voice and his face mixed the character of the Joker with more complexity than he had previously been granted after From Ledger's passing at the posthumous Oscar the Joker's future was cemented as a dark force of nihilism, all of which brings us to Jared Leto, because we don't like dwelling on the negative or beating a dead cultural horse, let's move on quickly for his Suicide Squad performance, which is both disappointing in League and thankfully.

Leto's brief Joker was a total gold-toothed psychopath, full of crazy eyes and big, exaggerated moves, almost a stage version of the high school character. Let's move on to the fact that the Joker was highly hyped and also highly disliked by most critics and audiences. There are many scathing accounts of his performance, from The New Yorker, which calls his portrayal of evil as as terrifying as Goodnight Moon, to Vice, which calls it comically corny, a Hot Topic managers' suburban idea of ​​edginess. I am NOT someone who is. I'm a The idea that what makes the performance even more painful is that Leto clearly seems to be trying to resurrect theLedger's performance, as indicated by his deep immersion in the role, which involves sending dead pigs and used condoms to other actors, which generated a lot of press attention and flash but made for a frustrating OneNote performance without a hint of the nuance. which colored Ledger's interpretation of the character in the same vein.

Leto's Joker is strangely flashy and flashy in a completely predictable way - basically, Leto's performance turned the deadly serious prep ledger into mere fodder for film marketing - the suffering, misery and madness associated with entering the character as a performance usurped the performance itself and that's also laughable, so let's move on to last year, where we reached the peak of Joker with the release of um Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, the movie promised to the public. A good two hours of super darkness, this time largely without the benevolent interference of Bruce Wayne's Arthur Fleck Phoenix, was unique in his vulnerability, soft spoken and clearly tormented, but the character had a boiling anger that seemed to radiate and eventually overwhelm him.

Watching him evolve from a beaten clown plagued by his inability to stop laughing to an armed killer gleefully laughing at his victim's death is possibly the most disturbing performance of the year now that Phoenix has had a luxury never before afforded to an actor playing Joker because the movie wasn't so much your typical comic book movie but rather a character study of one person's descent into an angry world. As a nihilistic psychopath, there was plenty of room for Phoenix to show off his acting chops and then some decided not to refer to past interpretations of the character.

Phoenix as Leger immersed himself in a diary and at the same time quickly lost about 50 pounds of enough weight to fit into the role of the actor. his own words start to go haywire as a well-known improviser Phoenix is ​​particularly rich to discuss when it comes to options, the director and crew have discussed the way Phoenix is ​​the spontaneous experimentation essential to the way they shot the film, from the choice to empty the refrigerator and crawl inside, as if to signify the character's desire to disappear in this iconic scene after committing his first murders in which Phoenix began spontaneously dancing in the bathroom.

His performance, according to New York Times dance critic Gia Corliss, essentially placed two characters within one dancing body, showing the dichotomy of Arthur with the emerging character of the Joker who will slowly take over the dances from the first time he moves in front of his TV while holding a gun as Corliss voices him. His past is bravery, something he never knew. When Arthur received them, the Joker takes over the choreography. At length, he is presented in a kind of power pose, as if by claiming space he is claiming his identity by demanding to be seen, a topic we discuss in more detail in our video on Joker and the politics of recognition also offered by Todd Phillips.

A more experimental take on the film that spends long moments focusing on Phoenix's captivating physicality focusing on the way his muscles twist as if to match his troubled soul and then of course there are the laughs that previously ranged from silly to diabolical Phoenix's version is painful. and heartbreaking, his entire sinewy body convulses, his mouth opens against his will, his laughter comes out of his bowels while his eyes show incredible suffering, transforming the iconic laugh into a howl of pain. Phoenix's performance deliberately provoked empathy in the audience and perhaps even pity. We think it's impossible not to and that was absolutely necessary for the themes of the film.

If Fletcher gave depth to the Joker, Phoenix forces us into a pit with him, this interpretation of the Joker would have been unimaginable in the late 60s, when the Joker was a simple superficial villain, Phoenix, transforms the Joker into a consummate antihero, someone you can relate to even when you're horrified by him, what do you get? I don't think when you cry, ready, three, two, one, try the police, there's something appropriate about that. the Joker's unreliable track record for a famous villain with no backstory makes sense Lee has no consistent characterization oh we have nothing no matches in the prints DNA the dental clothing is personalized the tags I think in his pockets but knives and Nameless Fluff has no other alias and makes each new interpretation of the character exciting, while other characters tend to thrive thanks to his sheer predictability.

He will never have a clumsy and mute James Bond, for example, the Joker is so fascinating because of the infinite facets and gradations that he has the talent. The actors have been able to find out, but what do you guys think about what makes a good Joker performance and who, if anyone was the defining Clown Prince, let us know what you think in the comments, thanks again to our amazing sponsors for supporting our channel of podcast, go ahead and click the subscribe button and before you go, I want to give a quick congratulations to the upstart CY upstart is ranked number one among 300 other companies on Trustpilot and go to Starcom slash joke to discover your custom right today thanks for watching Peace, guys.