Neris Dipsov

Joker and Our Filters Neris Dipsov

While every branch of art is affected by the perceptual transformations of social mechanisms and identities, cinema also gets its share of these influences. After the modern narrative, the postmodern narrative emerges and shows its effects in cinema. Although the concept of postmodern, which marks the post-modernist period, is still very controversial and like a new concept - especially in societies that have undergone the painful modernization process - it has already penetrated into the hero and story styles in the cinema, and is reflected in daily life on the screen with narratives that hold a mirror to societies and individuals. Postmodernism is a concept that represents the period of the individual and social unconscious, in which the dissolution of the individual's identities and the modern duality paradigms that hold on to the identities are intertwined. Since the cinema also exhibits the heroes of stories that are not very different from our daily stories in sensory sense, the dialogues of the Antagonist-Protagonist dualism that goes back to Propp's tales have begun to be reshaped with mass new perceptions and new catharsis with the postmodern identity dilemma. In the era of various catharsis questioning that the evil hero's dilemmas started to attract more attention than the benevolent hero's, and that even not playing good could be more virtuous, the character of "Joker", which we witnessed from the comics to the Batman series, to the cinema screen and finally to the release of his solo film, is also called 'bad joker' in the language of the dualist dimension, referring to the journey of the antagonist hero, which may include Jung's archetypal Trickster. Understanding it can be a useful tool in reading the ethical crises that the modern and postmodern individual has unconsciously occupied, and perhaps seeing the roots of the imaginary monsters that shaped the mental state of today's people with the transition from the first human to the narrative way of thinking. It may reveal our changing filters, with the values of archetypes and ages, in the process from the memories of unconscious monsters to the journey of the antagonist character.