I think the reason I liked the Heath Ledger joker so much besides the performance itself was that they deliberately screwed around creating an unreliable origin story. The fact that he tells multiple contradictory stories is the best part.
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I’m not motivated to watch the new Joker partly because the premise of a whiny incel/red pill/mass shooter type newsy contemporary justification sounds tedious, but mainly because it collapses the wave function. The origin indeterminacy feels essential to the Joker character.
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A whale of a performance. It wasn’t just the shifty origin story—the fearful symmetry of chaos sprung from chaos—but Ledger’s equally shady body language that made him almost impossible to parse/predict.
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I resist learning the lyrics to songs I like, keeps them fresher longer
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an earlier example (of achieving awesomeness via unreliable origin story) was V for Vendetta, the graphic novel
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