CORINGA (2019): o que há por trás da máscara?

Abstract

The general purpose of this master's thesis is to analyze the villain's journey in a film originating from comic books, with an emphasis on the characterization of the protagonist. The empirical corpus selected as the object of study was Joker (2019) by director Todd Phillips, which tells the origin of the most popular DC Comics villain. The film stands out, among other comic book adaptations of the Batman franchise, for avoiding dichotomous clashes between good and evil. Ironically, the premise created by Phillips is marked by just the opposite: the loss of control, in an urban universe where Batman does not yet exist and chaos is aggravated in the streets of Gotham, increasingly filthy and violent. The justification for this study comes from the need to demonstrate how the work performs a series of ruptures, which range from technical aspects, such as the absence of superpowers and special effects, common in film adaptations of contemporary comics; narrative aspects, as it is a film about a villain without the presence of a hero to fight him; in addition to the present political purposes, which signal changes in the perception of social inequalities. Initially, there was a search for the state of the art, more specifically, for academic works that dealt with the issues of the villain archetype and the filmic adaptations of comic books. In this theme, we found the books by Denise Guimarães (2012), Christopher Vogler (2006), Carl Jung (2000), the theses by Luís Gustavo Vechi (2008), Alexandre Schmitt (2011) and the dissertations by Valéria Yida (2016) and Fabricio Marques Franco (2017). The problematization is linked to questions about what is really behind Arthur Fleck's mask; and how, in this context, the Joker would or would not assume a perverse attitude, pertinent to the expected behavior of the shadow archetype to which he belongs. The hypothesis is even conjectured: What if the creation of the persona Arthur Fleck is not an attempt to humanize the Joker, but rather a catharsis based on imaginary memories? Based on this hypothesis, the end would unmask the hypocrisy, since the arguments used for the public to sympathize with the villain and justify the crimes of this vengeful figure were, in fact, mere fruits of his distorted memories. In the end, the Joker would dance and mock those who believed his story. For Baudrillard (1991, p. 11) representation or simulation can act as a kind of “circular seduction”. With this in mind, the Joker character may have used his dances and fanciful narrative to seduce us. After all, how can we judge him not to be ill if he simulates so well the symptoms of the mental condition he claims to have? And if this really was an incurable disease, which always made you laugh uncontrollably, like killing, could it have simply made you acquire the supposed self-control over that laugh? Raising such questions reinforces the feeling that we have been deceived by a fanciful narrative created by a perverse and insane mind. To prove the hypothesis, the objective of this research was to carry out an analysis of the aesthetic and narrative aspects of Joker (2019). The process was divided into two stages: firstly, the decoupage of the film elements was carried out, to later perform the interpretation and reconstruction of the film taking into account the decomposed elements. Film analysis was adopted as a methodology, with theoretical support on the concepts of Aumont (1995), Penafria (2009), Xavier (1983) and Vogler (2006), among other scholars on the subject.