The Reconfiguration of Homme Fatal in The Third Millennium Joker Adaptions

Abstract

"The relevance of the Joker as a prominent character in popular culture and the film industry merited tremendous scholarly attention. It has been analyzed through the lenses of various critical theories, inter alia the Bakhtinian “carnival”, the Freudian psychoanalysis, and several others. Still, nearly there is no critical development of the Joker as a homme fatal. It is thus the novelty of this paper to do so; on the one hand, it aims to reconfigure the conceptualization of the homme fatal beyond its classical seductive and inveigling power within women’s world. Here, I endeavor to redefine the fatality of homme fatal from the perspective of the Joker, which is centralized more on an outlawed destructive personality far from being a sexually desirable man. I focus on the “fatal men” and “fatal rebel” by Mario Praz in his Romantic Agony . This study focuses therefore on the reconfiguration of homme fatal in two Joker adaptations: The Dark Knight (2008) and Suicide Squad (2016). Thereby, I contend that the two jokers share common features with the classical homme fatal, most of which contribute to the comic-ization of their ‘fatality’. Keywords: Joker, Homme fatal, The Dark Knight, The Suicide Squad, the Vice."