First of all, this movie is a complete tragedy, the hero Arthur has succeeded, but he doesn't know. If the clown didn’t kill, he had fulfilled his dream, appeared on his favorite TV show, and has gained a lot of attention. After TV night, he will probably become famous, just like a grassroots singer on the Avenue of Stars. finals. But it was too late, he had committed too many mistakes, and life had crushed him before he succeeded. He was a professional clown, but he killed the host because he couldn't stand the ridicule. His professional beliefs had collapsed. The clown was originally a ridiculed profession. He was only one step away from success, but it was all ruined. His life could have been a comedy where a small person struggled, but he was crushed by society and turned into a complete tragedy. His life is a tragedy.
Secondly, Arthur is the bottom of the poor, this is his name before he became a clown. This dualistic world setting is very interesting. All the details of the world are hidden, and the main line of the story has become dualistic opposition and struggle. But the constant characterization of Arthur's living environment convinces you that this is a possible world. Arthur's dream is to become a talk show actor, and his idol is the talk show host Morrie Frank. But the difficult life can only make him play the clown on various occasions to make a living. In this way, it was ironic to be teased and beaten for no reason.
is also a poor man of the oppressed class, but he stretched his fists to his fellows who were more pitiful than himself. This may be the beginning of his transformation, "Let me tell you whom to sin against." In the first act of the movie, the news on TV explained the background of the story. The chaotic city, the streets are full of rubbish, rats are running everywhere, shops are facing closure, and the male protagonist is practicing his own laugh. He just wants to do this well. A job, and for this job, he has to laugh at others. The job as a clown is probably due to his mother, who taught him to laugh at everyone since he was a child.
At first, he had no malice, but only silently vented in the face of harm. It seems that no one really cares about him. The female doctor who is in charge of treating him never listens to him, but asks the same questions repeatedly, showing that the world is mechanical and emotionless. After breaking the original order of life, Arthur took the initiative to turn his laughter into a mockery of society, and tried to make it his own symbol and drive pure chaos through the TV medium of talk show.
From this perspective, there is no substantial difference between the clowns before and after the transition. The clowns who lived in the shadow of their mothers rely on family, performance and identification to establish their own symbolic order, while the clowns after the killing relied on the clown mask. , Laughter, violence and chaos to establish their own symbolic order. He always needs a mask to conceal his fragility, at first it was a mask of comedy performance, followed by a mask of violence and chaos.
In addition, Arthur is always curious about why his mother always writes to Wayne. It is obvious that she worked for Wayne's family 30 years ago. Until one day he suddenly found his mother's letter, that he was the child of Wayne and his mother. But Wayne is the richest man in Gotham City and is the one who wants to run for mayor. He could not accept the fact that he fell in love with a maid and gave birth to a child. So he made up a story, saying that Arthur's mother was a paranoid, and Arthur was her adopted child, and he acquiesced in the abusive behavior of her boyfriend. For a richest man, this is not difficult. But Arthur's mother has been carrying the fate of being regarded as a paranoid for so many years. It's just that when Arthur looked at the medical record sheet, he laughed heartbreakingly.
Eventually, the clown also became a transparent container to hold the audience's explanation of the cause and effect that happened to him. As the clown himself said in the movie, "I am nobody." For example, he can be a symbol that highlights the narrative that capitalist society makes people psychopathic, or a symbol that is considered by the right to instigate violence. Every group can take what they need from this image-this is the essence of the postmodern film industry, and the signs that originally had subversive power are tamed by this all-encompassing power discourse. We are not against the clown, because compared to other movies, it directly presents class contradictions, violence, and the despair of capitalist society to us.
