In Todd Phillips’ Joker(2019), Arthur Fleck/“Joker” is a concealedcreature, a broken, dejected man passing as an oddlysympathetic, violent clown, the result of pastbrutal interpersonal experiences. He is a real manbut with a complex clinical lineage, as hetransitions from Arthur, the unexceptionalindividual, into Joker, La Bêtehumaine, a disturbed, rampaging specimenof the human. Joker documents the stylized evolutionof festering human duality in a specificsocio-historical milieu, in this case, the New YorkCity of the 1980s. The following case studyintroduces a suffering, surplus, drugged, lonely,and enraged man who emerges, in nefarious strokes ofnear-mythical violence, as a contrived naturalistspecimen, a masked product. As Baudelaire observes“as for the grotesque figures which antiquity hasbequeathed us—the masks—I believe that these thingsare full of deep seriousness.” Joker is a naturalist film narrativepossessing a “deep seriousness” that needs to beunmasked.

In the 1876 November issue of Scientific American, an anonymous authorprovides illustrative insights into the imaginativepossibilities of artistic composition available tothe consuming public in the pre-cinematic device,the magic lantern, and how to best utilize itsmechanical, fantastic potential to attrac anaudience: “[t]he best outlines are funny men andwomen, animals, birds, and grotesque figures, sheetsof characters, clowns, harlequins.” Even before thecelebrated era of the cinema of attractions emergedin the late nineteenth century, clowns, depicted aseither humorous, delightful, or seemingly horrificimages, were projected on walls, canvases, and lateron screens.