Joker in News Media Discourse

Abstract

"The entertainment media often delivers cultural symbols, which occasionally inform news media discourse. Such is the case of the “Joker” being used as a symbol of chaos. Since the character’s existence and popularity generated a pool of possibilities for political associations, the latest Joker film by director Todd Phillips, which premiered in 2019, caused controversy on many levels: “The real threat of Joker is hiding in plain sight” (The New York Times 2019); “Joker isn’t an ode to the far right – it’s a warning against austerity” (The Guardian 2019). The polemical aspect of the discourse prompted by this film is apparent in the frames used by the news media to cover Joker’s premiere. This paper aims to identify these news media frames, using an inductive clustering method, and further investigate them by exploring theories of social construction of reality, with a focus on psychoanalytic aspects of the hero/villain myth that informs these news frames. Keywords: Media Frames, Myth, Constructivism, Joker. "