Essay on A Rhetorical Analysis of the Killing Joke

Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” builds the setting of the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. His purpose is to emphasize that the town of Holcomb is a small town where no one comes and no one leaves. He includes these details to show the contrast between the town before and after the murders of the Clutter family to the reader.

Killing us Softly 4 sends out a very strong message that could potentially send wrong signals to some. Jean Kilbourne did a fantastic job at making sure the message properly shown to the audience. After all she does have the experience and has been able to polish her work after killing us softly one, two, and three. She speaks very strong about sex trafficking, Objectification of women, gender violence, and global impact of oppression. But what I felt she spoke most passionately about is about how women are portrayed as flawless just as art from Florence, Rome, Venice, and others during, after and before the Renaissance. Although their perception of perfection was different as ours they often showed what was wanted not what was. Now with the use of photoshop we end up making a woman look impossibly beautiful. Women having to live up to that and men expecting the same thing hurts everyone, except people making money off it of course. All of this has been seen through history in a different way using art.

Vonnegut is very keen to express his choice of words throughout the novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The phrase that is mentioned the most is “so it goes”. This phrase is mentioned over a hundred times at full length of the novel. At every time someone dies in the novel or a tragedy happens Vonnegut ends the passage with “so it goes”. Because the main focus of the novel is on the bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut is making a point that the war is awful but inevitable. He uses repetition to promote how common and cruel war and death is, in the big scheme of things. An observation done by Allen says “The plain old death will be there anyways. It leads us to the idea that, given that we all must die anyway, often cruelly or prematurely. The commonness

1. Narrator describes the dead man’s body in such details because he wanted to show the true reality of war. He wanted the audience to be able to visualize it yourself , identify yourself and feel the tragedy of war and its disastrous consequences: “his jaw in his throat, his upper lip and teath were gone, his eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole.” Narrator wanted readers call up feelings and provoke them to rebel against the war.

In the Joker’s page, the reader’s see a slowed down time pace as the story goes on adding emphasis on what is going on and the emotions that Joker is going through. The reader gets to see the Joker’s reaction to being threatened and his timidity in the fourth and fifth panels and soon after we see the shock of it, the realization that he is unable to get out of the situation he put himself in with the sixth panel. From the sixth to the seventh panel, though only a few seconds have passed between the panels the reader gets a completely different shot from one panel to the next. The Joker changes from a shocked expression to one of conflict and melancholy, depicted with the ducked head and trembling hands. The mockery of it is added, as previously stated, with the taunting way the two figures in the background look down at the Joker, one with the signature Joker smile and the other with “crazy” wide eyes. Meanwhile, on Gordon’s page the reader gets a much quicker pace of time; each panel has a different scene and shot of Gordon and the Joker allowing for the reader to get the emotions Gordon is giving out faster. Though we see from the first through the third panel of the page, Gordon realizes that he can’t get out of the situation in order to help his daughter much

Comprised of dark humor, brutal imagery, and generally erratic content, his notebook gives the viewer an idea of where Ledger may have drawn inspiration for the spine-tingling Joker. We see stills taken from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, clippings from Batman comics,

We see this within the fifth panel where the shot comes from behind the Joker, allowing the reader to only see the two men’s threatening faces, then later in the seventh panel where the Joker is alone and in a position that depicts him being upset/ in agony with two sinister looking people staring down at him in the background, creating a mocking tone. This mocking tone is carried on to Gordon’s page with the Joker’s insane song being in the background, “… if you hurt inside, get certified, and if life should treat you bad…don’t get ee-ee-even get mad!” (Moore). The Joker is singing his demented song as he forces Gordon to see the pedophilic photographs the Joker has taken of his daughter, the lyrics insinuating that Gordon shouldn’t get upset, that he’s not allowed to be upset like he wasn’t, again mirroring what was supposedly done to

 Although the Joker has a disturbing mind-set  , for example, when he tests out his experiments he uses people. The Joker does not care if he causes pain to others or maybe even himself. Another thing about what makes the Joker insane is his sidekick. His sidekick , Harley Quinn, was just a regular girl who interviewed the Joker. She ended up falling in love with him , and the Joker coming up with outrageous ideas for her to prove she loved him made her fall in to a tank of acid so she can look just like him.

With this page of the Killing Joke Alan Moore and Brian Boland use panel composition to increase the drama with each individual panel. Within the first three panels of the page the reader gets three different “camera” shots. The second panel in which the reader gets a shot of the Joker reentering the bar/restaurant, the shadow of his hat hiding his eyes making it difficult to read his emotions. The next panel is completely different style, black and white, it makes it so the reader’s focus is entirely on the words being spoken, the lack of sympathy the men have on the Joker, similar to the lack of sympathy the joker has on all of his victims. In the next four panels the focus is on the Joker and how he is being treated poorly after the death of his pregnant wife. We see this mainly in the fifth panel where the shot comes from behind the Joker allowing the reader only see the two men’s threatening faces, then later in the seventh panel where the Joker is alone and in a position that can be interpreted as him being upset/ in agony with two sinister looking people staring down at him in the

As times change, so does society. Which begs the question does the evilness of the villains in The Dark Knight trilogy change and become more sinister? More specifically who is more sinister between Bane and The Joker? In this essay I will discuss what each villain did and how easily they killed.

The world we live in today—a world occupied by increasing misanthropists—continues growing into, not a world of happiness and excitement, but a world of despair. In regards to despair, the frequency of people overlooking the optimism of life, freedom, and the desire to simply be content is becoming a common trend. In The Dark Knight, The Joker, being the antagonist, is depicted as a malicious, unpredictable genius—but who is he really? By completely eluding the above statements, The Joker proves to be understanding of the growing despair in the world—he takes his wit and twists pessimism into humor and absurdity in relation to his nihilistic views. Although The Joker is depicted simply as a sociopathic criminal, he is much more—not only by allowing his foil character, Batman—both equally intelligent and dangerous—to influence his behavior by relying on each other, but by shaping the future outlook on society with

Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film, The Dark Knight, is the classic battle between Batman and villain. He takes on The Joker and Two-Face in this film to protect the people he loves and the city he loves. The Joker is in the custody of Gotham Police and this happens to be the first time The Joker and Batman meet, but at first the audience does not know that. Detective Gordon starts in the simplistic room only to take the handcuffs off of The Joker ‘s hand when he will not reveal where Harvey Dent is. As Gordon leaves Batman is revealed and slams The Joker’s head on the tabletop. The Joker proceeds to try and land on Batman’s nerves to make him crack. The Joker tells Batman, “You complete me” only to make their relationship more twisted and confusing

There was a line in the comic where the Joker said, “Don’t get ee-ee-even, get mad!” I believe that he was trying to make Jim Gordon go crazy just like himself. First the Joker shot Barbara in from of him, then kidnapped him and began the torture. He took pictures of Barbara without her clothes and it is assumed that Joker raped her. The pictures are shown to Jim and he feels like he didn’t his job as a parent but he didn’t let his break him. He powered through all the torture and it made him stronger.

Through his films, such as The Dark Knight Trilogy, Interstellar, Memento, and The Prestige, he investigates the human mind and the disparate configurations it can exhibit by using sociology. The Joker is a psychotic anarchist and embodies Nolan’s interpretation of the lowest form of a person. Nolan never tells the audience what the Joker’s true background is, however, the Joker reveal various false stories about his childhood. Although his stories are not verifiable, it gives the audience a clear picture that he faced hardships in his childhood and lived according to the lower-class society standards. The Joker’s goal is to force the citizens of Gotham down to his level by abandoning their beliefs about being protected by the Batman and the police force, therefore, they can visualize how no one protects and cares for the lower-class individuals.

“Dark Knight” was a smash hit for it’s fame, explosions, and chase scenes, but what really had me on the edge of my seat was perhaps the most riveting villain I had ever seen. The Joker. The Joker is a mob-backed terrorist with suicidal tendencies and According to the DSM, the joker would be given the diagnoses of Antisocial personality disorder. He is not reasonable, he’s not afraid of anything, and the last thing he cares about in the world is himself. As Alfred explained to Bruce, “Some men just want to watch the world burn