David Ayer keeps explaining away The Joker

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

jared leto, the joker, suicide squad, dc extended universe,

For a character that is in SUICIDE SQUAD for only about seven minutes of total screen time, there is a lot of attention being paid to various details of Jared Leto's Joker. It doesn't matter that we are sure to get more Joker as the DC Extended Universe plays on, be it in JUSTICE LEAGUE or a solo Batman movie or whatever other titles Warner Bros. is going to add to their slate for the next few years. Fans have questions about different things pertaining to the Joker, and that means the answers to come will explain away plenty of things we could be learning about the character along the way.

In fact, this is one of the problems that fan culture has right now is a feeling of entitlement to know everything right now. There is no patience anymore to let stories play out, to let details be revealed along the way. No… we want what we want, and we want it now. As a result, that leads to storytellers and filmmakers and studios trying to placate fan bases in order to keep them happy at all times, and now we have a disintegration of a system that once let us use our imaginations to fill in the blanks or that made us sit and wait until the story found the right time to reveal things to us. 

David Ayer, in speaking to Empire, has gone into detail about why the Joker has a "Damaged" tattoo on his forehead and why he's sporting a grill… as if we really needed to know that now. But people have been asking about them relentlessly, so we're going to find out regardless. 

"This is sort of my personal thing and maybe less about a larger connection. But Joker killed Robin and Batman basically smashes his teeth out and locks him up in Arkham Asylum. It’s in the asylum where Joker would have done the ‘damaged’ tattoo as a message to Batman saying, 'You’ve damaged me. I was so beautiful before and now you’ve destroyed my face.' That’s where the grill comes from."

The more you know, I guess…

Now wouldn't that have been something much cooler to see in a movie, in order to learn about the pain the Joker has caused for Batman with his loss and the Bat's methods for trying to treat it rather than being told in this manner? Of course it would have. Showing is always better than telling, but that's what a lack of patience and a sense of entitlement will get you. But what's the point of a movie taking time to feature what might be an important moment in us understanding the Batman-Joker relationship in this DCEU if we already know about it?

Good things come to those who wait… This might have been one of them had we been able to do that.

Source: Empire

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