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FirmhandKY -> RE: Obama as "The Joker" (8/4/2009 7:26:34 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
How the hell is this supposed to be racist? "The only thing missing is a noose???" That strikes me as very polarizing, and very dumb.
When I first saw the poster, what immediately came to mind was "A Clockwork Orange":
Photo 1.
Photo 2.
When I went looking, I found that that was a pretty good first instinct:
Heath Ledger's Joker is No Joke!:
Ledger said that his Joker is intended to scare the audience and cited Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) as an early influence on his performance. Ledger told MTV, “(The Joker) has zero empathy.”
I think the book "The Clockwork Orange"'s message is more on point as well:
Burgess wrote in introduction to the 1986 edition, titled A Clockwork Orange Resucked, that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil; or the almighty state".
Some other points of view about the Stanley Kubrick movie:
From South Africa
A Clockwork Orange is quite simplistic in its message, namely that a man with no free will isn't really a man at all. As one character states: "The question is whether or not this technique really makes a man good. Goodness comes from within. Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man."
From a site on the Kubrick move:
Here's a nasty little future courtesy of Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) in his novel A Clockwork Orange. By the turn of the 21st century men are on living on the Moon, but life on Earth has descended to a choice between the Scylla of rampant street violence and the Charybdis of a nascent police state. Gangs of brutal young men rule the cities at night and roam the countryside in stolen cars to attack isolated homes in orgies of burglary and rape.
The government's remedy to this epidemic of crime is an experimental programme to "reform" young hooligans with a rather sledgehammer variety of aversion therapy that involves strapping the offender down and showing him films of sex and violence while drug injections cause him to be violently ill. Eventually, even the thought of committing a wrong act becomes so literally nauseating that the offender has to scotch the idea or face suffocation. As an unfortunate side effect, it also causes violent illness while listening to Beethoven, but you can't make an omelette, etc. etc.
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... why having free will is so vitally important.
I think the "Socialist" part of the Obama poster is trying to get to the same thing.
Firm
edited: format
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