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August 5, 2009

Vicious Right Turn: Obama A Joker? Dead Heath Ledger? Vampire? …Or Just Wingnut’s Enigma?

By Michael Shaw

BHO Joker.jpg

If Obama’s election invited the dream of a new era of post-partisanship, that’s a harsh light suddenly streaming through the window. The craziness might just be orchestrated by a narrow targeted effort and then amplified by the far right internets. Either way, though, it feels like a swarm — as evidenced, for example, by the sudden inundation of screaming and all-too-synchronous sounding trolls on otherwise moderate to progressive discussion threads.

As part of the hate offensive, wingnut blogs — starting with Newsbusters — are trying to build buzz around this Obama poster supposedly showing up in L.A. Evoking the city’s tradition of political art-via-billboarding crew, the poster riffs off Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster with the one word message.

The LA Weekly, a tried-and-true left wing fixture, probably didn’t know what hit them after Steven Mikulan took a back-of-the-hand to this chilling Obama as Joker (and the dead Health Ledger). Particularly lighting up the wackos, choking the discussion thread and promoting thousands of diggs was Mikulan’s sign off comment: “The only thing missing is a noose.”

Regarding the image specifically, I’m interested in your read, particularly Obama in chalky white face. Besides the allusion to the President as a psychopath and more insidiously, a man behind a mask, does the chalk exploit race by suggesting the man is playing at being white? What I’m also concerned about, aside from the psycho-Joker reference, is the association to violence (emphasized by the gang tags in the background), Obama with the bloody mouth and, particularly, a couple of black eyes.

(image: Newsbusters)

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  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p00e5523476cc8834 DennisQ

    I don’t think the corporate attacks on Obama are going anywhere. They don’t look grass-roots and they don’t feel grass-roots. This ad in particular suggests focus groups and concept screening.
    Of course there’s racism involved. Sometimes I think that’s the only thing that motivates the noisier Obama-phobes. They can’t stand the idea that a Black man is president and is actually going ahead with an agenda. I suspect that health care reform wouldn’t have gotten these people off their couches if Obama were white.
    The country is returning to liberalism. Obama’s election is a product of that shift, but he’s doing more than being carried along. I’ve admired the way he evaluates an issue and knows just how much shove it needs. McCain is scratching his head about being trounced. But Obama did that to Hillary, too.

  • Ralph

    I saw where Dan Hopper of Best Week Ever said that the Obama/Joker poster did the opposite of what the tea baggers intend, because the Joker character is awesome, he gets things done. He’s the best Batman character ever, so he makes Obama look like somebody who can make things happen. It was funny, but I think the teabaggers, driven by their corporate interests and abetted by corporate media, are trying to pretend like they’re a democratic movement. We all need to get together like we did after the 2004 election and expose this stuff for what it is.

  • Bernini

    Here in Philly I recall seeing posters of W that showed his face contorted in such a way that his mouth looked like an a-hole. It was a disturbing image and since I have a healthy loathing of such a callous tool as W, I also thought it was an effective image. It was immediate, visceral, and signified protest.
    What strikes me about the Obama as The Joker poster is that when I read Socialism I am immediately reminded of the lame attempts Palin/McCain made to paint Obama with that label. Similar to the above comment, the wing nuts just can’t get guerrilla imagineering correct on any front. No one, besides kooky minority of a older generation, is moved by the word “socialism’ today. This barley registers as a protest. In fact, it will probably become an expensive collectors item. So much for socialism, whack jobs.

  • Stella

    This photo puts the creators of the ugly poster on a par with the poor fools who can do no better than scribbling on public walls to express themselves. It’s virtually meaningless.
    Of course the teevee will give it 2 or 3 days to live.

  • Progressive Mom

    Obama “done up” like this strikes me as the work of a person who is out of touch with contemporary and urban culture, but desperately trying to prove he/she isn’t. It’s a fail with the analogy (Obama as the Joker? Where’s the connection?) and it’s a fail in the metaphor (The Joker as a socialist?). There’s no actual political cartoon message to be gained here; just anger.

  • jonst

    Dennis Q wrote,
    “The country is returning to liberalism”. If you are of a mind to, please define “liberalism”. The joker poster makes me think of Christopher Walken….not exactly sure why, but it does. I find the “socialism” spin fascinating. First, for the reasons Bernini noted….how dated it is. And second, because it is so far from any factual basis…….that it IS almost akin to a cartoon caricature. I mean, you mind as well call Obama a “vampire”, or “werewolf”,.

  • Reece

    What always shocks me is that the rightwingnut never has to connect the ideas they present with any coherence or logic. Its almost as if the, dare I say, lack of intelligence in that group of people allows them to make any kind of connection they want. The Joker, as a character, cared nothing for other people or ideas. His mind was a jumbled mess of tragedy, anger, and violence punctuated with small bits of very sophisticated humor and large chunks of bad jokes. The Joker was a character born of violent selfishness and yet socialists are completely concerned with the will of the people (or the will of the mob, depending on your interpretation.)
    Even with all that, Obama is the least like any socialist I’ve ever known. In fact, I’d think of him more of a centrist or pragmatist.
    Why can’t they be conservative AND make sense at the same time?

  • david

    Ugly, mean and counterproductive. Typical wingnut “creativity”.

  • larco

    Obama’s already debunked the vampire meme: http://tinyurl.com/lhwfea.

  • larco

    Let’s try that again: http://tinyurl.com/lhwfea

  • bystander

    I needed to Google-up your previous discussions of Bernie Madoff and John McCain as The Joker.
    I’m not quite sure how well the Obama-as-Joker image stands with the previous two. I don’t have the means (read: technical skill) to put the three images side-by-side for comparison’s sake and I think I lose something by tabbing back and forth. [Save each image to my hard drive, [black box], upload single image to photobucket, and embed?]
    Anyway. It strikes me that the Obama version is overdone/overdrawn in comparison to the other two. In the Madoff and McCain versions there is an amplification of an element of each man that is revealed through the Joker lens. But, in the Obama version there isn’t an element exposed, it’s more like the entire man is hidden. It’s hard for me to see Obama through all the paint. I’m not saying this very well… the adult woman as makeup artist versus a three year old who got into Mommy’s makeup cache? The Obama version strikes me as a juvenile attempt to mimic. It misses the essence of the stagecraft.
    Because I have those other two images in mind, and have had them since the Obama image was done, it’s hard for me to think about a racial component. I get stuck thinking about the creators of the image trying to mimic other attempts and falling short. They made Obama’s image grotesque, but how all that links to socialism escapes me. There’s no intelligence behind it. Nothing subliminal has been unmasked.
    Ironic. With the full face mask on Obama, imo, the creators have effectively hidden anything they had intended to expose.

  • Joseph

    Very good comment, Bystander. My take on the image is similar in that I feel sympathy for the individual to whose face so much distortion is applied. This feeling focuses on the cuts to the mouth in particular. In the face of Heath Ledger’s Joker, the slits in the mouth communicate a sense of not only frightening pain but also menacing possibility that the viewer might receive the same heinous wounds. The interplay of those feelings short-circuits any sense of sustained empathy with the Joker. He is just too threatening.
    In contrast, this portrayal of President Obama doesn’t evoke any comparable resonance. I look at the image without entering into dialogue about its bearing toward me. It appears to be an image of an individual whose face is known to be inviting and attractive and that has been scarred here in a way that makes you wonder why anyone would want to hurt it in that particular way.

  • jonst

    Larco,
    My point is that one does not have to, for instance, debunk the “Vampire meme”. There is no such thing as Vampires. There is no such thing as the Joker, or super villains, (unless they be at Goldman Sachs). It is the child-like, embrace of fantasy, that, for better or worse, gets my attention.

  • bystander

    And, (via Andrew Sullivan’s the Daily Dish) Vanity Fair did a version of Bush as The Joker.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0115724f02ff970b Serr8d

    “Vicious Right Turn” ?
    We owe you.

  • http://www.doves2day.blogspot.com g

    True – they’ve “applied” the makeup to an image of his face and that’s how it looks. It looks like a layer over an image. The more skillfully done McCain image appeared more as if the makeup were actually on the man’s skin, as Heath Ledger’s makeup actually was. I think they chose the wrong image to alter, actually – for it to work, they should have chosen an image where his face was more expressive. Instead, what they’ve created looks like a zombie, not the Joker.
    And it’s odd, too, because in a funny way it demonstrates how Obama’s critics really can’t touch him – at least not so far – with ridiculous insults. They’ve thrown everything at him – Socialist, Gangstah Thug, Terrorist, Muslim operative, Elistist – now Zombie/Joker? So what’s one more? This is about as effective as calling him “Poopy-head.”

  • http://drivethrumall.blogspot.com Natalie

    I just think it’s bad street art (and obv. misuse of the term socialism). From what I’ve heard, this isn’t as widespread as the right wing think it is, and they’re hyping it because they finally get something for themselves. I don’t really find any racist connotation in this one – sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

  • http://www.victorfitzsimons.net Victor F

    I thought Republicans were supposed to be the stereotypical “tough guys” of American politics, and here they are, wetting their pants about a poorly-done poster of Obama in movie makeup? The reactionaries are so scared these days… I mean, what would Charlton Heston say?
    Hmm… lessee. The Joker in the “Dark Knight” was brilliant and effective. Are those the kind of associations these reactionaries are trying to make? “Socialism” is an element of every nation in the world where the government at least attempts to provide assistance to its people. I suppose these same reactionaries would like our military abolished, Social Security rescinded, the FDA done away with, Welfare and Medicare erased, and while we’re at it, let’s have every child be home-schooled. I mean, these reactionaries are really revolutionary! They want to dismantle the whole system!
    Mmm. I can almost taste the rat turds in my bread. To a brave new Tomorrow!

  • Reece

    ?
    The Left has never embraced those depicted.
    The Right claims the Far Right as its base.

  • Reece

    And by Left and Right, I mean Political Left and Political Right.
    Again, being conservative doesn’t make you Republican nor does being liberal make you Democrat.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/bagnews Michael Shaw (The BAG)

    Bystander, here are the two Joker images you’re referring w/ corresponding BNN posts:

    You can click through to original posts for larger sizes
    : The Joker’s On Us. illustration: Darrow for NY Magazine. March 2, 2008. Trickster McCain. illustration: Graphic designer Marco Acevedo.
  • http://www.woodka.com donna

    “Why can’t they be conservative AND make sense at the same time?”
    Impossible request, conservatism doesn’t make sense. Change is the way of the world, and to fight it IS insane, by definition.

  • http://www.woodka.com/ donna

    And Laura Bush made a FAR better comparison to the “original” joker….
    http://www.bongonews.com/layout4.php?event=1725
    Now THAT was funny….

  • Robin Lee

    I don’t know. It seems darker to me than the rest of the comments suggest. A lot of us dismiss the wackos because to us they are illogical, incoherent, and utterly unconvincing. But they’re not trying to convince us, they’re trying to convince just enough of everyone else that Obama is both illegitimate and some sort of deviant. We’re seeing that it doesn’t take a majority of people at a meeting to poison the debate so I wouldn’t be so dismissive of such potentially powerful visual rhetoric.

  • mcc

    Along the lines of what several other commenters have already said, I can only really look at this as part of a larger pattern of the right getting so wrapped up in their internal mythology and Fox-News-constructed reality that to anyone outside the circle they just seem to be talking in some sort of code. As a movement they have moved beyond “arguments” and in some cases “sentences” and are presenting to the public a baffling word salad where you have to actively do research just in order to know who “ACORN” is and what exactly it is they mean when they use the word “socialism”.
    This poster is a fantastic example because of how simple the task they messed up was. You don’t really need an excuse to compare a public figure to a supervillain. The number of random joker photoshops linked in this thread are a testament to that. This poster would, even if it weren’t exactly the highest form of political discourse, make perfect and immediate sense if they’d just cut off the word at the bottom and let the picture to speak for itself. It might have even been a bit creepy. But with the label the effect is just to baffle almost any potential viewer. What is the label trying to communicate? What is the poster trying to communicate, with this label present? Was the Joker… socialist? Did they even watch the movie before making this poster? Of course admittedly I myself walked in a bit late to “The Dark Knight” and missed the first five or ten minutes, so maybe I missed an extended segment (perhaps during or immediately after the bank robbery scene?) where the Joker gives away rebates for new cars and attempts to found a health insurance company.
    This poster could have labeled Obama-as-Joker with the word “poopyhead” and it would have communicated the same intent and message, but would have made more sense and actually been comprehensible to people who haven’t rewired their brains such that wingnutese is actually comprehensible. On the other hand maybe that’s the point, maybe all this jargon is like a secret handshake and it’s not supposed to make sense to us Outsiders, maybe the message is designed to covertly connect for someone ensconced in a certain culture and sail over the rest of us’s heads. It is this sort of thing that makes people wonder whether when right-wingers attack Obama for being a “socialist” or a “muslim” that they’re actually just searching for a word to communicate something else, something they can’t say outright.

  • Tena

    “maybe that’s the point, maybe all this jargon is like a secret handshake and it’s not supposed to make sense to us Outsiders,”
    You got it.
    Words do not mean the same things to the Right and the Left and that’s because the Right has their own meanings for words and if you don’t know the meaning, then you aren’t one of the righteous.
    We are talking AT each other and each side is speaking a language the other side does not understand. I find it deeply upsetting because we cannot communicate anymore between the Right and Left and I really don’t know what will happen if this divide keeps widening.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a4ca3aad970b Liz

    The best all-time joker political creation was that one of Bush in Vanity Fair a couple of years ago. It was effective because we knew Bush seemed to enjoy that type of role. It is interesting that the poster is getting the attention in Los Angeles – the city that many many years ago made movies picturing white actors in black face.

  • jaydenver

    I was going to post this earlier but was waiting to see some other comments. Your take on this seems more like the one I was going to suggest:
    It seems that many of the attacks on the current President are designed to dehumanize and de-Americanize him. This will make it a whole lot easier for some wacko to “do the vicious right thing.” I read where death threats against Obama are 400% more numerous than those received during the previous administration. I guess that’s one way of reading “We owe you.”
    Funny how we both used the “wacko” designator.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a4ca3aad970b Liz

    PS The people at Freaking News have a some posts right now related to the Joker/Obama poster.
    I actually like this Hillary one and I am a Hillary fan. I can see the humor here, but it is probably not universally shared.
    http://www.freakingnews.com/Campaign-of-Terror-Pictures-68951.asp

  • jaydenver

    What happened to “Vicious Right Turn?” You’ve made Serr8d’s comment pointless. If you’re going to change the headline, use the strikethrough not the memory hole. Keep the playing field level and fair.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/bagnews Michael Shaw (The BAG)

    Jaydenver,
    Yes, thanks. I meant to add to the title, not replace. Apologies to Serr8d too.

  • Julie L

    I just saw that pic on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and thought “who the heck is that?” To me, Obama is unrecognizable – what made this pic recognizable was the 4 images together, which reminded me of the Fairey pic.
    My dad has been raging about Obama’s socialism for months now. sigh.

  • bystander

    Thanks, Michael! Appreciate the technical help. It seems much clearer to me with these versions arrayed on the same page that the Obama version is a really unsophisticated knock off. Looking back, to include the one done of Bush by Vanity Fair, it’s evident there’s no artistry in the Obama version at all. Without the artistry it lacks message, I think. Madoff’s Ponzi just trust me scheme, McCain’s Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran … the Joker overlay was evocative. The one of Bush is more puzzling. When I first looked at it, I thought it was of his father (41 as opposed to 43). But, were I to project 43 to his father’s age some years in the future, that is how I would imagine the torture of innocents in Bagram, Gitmo, and others to “hang” on him.
    I’m as puzzled as I was when I first looked at the Obama poster. This means … what… exactly? Certainly Obama is ghoulish looking. And, maybe that’s all there is to it. The Right’s visceral antipathy on display. I still can’t put racism to it; all of the Joker images bleach out the faces to some degree. The violence? Well, coupled with gang signs that mark territory … Maybe. There’s been a fair bit of press to the threats various representatives are receiving. Maybe the Obama image presages those threats. Was the Obama image intended to be a warning? Who knows. The rump of the Right looks increasingly undone.

  • dada

    Here’s link to the original artwork. A photoshop of Obama’s TIME mag cover. It was just part of a collection of images a design student put on his Flicker page back in January. My impression is that it wasn’t political and just done for fun.
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/khateeb88/3206380753/
    But this doesn’t answer who grabbed that image and altered it by taking away the TIME mag cover, stretching out the image, using painterly photoshop effects, adding border, adding Socialism tag.
    It also doesn’t answer what the Socialism poster poster’s intention is. It’s a rather confused political statement and was probably done by a (small or big L) libertarian prankster!

  • yg

    the actor who played this character is dead. setting it up in a mug shot/criminal/wanted poster format expresses rightwing desire to see obama dead too.

  • mcc

    From TPM:

    The Secret Service is now looking into a fax that was sent to the office of Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), which appeared to be a death threat against President Obama. The fact was of the infamous Obama/Joker picture that has been circulating among right-wing activists, with a message added: “Death to All Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!”

  • yg

    nice catch.

  • Buskertype

    The main thing this image makes me think is “lynching”.
    White, corpse-like face paint, dark eyes (coon eyes perhaps) mutilated mouth.
    For what it’s worth, I don’t think the two other jokerized photos are much more palatable.

  • Sarah Deere

    You’re digging too deeply, assuming too much sophistication and sublety. All this poster meant to do was ro conflate Obama with a “villain” and to hammer home that he is a “socialist”. Never mind that the Joker a la Heath was not a socialist. It has, really, nothing to do with White Face, IMHO. It’s just trying – as I say – to marry Obama to “EVIL”. Honestly, most of these nuts are not that abstruse in their thinking. They just want to KILL. Their impotence feeds their rage.

  • paulw

    It’s important to note that the people who made the poster probably saw the film. In it, the Joker was a Revolutionary Nihilist who wanted to overthrow the public order and pit people against each other.
    More important, the movie showed the Joker as clearly both insane and evil, I don’t think it is intended to portray a deeper message than that. Indeed, that’s been the Right’s message on the healthcare debat all along, that the new system will be evil and insane.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a4fffd34970b monkey

    I have to laugh at all these letters condemning the republicans for trying to convey some sort of message by making this Joker depiction when they are so obviously out of touch with America.
    Oops, It seems that the artist was a young in touch artist of sorts from Chicago and wow he’s a democrat. Reread all these letters and laugh at all the insight these literary and social geniuses had to bestow upon us.

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