Friday, January 25, 2008

Killing Joker


The Mystery deepens to untold levels. Looking at the Dark Knight trailer, it's so painfully obvious that someone was looking very carefully at Killing Joke's video "Hosannas From the Basements of Hell." 


Ledger is made up to be a slightly more glamorous version of Jaz Coleman, who's been using that that type of makeup for almost 30 years. They even went so far as to borrow Coleman's unkempt hair. This Joker looks nothing like any version I remember and almost exactly like Coleman. Designers and stylists are constantly combing through any reference they can get their hands on for "inspiration," and it seems a no-brainer where the new Joker comes from.


Ellen Degeneres showed this clip (kudos to Just Me over at Meta-Logic Cafe for the scoop) when she announced Ledger's death. The video showing Ledger attacked by a crow, or better for our purposes, a raven.

Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven is not in the 'Hosannas' video. He had left the band before it was filmed to tour with Ministry. Three months before Heath Ledger died in his sleep, Paul Raven also passed away in his sleep. The video for 'Hosannas' was filmed around the same time as Ledger made that appearance on Ellen.

Remember now that this is the band that inspired Alan Moore to transform the Joker from a comic-relief Batman villain into the iconic character he is today. But Dark Knight completes the circle by paying visual tribute to Jaz Coleman with their new depiction of the Joker.

More and more all the time, it seems that the Collective Unconscious is speaking to us in profound and powerful ways. Or are we just more attuned to it since the Internet gives us the power to make connections instantaneously? The very nature of the Web seems to be encouraging people to new levels of pattern recognition. The more information you have at hand, the more the patterns begin to reveal themselves.

In ten years from today, our reality paradigm will be very much different.