ABSTRACT
From Conrad Veidt’s starring role in Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) to Jared Leto’s brief appearance as the Joker in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (2016), one permanent possibility for human subjectivity has moved into visibility through actors: madness, which illuminates human nature as such, picturing that subjectivity cannot be genuinely comprehended, and would not be what it is, as Jacques Lacan reminds us, “without madness as the limit of its freedom” (2006 [1947]: 144). Madness is “freedom’s most faithful companion, following its every move like a shadow”, rather than “resulting from a contingent fact – the frailties of his organism – madness is the permanent virtuality of a gap opened up in his essence” (ibid.: 144). It is exactly this gap that is also opened up by actors, in “mad” or “insane” acting, through altered states, seemingly uncontrolled by reason or judgement, ruinously imprudent and/or extravagantly, wildly foolish, carried away, filled with enthusiasm, excited and exciting, infatuating and infatuated. These openings are especially performed by actors who dare to grasp their meaning, to treat them, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes, as “modalities and variations of the subject’s total being” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 123–124). Think of Nicolas Cage, Danny Glover, Klaus Kinski, Juliette Lewis, Margot Robbie, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider, or Tommy Wiseau, who all achieve to make visible a phenomenology of madness as an expression of the subject’s total being that pays reverential homage to the permanent virtuality of the gap opened up in the essence of freedom and has therefore produced several works of art that might be categorized as “cult”, especially if this gap is also filled with the addition of the subjectivity of a clown, a pantomime or harlequinade, a fool or jester as a stage or screen character, but also as an ambiguous, mysterious and even uncanny being on the screen. Think of Tim Curry as Pennywise on the TV screen in the mini-series Stephen King’s It (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990) or John Carroll Lynch as Twisty in the fourth season of American Horror Story titled Freakshow (Ryan Murphy, 2014), or go off screen and remember Ronald McDonald welcoming you at his restaurants, or Cindy Sherman’s photographs of clowns displayed in galleries (2014), and return to the cinema screen and watch the ensemble in Balada triste de trompeta (Alex de Iglesia, 2010), Andy Powers in Clown (John Watts, 2014), or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008):
