Poison x The People’s Joker: Who Owns Our Image? @ YBCA

Presented by Frameline & YBCA /// Tickets Here

Who owns our image? Under late-stage capitalism, everything is property—from your shoes to your phone to your identity. So why not steal the classics? (You couldn’t save enough anyway.) Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991) and Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2022) twist the canon of beloved American narrative conventions into organisms that reflect defiant, new ways to represent queer life.

Poison reimagines and recontextualizes three classic genres—the prison film, the monster film, and the broadcast news magazine—through a queer lens. The People’s Joker reclaims the copyrighted characters of the Batman comics to redraw (and redraw, and redraw) a trans woman’s origin story as pop mythology. In an attempt to reclaim ownership of their images, these two films amount to a sum greater than their parts.