Method Madness

The boardroom was a prism, engineered to refract both sunlight and ambition. Walls of glass overlooked the Hollywood Basin, so high that the city's noise was reduced to a trembling, insect hum.

The table, a slab of smoked quartz, seemed less a surface than a display case: beneath the glass, layers of legal vellum and carbon contracts gleamed like pressed flowers, each one an artifact of money, fame, and war.

At the head sat the Chairman of Warner Bros.—a man with an ex-CIA stillness, his suit tailored to constrict only when he breathed too deeply.

Around him, the heavy hitters: the head of Global IP, two senior partners from the legal division, a PR chief with cheekbones sharp enough to slice oranges, and, across from them, three agents from the most ruthless talent firm in the hemisphere. Nobody smiled. Not unless it moved the needle.

They'd been here for two hours, which was one hour longer than these people spent on weddings or funerals. The first thirty minutes were pleasantries—commendations, threats, the ritual chewing-over of NDA language. The next hour was all numbers, delivered with an almost tantric lack of affect.

Now, on a plasma display hovering at the end of the room: projected revenue.

$1,800,000,000

And below it, in parenthesis, as if shy: (21 days, domestic+international, no merchandise.)

The Chairman tapped the number with a Montblanc. The sound was so precise, it could have been used as a metronome for executions.

"Gentlemen. Ladies. As of this morning, we are tracking a global multiplier not seen since Titanic." He did not look at the numbers. He looked at the agents.

"And your client—" he tapped again, slower—"is the reason."

A woman from the agency, hair silver and severe, glided a folder down the table. It slid a perfect three feet before stopping in front of Legal. The gesture was so casual it almost seemed unscripted.

She said, "Our other client wants the Vale treatment. Backend, creative. The works."

The phrase hung in the air, loaded. The Vale treatment. The studio had spent millions trying to define it, and even more trying to reverse-engineer it. None had succeeded.

The Chairman smiled. It was a real, human smile, and it frightened everyone.

"There is no 'same' after Vale," he said.

"That's the problem, isn't it?"

Legal Partner #1: "The Joker contract was a black swan. It sets a precedent—"

Legal Partner #2 (interrupting): "—which we are eager not to repeat."

The agency rep drummed her fingers on the glass. Her nails were black, matte, and unchipped.

"You don't have a choice," she said.

"Not after the trailer. Not after the press tour. The world expects a myth, not a brand extension."

From the side, the PR Chief cut in.

"Chanel is offering eight figures. They want Vale as the face of 'Madness.' Global rollout, Times Square, Tokyo, Paris. We're in negotiation to split the rights with Chanel, not compete."

The Chairman looked at her, then at the room.

"Chanel is not a partner. Chanel is an amplifier. We need to control the message. We need to control the man."

The word "control" hit the table like a gavel.

A murmur: "Can anyone?"

The agency woman didn't move, didn't blink.

"He doesn't have to be controlled. Just aligned."

There was a silence, then. The kind that happens in the aftermath of a near-miss or before a decisive murder. No one wanted to be the next to speak.

Finally, Global IP took the floor.

"There is another problem," he said, scrolling his tablet.

"He hasn't left the penthouse since opening night. He's canceled three interviews, two photo shoots, and a Chanel creative meeting. We don't know if it's a strategy or a breakdown."

Legal Partner #2: "Or both."

The agency rep, now bored, said,

"He's not broken. He's ascending. You built him for myth, and now he's delivering. If you wanted safe, you'd have cast someone else."

The Chairman leaned back, templed his fingers. He watched the city through the glass, as if looking for an omen in the brown smog. Then, almost as an afterthought, he gestured to the Legal #1.

"Show them."

Legal #1 tapped at a remote, and the plasma display flicked from the numbers to a high-resolution drone photo of Marcus Vale's penthouse. The image was a monument to engineered loneliness: black marble, six-story glass wall, private rooftop, a perimeter of security lasers and absence.

"He's not in the building," Legal #1 said, quietly.

"But every week, a florist delivers fifty blood-red roses to the top floor. Never signed. Never refused."

Nobody spoke.

A producer, veteran of twenty box-office campaigns and four divorces, whispered,

"He's transcended acting." He meant it as a joke, but it came out like a confession.

"He's our modern myth now."

For a moment, it felt like a funeral—the kind where the corpse is a person you never really knew, and you're all just pretending you do.

The agency rep stood, gathering the folder. "We'll send a revised draft by five. If you want to talk to him, do it through us. If you want to see him, get in line."

The Chairman stood, too. "We're always first in line." His voice was velvet and ice.

Outside, two security guards in bespoke uniforms opened the boardroom doors. The meeting was over. The room emptied in silence, each executive carrying the weight of the new world they'd just inherited.

On the wall, the Joker's smile lingered on the paused display, teeth bright enough to light the skyline for miles.

....

The showroom was a sanctum, half-cathedral, half-laboratory. Every surface gleamed—stainless steel, smoked acrylic, the kind of polished white resin that made even a shadow look curated.

At the far end, a wall of LED screens rippled with slow-motion footage: Marcus Vale's Joker, cycling through a twenty-second loop of smiles, glares, and the peculiar, weightless moment just before violence. The video was set to silent, but the gravity in his gaze needed no soundtrack.

Lined before the screens were ten models, frozen in position as if awaiting judgment. Their bodies were dressed in the new season's statement: high collars of purple velvet, tailored suits in mint green and bruise gold, patent leather harnesses that gripped ribcages and spines.

The makeup was minimalist, almost sickly—skin pale as cake fondant, lips defined with a blue-black line, eyes ringed in wet, black shadow that blurred at the edges. Each model wore a different variation of the Joker's signature—sometimes a band of color at the neck, sometimes a line of silver staples tracing the jaw.

At the center, presiding over all of it, stood the creative director—a man in his fifties, bald except for a single silver stripe, his voice trained to cut glass even at a whisper.

He stalked the runway, hands behind his back, and addressed the coterie of designers, marketers, and photographers in attendance.

"This is not about clothing," he said, voice barely above a hiss. "This is about conversion. Transformation." He gestured at the models, who did not so much as blink.

"We're selling the experience of shedding your life. Of becoming myth."

A junior stylist scurried forward with fabric swatches, each one labeled in three languages, and fanned them out for the creative director's inspection. He flicked his fingers over the samples—merino, silk, something that might have been python skin—and selected two, dropping the rejects on the floor with practiced disdain. The stylist stooped, collecting them in silence.

Behind the creative director, three marketing executives crowded a Lucite table. They scrolled through an endless stream of social metrics, arguing in low, urgent voices about hashtag dominance and geo-targeted launches.

The terms were surgical: #Valewave, #Metamorphosis, #BeyondHuman. One exec, a woman in neon orange eyeliner, tapped her screen and whispered,

"We can own the meme cycle by Thursday if we leak the next campaign shot." The others nodded, awed or terrified by the possibility.

A glass door hissed open, and a woman entered—the CEO. Her hair was lacquered to a mirror shine, her shoes knives of patent red. She paused at the threshold, scanning the room, then drifted toward the main display. In her wake, a man in a white lab coat rolled a chrome cart to the center stage.

On the cart: a set of slender glass vials, each one filled with an amber or violet liquid, stoppered and labeled with elegant, matte-black script.

The man in the lab coat bowed his head, then addressed the creative director. "As requested," he said.

"The test samples."

The director plucked a vial labeled "The Vale Effect," uncorked it, and inhaled. For a second, his eyes closed; the moment bordered on erotic. He handed the vial to the CEO, who dabbed a drop onto her wrist and waited. She lifted her hand to her nose, lips parting as she tasted the air.

"Sensual," she said.

"But there's violence underneath." She nodded at the chemist, who looked both proud and afraid.

The director turned to the assembled.

"It must be addictive," he intoned,

"but also forbidden. We want people to be ashamed of how much they want it."

The CEO nodded, satisfied. She scrolled through projected sales on her tablet, watching numbers climb in real time. She looked up, eyes blazing.

"This will redefine luxury," she declared.

"Not just fashion. Desire itself."

As she spoke, a makeup artist approached one of the models. The model—barely out of her teens, with cheekbones like glass—sat perfectly still as the artist dusted her face with chalk-white powder, then painted a thin blue line along the lip, precise as a surgery.

The artist's hands did not tremble. With the last touch, he wiped his thumb across the girl's jaw, blurring the edge until it looked half-mortal, half-other.

The room fell silent as the transformation finished.

The model turned toward the creative director, awaiting command. For a moment, she looked more like Marcus Vale than herself—a coldly perfect vessel for the new mythos.

The director stepped forward, circling the girl. He smiled, then snapped his fingers.

"There it is," he said, softly.

"The new beautiful."

Everyone in the room leaned in, as if in prayer.

Somewhere, the Joker's face flickered on the LED wall, smiling in infinite slow motion.

Nobody could say if it was art, or if they'd all been bought.

.....

The world became a split-screen, flickering with the image of a painted smile.

On the BBC, a pale anchor in a midnight-blue blazer stared at the teleprompter as if the numbers were a kind of violence.

"One-point-eight billion dollars in just three weeks," she said, her accent the Queen's but her voice trembling on the word billion.

"The fastest-grossing film in cinematic history. And still climbing."

CNN ran a lower-third that blinked: "Joker Mania: Art or Madness?" The panel was five heads, all talking at once, their feeds stitched together by a producer with a taste for carnage. One critic, balding and bright-eyed, said,

"This isn't just box office, it's cultural possession." His opponent, a think-tank veteran in a chunky necklace, sneered:

"There's something dangerous about this level of influence. You can see it in the streets." A third panelist, younger, handsome, with the kind of voice that made you want to trust him, said, "We haven't seen an actor do this to an audience since Brando. Maybe not even then."

Hashtags trended and mutated by the minute: #JokerTakeover, #Valewave, #SmileThatWatched. Clips of the ballroom scene racked up millions of views by the hour. The smile became currency. The laugh—a ringtone, then an audio meme, then a thing teenagers practiced in the mirror, daring themselves to get it right.

In Tokyo, the Shinjuku skyline was plastered with Vale's face, projected in purple neon onto the sides of skyscrapers. News helicopters filmed the gathering of fans—some dressed in meticulous cosplay, others just wanting to stand where the image could fall over them like a benediction. When the hologram flickered, they screamed. When it glitched, they cheered.

In Paris, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées was hit overnight by a wave of street art. Every bench, every lamp post, every bare section of wall grew a Joker smile—sometimes sprayed in black, sometimes brushed in red. Within a day, the city's sanitation department gave up. The mayor shrugged on TV and said,

"C'est la folie collective." Everyone pretended not to love it.

Twitter became a bloodbath. Stan armies fought meme wars over which scene was the most iconic. Viral threads dissected every micro-expression. There were conspiracy theories about the Vale technique, message boards dedicated to decoding the laughter, and—inevitably—dozens of open letters warning about "emotional contagion." None of it slowed anything down.

Cut to a hospital waiting room, far from the glitter. The TV mounted in the corner cycled through news coverage while nurses checked their phones behind the desk.

On a hard plastic bench sat a boy of maybe seventeen, hands bandaged, staring straight ahead. Beside him, a woman—his mother, by the look of her—held a printout of the Joker's face, trembling in her grip.

In the hallway, a therapist conferred with a nurse.

"We're seeing five to six new cases a day. It's not just copycat violence—most of them just want to be seen. To matter." The nurse nodded.

"Like the mask is a way to not be afraid, for once."

Later, in a small therapy room, a psychiatrist leaned toward the camera, eyes level and unflinching.

"This isn't a moral panic," she said.

"It's a shift. We're witnessing mass psychological impact unlike anything cinema has produced before."

She paused, as if expecting someone to interrupt, then continued.

"It's more than a film. It's a prototype. It's a mirror that people can't turn away from."

For a heartbeat, the camera lingered on her face. Then the feed cut, replaced by the looping Joker trailer, teeth glinting, eyes ablaze.

And for the first time in a hundred years, the world was happy to let the mask do the watching.

.......

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