Ryan McNeil
There comes a point in JOKER, when the titular character tells the set-up for a joke and the punchline is a killing. It’s unclear if this moment is meant to be absurd, shocking, humorous, or some mixture of the three.
What’s clear is the the dark soul who carries out the deed is ordinarily a villain. So what are we to make of the fact that in this movie, that twisted man is the hero?
JOKER is the story of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). Arthur is deeply down on his luck in Gotham City. When we meet him, he is taking odd jobs as a clown – and the first time we see him working as a walking advertisement, he gets jumped by a pack of kids.
He is seeing a social worker about his anxieties, not that it seems to be doing him much good. Glances at what he writes in his journal and listening-in on his sessions indicate that he is very much in a dark place.
What’s more, Arthur is living with his mother in a derelict Gotham apartment that isn’t doing his mental health a whole lot of good. He does get on reasonably well with one of his neighbours named Sophie (Zazie Beets), but that is of little solace to our hero.
As time passes, things for Arthur go from bad to worse. First, he bombs on-stage when pursuing his dreams of stand-up comedy, then he gets fired from his clowning gig, and finally he is harassed again on the way home by three wolves of Wall Street.
Arthur snaps, and kills all three men. That night his mother has a stroke, and he is openly mocked for his lack of comedic skills by a late night television host (Robert DeNiro).
Whatever remained of Arthur dissipates shortly after. The man we knew begins to dress and act as the clown society accuses him of being. “The Joker” is born, and Gotham will no longer be able to look away from the man who felt ignored for so long.
Let it not be said or suggested that JOKER is a failure of performance or rendering. Quite the contrary, this film contains an unbelievable performance by its lead and a dark and disturbing world built by its filmmakers. If JOKER is a failure – and to be clear, I believe it is – it is primarily a failure of writing.
JOKER wants to have us believe that when the world turns its back on us that we are justified in turning our back on the world. Moreover, this story suggests that anyone who can motivate the world to turn its back on itself is someone to be lionized. As if to drive the point home, when we watch Arthur ascend a public staircase time after time, he is worn and weary. Seeing him descend though is something he does with relish, rhythm and aplomb. We aren’t supposed to cheer for a person’s descent…and yet that’s precisely what this film wants us to do.
That’s all if one were to consider the story of JOKER in a vacuum…which, of course, we cannot.
Late in the game, Joker declares that he used to believe his life was a tragedy but now he understands that in-fact, it’s a comedy. Trouble is, this thought disagrees with his actions. If everything that has happened to him is just layer upon layer of absurdity, he is not justified in taking action against it. After all, in the circus, it’s the ringmaster that cracks the whip – not the clowns.
Where usually The Joker as a character shows-up fully-formed, this movie wants to widen-out the lens and depict how he got the way he got. According to this film, this man is not a psychopathic murdering criminal, but in-fact a man with mental health issue, who found himself isolated and alienated. It wants us to know that his dark feelings and urges are not his fault.
The problem is that even if those feelings and urges are not his fault (and that’s a big “if” within the scope of this film), they are his responsibility. JOKER doesn’t seem to understand or care about the individual responsibility, and that’s what makes this film so problematic.
JOKER wants to paint its subject as a hero – as a man who the system failed and who pushed back against that failing system. The trouble is Joker doesn’t push back against the failing system – he shoves a stick of dynamite into the gears and lights the fuse. That’s not heroic: That’s anarchy and should not be celebrated.
Part of what has always made Joker so fascinating is the way he says things that make a certain level of sense. He has told us through the years things like:
“Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened”
or
“Their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They’ll eat each other. See I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve“
What the stories that feature such morsels of insanity require are heroes that can look Joker in the eye and say in a clear voice “No it’s not. Sit down and shut up”. Absent that person – cape or no cape – these carnival proclamations are allowed a chance to become parables. They are whispered, and then they are declared, and soon they are chanted by gathered mobs.
This is not the time to whisper such dark ideas, nor the time to declare them.
The world we live in is on fire; please pardon me if I don’t want a prose poem about a match.
“JOKER wants to have us believe that when the world turns its back on us that we are justified in turning our back on the world.”
All the positive things I can say about Joker come from where it is showing empathy, not nihilism – where negative actions are not forgiven, but are a warning. I dont see a lit match at all – it’s a call to pay attention to the system handing out the matches to the same people they are abandoning. That people dont want to rise up and burn the city down… but they will if you push them too far. And God help us if they rally around an anarchistic charismatic populist figurehead who has already given up on making things better.
Anyone sho lionized Joker likewise has misread the movie. Like Walter White, you are meant to both relate to him and be horrified by his choices, be made to feel guilty for when you are rooting for him, and guilty by proxy for all the people like him we have abandoned and will keep abandoning.
The film is a call for empathy and not at all permission for nihilism. Apathy is the true villain of the film, and the tragedy is watching Arthur ultimately embrace it.
On the meta level it also demands revisiting exactly what Batman represents especially when it comes to his tactics, and what kind of attitudes regarding empathy and nihilism he perpetuates when he is portrayed as the hero by default.
Anywho: you know me. My favorite thing in movies is when they are empathy exercises.