“Dying is easy. Comedy – THAT’s hard.”
This Saturday, one of my friends wanted to see Joker with me, my roommate and another friend. And after we saw it, I said, “remember Gary, this was YOUR idea.”
Professional critics have pointed out that director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) has taken some pretty obvious inspiration from two of the classics Robert DeNiro made with director Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, in which a complete loser succumbs to his dark side and achieves a kind of ascension, and The King of Comedy, in which an even bigger loser becomes a supervillain because he completely fails at standup comedy. These elements are actually linked in the character played by Robert DeNiro in this movie, a local late-night talk show host in Gotham City who is an inspiration to the main character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) who struggles with mental illness and poverty even as he writes standup comedy and works as a hired clown, because he sees his life’s mission as “spreading joy and laughter to everyone.” So already you know this isn’t going to work out.
The reputation of this film has far preceded it, with said professional critics bagging on Joker not so much for its quality as a movie as for the message they think it’s sending. Gotham is clearly a stand-in for the failed administration of New York in the 1970s, prior to Rudy Guiliani (MY, how times have changed). In this age of disturbed “incel” gunmen, an unpopular and mentally disturbed person who turns to violence to make an impact seems to be too close to home. And as Bill Maher said months before, in regard to the remake of It, “if you’re trying to make a movie about a badly-painted clown who terrorizes the neighborhood – you’re a bit late.”
Reviews frequently use phrases like “numbing” and “empty.” Kevin Fallon at The Daily Beast called Joker “meaningless.” One review went into political analysis, describing the pivotal event that turns Arthur into a murderer (like that’s spoiling anything), getting on the subway in costume after getting fired from his clown job and being harassed and beaten by three drunks. He shoots them all in a scene that the critic describes as evoking the 1984 subway shooting by Bernhard Goetz of non-white teenagers. At the same time, critic Richard Brody admits that the drunks in Joker are white, but doesn’t point out that the men turn out to be connected to a certain millionaire’s company. He presents Joker as “an intensely racialized movie” in which the overt aspects of racism are “whitewashed” (as in the subway scene), but if anyone seems “racialized,” it’s Brody himself, who sees Joker as being a parody not of a Scorsese film, but of none other than Black Panther.
A lot of the backlash seems to be less
the film as it actually is than the perception that critics brought
to it in advance. So why is Joker such a threat to the
culture? Why is this Todd Phillips/Joaquin Phoenix Joker somehow
more offensive or dangerous than the Christopher Nolan/Heath Ledger
Joker?
Well, for one thing, Joaquin Phoenix makes the Heath Ledger
Joker look like Mr. Spock.
For another thing, the Heath Ledger Joker was never intended to be a character study. The whole point was that he was a character without a past. (Or as the Alan Moore Joker put it, ‘I prefer (my past) to be multiple choice.’) He is somehow easier to accept as a character who came into being ex nihilo as an Agent of Chaos.
Arthur Fleck, on the other hand, is presented as a product (if not a victim) of circumstances: child abuse, class struggle, an unfeeling or hard-pressed government that cuts social services, the works. The fact that there are violent losers in the real world who could claim such circumstances (and do use them to justify anti-social acts) makes the stakes seem that much more real to some people. Indeed, this movie goes so far into “realism” that it makes Christopher Nolan’s unrelentingly grim take on the Batman mythos look as wacky and family-friendly as Batman ’66.
Moreover, The Dark Knight is a movie where Good wins. Batman (and Lucius Fox) bet that the people of Gotham will not do the evil thing to save themselves under pressure, and because they do not, the Joker’s scheme is foiled. Joker is not nearly so optimistic. Arthur/Joker is simultaneously leader and follower of a stochastic wave of violence, in which an aristocratic class that thinks it knows better than the common rabble are pitted against a “kill the rich” mob determined to prove them right.
The Dark Knight was in 2008, only 11 years ago. I wonder what changed since then?
Joker is a good movie, in the sense that it is a unique personal vision that is perfectly executed. It’s just not a very uplifting one. Joker does NOT put the “fun” in “funeral.” As my friend Don said, “It was deeply disturbing, and then it was deeply disturbing over and over again.” We also agreed that it was more disturbing than the before-the-movie trailer for Doctor Sleep, which is the sequel to The Shining.
Still, Joker isn’t as disturbing as the trailer to Cats.
Nothing is more disturbing than that.