Even with a few months remaining in the year, it’s safe to say that 2019’s most talked-about movie will be Todd Phillips’
Joker (2019), starring Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. That’s partially because the character of the Joker is one of pop culture’s most notorious villains, made especially relevant to contemporary audiences via Heath Ledger’s brilliantly manic portrayal in 2008’s
The Dark Knight; but even more so because
Joker’s thematic material differs, shall we say, violently, from other comic book movie installments.
Ah yes, violence. We just can’t get enough of it, so the cultural narrative goes. And the Narrative has a point: violence now pervades our favorite shows, our favorite films, and our favorite games. It’s so often the glue that holds us to our screens: it makes us gasp, cry, cheer. If we take a step back from those screens, we might notice that the commonality shared by the most critical- and viewer-acclaimed television shows of the past decade is that they feature most of their characters being brutally killed. Netflix in particular has become proficient in stirring up one bloodbath after another, spoon-feeding us drug cartels, mafias, murderous politics, zombie apocalypses, medieval wars, serial killers, even fire breathing dragons. Where there’s murder, there’s Netflix ™.
But there’s something strange about all this pop-violence that we supposedly love so much. What I mean is that it’s always oddly distant, fantastical, not at all relevant to our lives. It takes place in strange worlds. For instance, there are no actual zombies. There are no dragons. The mafia isn’t exactly a major presence at this point. Sure, these popular entertainment landscapes are violent, but they’re fictionally violent in an obvious way; they lack the threat of nearness. We feel brave in the presence of this brand-name violence: since it’s largely irrelevant to our lives, it can’t shake us.
It’s not just television, either. The most celebrated cinematic movie villains share this fantastical otherness to their evil deeds. The typical movie murderer is mentally ill and simply predisposed to violence without any explanation or hope for change: take Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) for example, who appears to have been born with incurable bloodlust; or Norman Bates of Pyscho (1950), whose mommy issues are so ingrained as to leave him staring gleefully from his cell at the film’s conclusion. Even Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight is explicitly stripped of a backstory, leaving us to assume that he simply grew up wanting to blow up hospitals—that he doesn’t need a reason to do so, other than his own insanity.
But this is kind of portrayal is divorced from reality. This is not how mental illness actually works. As a psychiatrist myself, I can testify to the gross inaccuracy of the perception, brought about in large part by such films, that violence is a symptom of mental illness. Filmmakers seem to like this notion, however, and one might venture that they have embraced it because it makes their movies scarier.
I disagree. Rather, it seems to me that they have embraced it because it makes their movies less scary—and thus more tolerable. Sure, if a man truly did exist who drank Chiantis and listened to classical music and ate human brains, and could not distinguish between the fineness of these activities; then yes, this would be frightening. But we know on some level that this man does not and could not exist, and this makes the supposedly terrifying character bearable, even fun. Neither do we shrink from Ledger’s Joker—we want more. Why wouldn’t we? He has nothing to do with us, with our world. Just like zombie apocalypses, characters like these pose only mimed threats; they suck the horror out of brutality.
Phillips’ Joker restores that horror. Here is a different kind of violence; here is that rare, daring film that serves us our craved daily dose of murder—R rating thoroughly deserved—without the comforting distance of a fictional world or an inconceivable killer. Joker isn’t ostensibly set in present day America, but its universe is unmistakably our own world, and the killer is equally real; that is to say, he’s a man very similar to many other men who exist at this very moment in virtually every community in America, and he commits gruesome acts that, as evidenced by recent headlines, are quite plausible indeed for such men to commit, given the wrong combination of circumstances.
Over the past twenty years, since the Columbine shootings of 1999, we’ve seen people, typically young men, sometimes but not always mentally ill, go on murderous rampages leaving several, sometimes dozens, dead. Why and how is this happening?
Director Phillips, with the help of the prodigious Phoenix, credulously illustrates the stepwise progression into this very type of real-world homicidal behavior. I’ll spend the bulk of this piece moving through that progression as Phillips plots it, noting as I go the insights contained therein.
——————————–
Let’s begin. Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), our protagonist, is mentally ill and severely so. When we meet him, though, he doesn’t seem to harbor any propensity for violence. He is, in a word, pathetic—struggling mightily to hold a job, in part because of bad luck (a gang of boys steals his promotional sign and beats him with it), but in larger part because he is socially awkward in the extreme. When a passing woman in his building mimes a gun to her head in a humorous manner, he attempts to flirt with her by mimicking the gesture with a far more gruesome flair, demonstrating a disconcerting inability to pick up and act on routine social cues. He aspires to be a comedian, but even his mentally ill mother, who has faith in her son’s goodness, knows that he lacks even the remotest feel for humor.
In addition his social ineptness, Fleck, thanks to a childhood brain trauma, has been saddled with a painfully uncontrollable laugh. This means that, like many real people with mental illness, Fleck can’t hide among the mentally healthy. In contrast with Travis Bickle, the protagonist from Martin Scorsese’s classic noir Taxi Driver (1979) (which many have compared to Joker) who carries on normal conversations and only occasionally sends ominous signals, Fleck doesn’t have the luxury of brooding undetected: because of his inappropriate laughter, everyone who meets him knows something’s up. He writes in his journal that the worst part about mental illness is the expectation of pretending not to have one—an expectation he is unable to fulfill.
A turning point comes when Fleck acquires a gun. Here we are forced to reckon with our American society, in which it would in fact be fairly easy for a sick man similar to Fleck to get his hands on a lethal weapon. Very tellingly, we soon see Fleck brandishing the gun in his living room while playing out a curious fantasy: he imagines impressing a woman with his dancing skill (a highly improbable occurrence) and fatally shooting her other suitor. The scene—Phoenix’s much sadder rendition of Taxi Driver’s “You talkin’ to me?” monologue, updated to reflect our new incel-inhabited world—shows us that Fleck harbors jealous resentment toward more socially adept men, as well as frustrated desire to successfully woo women, and that these internalities are immediately merged with the possibilities offered by the firearm. Fleck’s “good dancer” fantasy, in essence, is that the gun (and the discharge of it) will turn the tables, make him cool.
It’s no wonder, then, that Fleck soon thereafter commits the alarming blunder of bringing the gun into a room full of children. It’s clear based on this act that he’s already attached to the weapon; it must go with him everywhere. When he’s justly fired for this misstep (and he’s lucky this is all that happens, as he’s already fired the gun in his own apartment by accident), we sense something brewing: the ostracism induced by the carrying of the gun has actually led him deeper into the very social hole of which it already seemed to him that only the gun could lift him out.
And when three Wall Street bros on the subway venture to beat up the hopelessly laughing Fleck, an incident similar to the one he endured in the opening sequence, the gun is indeed the equalizer. Two are dead in seconds, but it’s not just a defensive impulse: Fleck menacingly tracks down the third and shoots him five times in cold blood. The gun therefore makes good on its previously felt promise: not only to get revenge on the cool kids, but, later we see, to make Fleck himself cool, as a substantial number in Gotham subsequently rally behind the murder, wearing clown masks in homage to its perpetrator. Fleck soon afterward tells his therapist: “For most of my life I didn’t know whether I really existed. But I do. And people are starting to notice.” Thus, Fleck’s initial inkling that the gun could provide the social calibration that he longed for is dishearteningly proven correct.
Relatedly, immediately after the incident, Fleck imagines or hallucinates himself finding and kissing the woman that he attempted to flirt with in the elevator earlier, and continues to believe that he is in fact dating her. We can deduce that due to the positive attention (though anonymous) that he is receiving for the triple murder, he sees himself for the first time as valuable, worthy. A girlfriend is, for the first time, conceivable, and he’s able to imagine the notion as reality. Again, violence has for the first time given Fleck a sense of acceptance and social standing.
Another interesting development is that media largely interprets the rallying behind Fleck’s triple murder as a watershed protest against wealth inequality in Gotham. But this is interpretation is incorrect. Fleck’s acts on the Subway are fueled by the men’s cruelty toward him (and possibly also by their cruelty toward an unknown woman on the same car), not by their perceived wealth. He confirms as much in the movie’s climax, telling talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) that he is not at all political.
In fact, it seems that the city’s media has largely misinterpreted the entire uprising that progressively envelops Gotham throughout the film. While newspaper headlines and Thomas Wayne dismiss the increasingly numerous protesters as jealous have-nots, the event that eventually sparks virtual anarchism on the streets has nothing to do with wealth inequality. Instead, it’s Fleck’s lament on live TV that there is “no civility” anymore, followed by his (likely true) accusation that Franklin merely invited him on the show to laugh at him—followed, of course, by Franklin’s brains landing on the back of the set. When Fleck is arrested, he is rescued by protesters from the cop car and raised up as the movement’s leader.
It appears, then, that the wealth inequality issue has been mostly a red herring popularized by the Gotham press. The hatred motivating the protesters has originated not in wealth disparity but in the social cruelty that the city’s common folk have experienced. Fleck’s words on Franklin’s show, as ensuing events demonstrate, strike at the true heart of the matter: the rebellion is against the cool kids, the bullies—not the rich, although these two groups may often overlap. I wonder if 2019 politicians are absorbing this insight.
I’ll move now to perhaps my favorite scene in the film: the one in which Fleck is preparing for his appearance on Murray Franklin, and his two friends from the clown agency, Randall and Gary, arrive to share their worries about the progressing police investigation into the triple murder. Fleck takes this opportunity to murder Randall in gory fashion, leaving the diminutive Gary whimpering in the corner in fear. Fleck allows Gary to leave, but a problem arises: Gary is too short and cannot reach the latch to unlock the door.
I suspect that the effect of this moment can only be fully felt watching the film in a theater. That’s because the situation is so absurdly unfortunate—Gary attempting to escape a murderer but hampered by the unremarkable height of the lock—that it compels laughter. During my viewing, most of the audience, including myself, gave in to (at least cautious) laughs. But Fleck doesn’t find it funny in the least, apologizing to Gary and sending him on his way, noting that he was always one of the few to display kindness to the killer. It struck me in that instant that the Joker, if he did exist (and I’ve already posited that, in some form, he does), then I, as well as most of the audience, would be among his targets.
This admonishment to the audience is completed when, during Fleck’s ensuing talk show appearance, he complains to Franklin: “I’m tired of people telling me what is funny and what isn’t.” He’s thus challenged us to some introspection, a rare happening in contemporary film: can we justify laughing at Gary for failing to reach the lock? Maybe we can’t; maybe we were wrong to do so. But if that isn’t funny, what is? Does the real humor lie, as Fleck contends, contrastingly, in the demise of the bullies, like the Wall Street friends on the subway? After all, we’re going to laugh at someone—who’s it going to be?
When a subway riot leaves a few police officers at the mercy of protesters, Fleck howls with laughter and dances a jig. This is behavior typical of the Joker character, as we might have seen from Jack Nicholson’s or Heath Ledger’s renditions (or, for 90’s children like myself, Mark Hamill’s); but now there’s a weird accusatory feel to it. Why laugh at Gary, vulnerable to a murderer because he can’t reach a simple lock—and not at the heretofore-powerful cops, now in mortal danger themselves?
Joker ends with Fleck in a mental institution, and insinuates that he imagined the whole thing. I sympathize with viewers who were irritated by this last layer of ambiguity, but I wasn’t. That’s because this device allows Fleck to challenge us once more, as he laughs in reflection of the film’s events, whether real or imagined, and calls them “a joke.” He tells his psychiatrist, certainly our stand-in, “You wouldn’t get it.”
And we wouldn’t; we didn’t. We, contrastingly, laughed at Gary trying to reach the lock. We laughed at Fleck walking straight ahead into a glass door in front of two cops. We laughed at Fleck melting down in front of his first comedy club audience. We laughed at the quips of Murray Franklin. We did not laugh at Fleck’s sparking rebellion and anarchy in Gotham.
But when the downtrodden Fleck first picked up the gun, his thin fingers sliding, enticed, over the metal, it irrevocably clicked for him that there was in fact a way to deal with us and our collective failure to laugh—a way to finally flip who gets to laugh at whom. The movie ends with Fleck exiting the interview room, tracking on his feet the blood of his humorless audience.
—————————-
As I alluded to in my introduction, Joker has caused controversy and polarization. The source of this controversy is the temptation to be outraged at Phillips for implicating us in our own society’s ills—for suggesting that, in Fleck’s words, we “get what we fucking deserve.” I only need to refer you to Joker’s rating on the dismal review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes to demonstrate that even some of our finest critics have fallen to that temptation.
But it would be a mistake unworthy of even a casual viewer to seriously evaluate Fleck’s vengeful morality, and it would be even more egregious to base our favor for the film on our concordance with it. Rather, we must evaluate the truth of what we see. We must evaluate whether it’s indeed realistic that a man could come to harbor such a morality based on his experiences in society, and whether many would indeed exalt him for expressing it.
Based on the insights I laid out in this review, I say that it is, and that they would. That’s why I, for one, found Phillips’ and Phoenix’s collaboration riveting, authentic, and, dare I say it… scary.
— Jim Andersen
You must be logged in to post a comment.