​JOKER - A RESPONSE

 
This is definitely not a review. This will definitely contain massive, total spoilers for the Joker movie. Proceed accordingly - and with the understanding that in my view, this is a movie best experienced cold as possible; in other words, if you’re going to go see it, maybe come back here after.
 
To steal an out of context quote from Guardian-reviewed horror author James Everington; Well, fuck.
 
I guess I’ll start with the disclaimers; Joker is a cultural icon that is incredibly important to me. I was a pretty avid Batman fan from the ages of thirteen to my mid twenties, and his rogues gallery in general, and Joker in particular, was a huge part of the reason why. And while I owned and enjoyed The Killing Joke, I was still - am still - ideologically opposed to the notion of a Joker origin story. For me, one of the central brilliances of the conceit of Joker is his fundamental unknowableness - even as the arch nemesis of the World’s Greatest Detective, he’s the one member of the Batman’s rogues gallery for whom the entry on the Batcomputer reads ‘Real Name: Unknown’.
 
So to describe my feelings as I sat down to watch this movie for the first time as mixed would be an understatement. ‘Who says I’m indecisive? I’m conflicted!’ as the mayor in Dark Knight Returns would put it. I think what tipped me into seeing it was mainly the initial critical response, which seemed.... Well, not universally positive, but it did seem to indicate it would be the kind of movie I would like.
 
I do also feel compelled to add that at least part of my wanting to see it was the, in my view, embarrassingly overwrought reaction to the trailer - the trailer, mind, not the film - from some people on the left/liberal twittersphere. For the first time in my usage of that site, I felt compelled to use the ‘mute word’ function to stop me seeing hot takes from people I under other circumstances like, posting commentary that in some cases wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from the mouth of Tipper Gore or Mary Whitehouse. I think the vast majority of nonsense talked about the ‘censorious left’ is grotesquely overblown, and often mistakes critique for censure (and even in this case, I feel compelled to add that nobody I saw was calling for the film to be banned, only rather performatively stating their intention not to see it), so it’s profoundly irritating to me when there’s an event like this and I see that, unfortunately, there is a small kernel of truth to some of the claims - or, at least, were in this case.
 
And it's doubly frustrating because, in my view, almost all of that commentary is just… wrong. As in, not in the movie.
 
Take the whole ‘incel as hero’ moral panic; the movie undercuts this completely, and indeed effectively deflates, if not demolishes, most of the ‘moral panic’ arguments against the film. These fears rest ultimately on a concern that the film is somehow ‘making it cool’, ‘it’ being murder and/or mayhem and/or mysogony and/or pick your bette nior of choise. But the movie just does not do this because Fleck/Joker in this movie (thank you Jack Graham for this observation) is simply never, ever cool.
 
The central performance by Phoenix is mesmerising, and you can’t take your eyes off him  - I mean that literally, as he’s on camera for almost the entire running time of the movie, and mostly center shot at that. He is, at moments, deeply pitiable, with an awful vulnerability and a desperate loneliness. But he is also shown as self absorbed, delusional, and unambiguously homicidal, and in none of those moments is the audience invited to enjoy or take glee in his awful actions. This is, in some ways, a revenge narrative, but it’s a revenge narrative that utterly fails to deliver any catharsis, at any point.
 
It was interesting to me that the movies early 80’s aesthetic seems to feed into that, making the movie visually reminiscent of, sure, Taxi Driver, but also Death Wish, Dirty Harry, and The French Connection. Hell, there’s even the odd moment when Pheonix looks into the camera where I felt I could detect an echo of Bales’ Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, in the set of the jaw and glint of the eyes. Flecks social situation is, of course, markedly worse than Bateman’s in every conceivable way (except, perhaps, at the start, with regard to his loving relationship with his mother, though that also ends up providing a catalysing moment for his spiral into psychosis in the final reel); still, there are some commonalities between the two men that are deeply uncomfortable.
 
Similarly, in the subway sequence where Fleck kills for the first time there are clear visual and narrative echos of Jodie Foster vehicle The Brave One; though, again, the differences are crucial, as they remove any sense of catharsis from the scene. Yes, the three men who start hassling the woman before turning on Fleck, are awful, gross men, all entitlement and boozy aggression and flashy watches. Still, Fleck is no hero. When he sees the woman's discomfort, he doesn’t try to intervene; he looks away, and it’s only his involuntary laughter that provides her an opportunity to escape, as the men turn their attention to him.
 
The scene itself is also shot and edited exquisitely, the use of the frequent flickering and occasional brief blackout of the lights giving events a sense of hyper reality; also feeding into the first gun shot, so that for a second, it's not clear what the flash signifies, though the noise and blood soon provide unwelcome clarity. To steal a meme, this sequence is going to be taught in film classes.
 
In this section, though, there are two crucial narrative events that turn it away from the catharsis of Foster’s pre-emptive revenge on her would-be rapists - one obvious, the other subtle, but I think ultimately more telling.
 
The first is that he shoots all three. The first killing could have been justifiable - certainly the look on Fleck’s face as the gun goes off is one of deep shock, and by the point he’s taking the shot, he’s lying on the floor being kicked by three men. I mean, people have been killed as a result of that kind of beating, and if you have a society that allows gun ownership (though earlier Fleck says ‘I’m not allowed to have that’ when a coworker first gives him the pistol, indicating his history of mental health may, in Gotham, if not in the real US, mean he’s not allowed to exercise his 2nd amendment rights) then, sure, it’s self defense.
 
And the second guy, it’s very quick after, so it could almost - almost - seem like just an overreaction, adrenaline.
 
But then there’s the third guy, who he wounds, then chases down, then shoots. In the back. And then stands over him and shoots some more, until he’s out of bullets.
 
This is not how heroes behave. Well, unless they are six year olds in an Orson Scott Card novel.

But the more subtle moment is, I think the more interesting one, and it’s this; the first shooting looks very much like an accident.
 
The reason I find this so significant is that in a standard revenge narrative - indeed, especially in The Brave One, which this sequence clearly visually references - the moment the protagonist pulls the trigger is a moment of empowerment and profound catharsis - both for them, and more importantly, for us. It gives us what we came for, after all; the worm turning, the bullied/victim turning the tables and asserting (lethal) power - blood for blood and by the gallons. This is what we want, as we chomp on my popcorn (and when I say we, I certianly include myself; I fucking love revenge movies, even bad ones). It’s a moment of release, of transformation, and it’s grit-your-teeth awesome… and Joker doesn’t do it. Not that way.
 
Instead, Fleck looks almost more scared than the two survivors. The second time he pulls the trigger, he’s still flinching, the gun bucking in his hand; not so much an instrument of powerful revenge as an out of control animal with a lethal bark. Even as he hunts down and kills the third man, the gun is out in front the whole way, his arm locked, almost as if it is drawing him towards his victim.
 
I am not - I really am not - trying to say Fleck doesn’t have agency in this moment; that would be totally wrong, and I think is neither intended nor implied. What I am saying is this scene manages to take one of the most iconic, pivotal moments in any revenge narrative - the first kill, the moment the ‘hero’ Takes Back Control - and utterly subverts it, making it what it always was, always should be; something squalid, and mean, and horrible, and utterly without merit, or joy, or catharsis.
 
The fucking Joker movie does this. I mean, that the fuck is gonig on here?
 
It’s far from the only time the film does this, of course. One reading of it might be that the entire film is a conscious effort to undermine and subvert every single trope there’s ever been about the ‘lone nut’ vigilante killer, positive or negative. Like, there’s Fleck’s relationship with his mother, which is, initially, loving and at least nominally mutually supportive - sure, she says cruel things to him at times (‘don’t you have to be funny to be a comedian?’) but she says it out of innocence, not malice, and Flecks simple devotion to her as he bathes her is a moment that could so easily have been played for creeps, but it’s not. Instead, it’s one of the more realistic portrayals of the life of a carer that I’ve ever seen, as well as standing as a mute but powerful rebuke to a society that demands its least fortunate, and most of need, spend all their time and energy caring for each other as best they can. Fleck is not a sympathetic character, but he is, again, a deeply pitiable one. It’s also telling that when she’s later revealed to have been abusive (by profound neglect at the very least - though one of the many areas of ambiguity the film contains is what the nature of Flecks mothers mental health issues are, beyond clearly present and profound) the moment he takes her life (again, a staple of the revenge narrative, the abused child as adult kills their abuser) is totally robbed of catharsis, yet again subverting the trope. It’s squalid. It’s horrible. And it solves nothing.
 
But then the subvertions are part of the point. The movie, like Fleck, keeps trying on and discarding personas, voices, genres. It’s a supervillain origin story, no, wait, gritty social realism, no, revenge narrative a la Taxi Driver, no, it’s the King Of Comedy, wait, no, it’s some fucked up Hamlet/Oedipus hybrid, no it’s a political treatise on mental health, oops, nope, it’s Fight Club, No, V for Vendetta, oh, wait, no… It’s kaleidoscopic, and I’m making it sound like a mess, but it isn’t, it’s coherent, it’s just… a lot.
 
Another central pillar of the film is ambiguity. Now, I have to be honest here; generally speaking, I am not a fan. When it comes to narrative, I’m often painfully conservitive - while I am in theory fine with a story that’s open to interpretation, and tolerant of unusual structure, in my heart of hearts, I’m an old fashioned ‘beginning-middle-and-end’ kind of guy.
 
I think part of what I like about Joker is how it still delivers that kind of narritive, but the ambiguity is nonetheless powerful and pervasive, and delivers some incredible twists along the way. I think it's also important to note that the film doesn’t cheat; Flecks unreliability as a narrator is signposted early. In the first twenty minutes,, we’re given a truly cringe-inducing trip inside Flecks daydreams as he watches the Murray Franklin show, and fantasises about being ‘discovered’ and called up on stage. The fantasy itself is sophomoric, if not outright infantile, which is part of why it’s so painful to watch; it’s sweet, Arthur is sweet, and the naked, raw desire for acceptance that the moment represents I found almost physically painful to experience. And sure, part of that is knowing, given the title, this can’t possibly end well (indeed the movie is merciless in exploiting the sense of dread, of descent, that the title and Flecks first scenes imply), but I think it hurts pretty bad on it’s own account. Who amongst us has not etc…
 
So we know Fleck has a powerfully realised if child-like inner life, and it was also immediately clear to me that his relationship with his neighbour was entirely in his head - though it was only on second viewing that I realised the big clue was her knowing his name without asking, or having any obvious means of knowing it. But the impact this unrelaibility has on other scenes is profound. Like, does the confrontation with Thomas Wayne really happen? The way Fleck gains access to the cinema seems like something out of a bad TV show (hell, when I saw him in the outrageously old fashioned attendant uniform, it felt like a nod to the 60’s Batman TV show, in some ways) but, equally, like something out of the second half of Fight Club. There’s nothing in the rest of the story to tell us either way. And that ambiguity is interesting because it feeds into the central ambiguity, not just unresolved but, by the end of the picture, unresolvable; is Thomas Wayne Fleck’s father?
 
When we initially learn of the possibility, it’s an incendiary moment; and one that plays with metatextual knowledge in a really fascinating way. As I sat there, I found myself thinking; Wait, they can’t, can they? I mean, DC signed this off, so surely… *thinks about everything I’ve seen so far* - wait, DC SIGNED THIS OFF!!! How is ANY of this happening? And as it IS happening, who’s to say…? But, surely…?
 
The thing is, by that point, Thomas Wayne has already undergone a pretty severe assault on his character - most especially from his own lips. His performance on the morning news program is appalling; distant, patrician, arrogant, with a distaste for the poor that spills over into contempt. He’s vile, classic white rich privilege, lauding the dead wall street jerks as family and good men (and we know all about the horseshit behind that particular claim)  while leaving his former employee (and again, that much is later verified) to rot in slum conditions. Chuck in the baffling, tone-deaf choice of a gala fundraising black tie screening of Chaplin’s Modern Times, FFS, as Gotham starts boiling over, and we’re left with a portrait so unsympathetic, I am amazed it got past DC head office. That’s fucking Batman’s dad, y’all. Even if all the other bits that have a hint of ambiguity didn’t happen - even if he never punched Fleck, even if Fleck’s mother was totally delusional - it’s still a portrait of a fucking monster. Add in the totally delicious moment where he utterly damns his son’s future career by decrying those who would wear masks as ‘cowardly’ and, yeah, this is uncharted territory for the Batman mythos, and one I find fascinating, even as I suspect this movie almost has to represent some wired cul de sac in terms of DC cinematic universe continuity (like, is there really anyone who thinks putting Fleck!Joker into a Robert Pattinson Batman flick is a good idea?).
 
Still, the ambiguity of Fleck’s parentage is the most powerful of these moments, not just because it’s left unresolved but because, as I noted above, it’s unresolvable. Yes, the papers from Arkham that Fleck reads could be true, sure they could; we know there’s something wrong with his mother, beyond just physical frailty, after all. At the same time, as the film explicitly points out, Wayne has all the money, power and influence in the world - if he did have an affair with her, he could have covered it up, even got her committed; it’s happened, all too often, to women who have the misfortune of first attracting and then becoming inconvenient to powerful men. The movie never comes down on one side (I felt sure it would, again imagining the suits would demand it, but apparently not), and when Fleck reads through the papers, first imagining himself inside his mothers interrogation room, and then finally enduring a hysterical laughing fit that is painful to watch, we’re left wondering how much he has worked all of this out; it the hysteria that’s about the pivot into psychosis at heart a reaction to knowing he’ll never know? Although, the photo of his young mother, with the inscription on the back - ‘I like your smile! - TW’ as he’s putting on his pre-show makeup sure twists the knife one last time (a moment very reminiscent of The Crow, another revenge narrative movie this film utterly skewers by inversion).
 
Because Fleck throughout the film is on a ceaseless quest for identity, and it’s that quest to pursue and protect those brittle identities that lead to almost all his actions; he chases the street kids to get back the sign from his clowning job, and later carries the gun that gets him fired for similar reasons. His pursuit of stand up comedy is an attempt to pivot from clowning to something he imagines he wants more (and of course, his imagined girlfriend watching adoringly is an attempt to create another role for himself to play). His maybe-not-even-real infiltration of the gala screening (and his almost-seduction of child Bruce Wayne at the manor gates, a wonderful sequence where Pheonix runs an incredible emotional and tonal gamut in a very short period of time - trying on and discarding a few more masks in the process, as I think about it) are both attempts to redefine himself as a son with a father and brother.
 
It’s heartbreaking, and it’s pitiful, and it’s desperately sad; and it’s also explicit in the text that none of this shit would even be happening if he’d been kept on his meds or even better, kept in the hospital he claims he was happy in during his first therapy session. One of the most baffling parts of the entire Joker experience, for me, was seeing far-right YouTube TrollScum Paul Joseph Watson declare the movie to be one of the best of the century, while blithely claiming it exposed the fatal flaws in… the left?!? I mean to say, in a movie set in the 80’s, where the entire narrative needs the Reagan policy of emptying state asylums and putting people with mental health issues literally on the street to be the backstory, the catalyst, for the entire bloody narrative… Well, you see my point. Mystifying.
 
It was disconcerting, all the same, and one of the reasons I wanted to see it again. I think where I’ve gotten to, following that viewing, is that, like Starship Troopers or even my beloved Robocop, there’s no film you can make on the subject of violence that won’t be misinterpreted by some meathead, somewhere, as saying the opposite of what it’s actually saying (or in the case of Joker, screaming).
 
Because, in keeping with the subversion of the revenge narrative I’ve been riffing on throughout, the movie also pulls a very significant rug in the final act, which is that in addition to there being no catharsis, we don’t get the moment when the Joker… becomes. I have to hat-tip Jack Graham again specifically for this observation, because it’s dead on and hugely revealing; at no point in this movie is the Joker ever, ever cool.
 
You keep thinking it’s going to happen. You keep waiting for it to happen.By the final fifteen minutes, you’re practically bursting with anticipation; and when he starts dancing down the steps, you go, aha! Here we…. And then the cops show up and it all goes to shit before it’s even begun.
 
This fucking movie, man.
 
Like, it doesn’t even do it in the grand climax. The other moment you think it’s going to happen, when The Fucking Joker is finally going to arrive and fuck shit up is when he’s walking through the curtain to be on the Murray Franklin show. And the set up is there, and the slo-mo is there… and then he sits down; and despite the performative entrance, he’s got nothing. He’s still Fleck, just in a suit and with green hair. He cycles through his rehearsed voices, trying to find a mode that fits, and he can’t, because they don’t, because he doesn’t, because… he doesn’t.
 
Instead, he makes a spur of the moment decision to kill Murray instead of enacting the suicide he’d reherarsed so carefully. And it’s not cathartic. It’s fucking horrible. It’s pointless, it’s empty, it’s meaningless.
 
And, see, here’s the thing; that’s how revenge stories should always make you feel. Because, here in the really real world that is, almost all the time, where revenge will lead you. Self hatred, self loathing. Nowhere good. No where you want to be.
 
Don’t misunderstand me; I am not saying you need to or should forgive. Be angry if it serves you. Hate, if it sustains you. But fucking live. Because living well is the best revenge. Maybe the only revenge worth a damn.
 
Before I close, I want to dig into one other aspect of the movie; that of the depictions of mental health. Now, full disclosure, I’ve had the odd brush with mental health issues in my life - nothing really serious or life threatening, thankfully, but enough to have had some pretty shit times, down the years, every now and then. So I do not and wouldn’t want to erase the experience of anyone who feels differently… but I was basically okay with how it was handled here. It’s self evidently not unproblematic - at the end of the movie ‘Joker’ is clearly ‘crazy’ and a killer, and that’s got all the usual stigmatization problems (made all the worse, arguably, by how we’ve seen him at better times, had to watch the deterioration to that final state) but, well, two things.
 
Firstly, the movie makes it so explicit you’d have to be literally Paul Joseph Watson to miss it; Fleck’s descent into sociopathy, whilst perhaps always being something he carried the potential for, simply wouldn’t have happened without the brutal and systematic cuts in services to the most vulnerable in society. Full stop. If the world worked as it should, Fleck and his mother would both have been in some kind of assisted living scheme with regular home help and appropriate medication, and they’d be doing just fine. It’s the world - specifically a Republican inspired, Reaganite world, Watson, you fucking dipshit, one typified by billionares like Wayne wanking themselves off on live TV over their ‘self madeness’ while ordinary people rot and bleed in a devil-take-the-hindemost society that treats empathy as an amusing diversion for the ultrarich and a fucking liability for anyone else  - that creates this Joker. It was preventable, and in that sense it’s as clear a tragedy as you’re ever likely to see.
 
But/and/also… he’s the fucking Joker. He’s crazy. He’s always been crazy. Yes, it’s true that the vast majority - the vast majority of people with mental health issues are not violent, and are disproportionately at risk of violence both from others and to themselves. Indeed, the movie shows both of these cases, with Fleck suffering indignities both great and small as he tries to navigate the world that’s squeezing him ever tighter. He also reherases suicide, like, a lot, and at one point, in one of the most ambigious moments in a very ambigious film, climbs into a fridge and shuts the door behind him, before inexplicably being located on the bed in the room next door when the phone rings to invite him on the Murray Franklin show the following morning.
 
And I know one specific complaint is that Flecks particular combination of symptoms are highly irregular to the level of almost being functionally impossible to see in one person. And, you know, not a mental health professional or expert here, that might be so. I do know (from personal experience) that someone can have more than one thing going on at once, mental health wise, and that symptoms and causes can get a bit tangled.
 
Suffice it to say Fleck is an extreme case in any number of ways. Also, ‘almost never’ is not never. It nearly is, but… so if you want to complain that it’s yet another fucking movie depicting someone with mental health issues as dangerous, yeah, sure, it is. And if you’re worried that feeds the bullshit Republican thing about how ‘we need to look at mental health’ as a substitute for real gun control, sure, I hear you, that’s a thing, all right.
 
But while ‘dangerously mentally ill’ is undeniably a grossly overrepresented demographic in hollywood movies, I have to say I cannot think of an example that comes anywhere near to treating that difficult, spikey topic with the respect and depth it deserves. Not the way Joker does. It is a devastating and damning portrait of a broken society, and the damage that does to the most vulnerable.
 
Fleck is not a hero. Joker is not a hero. What he does is inexcusable.
 
But to understand is not to excuse. And he is - also - a victim.
 
And this fucking movie is fucking amazing.
 
KP
22/10/19