Why you’re wrong about “Joker”

Crossposted from Dreamwidth

• Joker is not a comic book movie, at least in the sense of giving you anything you would remotely expect from a comic book movie. It has some character names and place names the same as in the comics, and near the end there’s a scene which will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows anything about Batman, but there are no superpowers, no costumes, no heroes, no fantasy or science fiction elements at all. People who enjoy comic book movies but not bleak gritty character dramas won’t like it. People who enjoy bleak gritty character dramas but not comic book movies will find nothing objectionable in it.
  
  (Mild spoiler warning, by the way. I don’t get into specifics but you may find the edge of surprise dulled on some elements of the movie if you read this post before you see it.)
• Joker is not a mass shooter manifesto. It doesn’t make out that Arthur’s deadly violence is a good response to his situation. It’s sympathetic, but in the same way the Hitler movie Downfall was sympathetic – it shows you why you do not want to be Arthur. It depicts a society strained to breaking point, and Arthur is that breaking point. Some people were worried there would be shootings at American cinemas; well, that’s part of living in a country that thinks weapons are a human right, not anything to do with the content of a movie. Nor is Arthur an “incel”. His romantic hopes are frustrated, but neither he nor the movie faults the young woman in question for frustrating them, and it’s not what drives him to embrace violence.
• Joker is not “triggering the libs”. I’m honestly tempted to wonder what brilliant stealth leftist came up with this take and got it shared around. A society breaking under the strain of socioeconomic inequality; a marginalized character experiencing oppression before the audience’s eyes; and the whole catastrophe is set off by (a) a gun and (b) the defunding of mental health services. Who tricked all the conservatives into thinking this supported their side? I mean, hey, if your idea of “triggering the libs” is to show compassion to people struggling with mental illness, I’m not going to complain. You go ahead and trigger those libs. On that note—
• Joker is not a “descent into madness”. I’m honestly impressed at how sensitively the film portrays the experience of mental illness. When Arthur gets that warning phone call from his boss and the sound fades out and the room seems to be pressing in on him – yes, that’s exactly what a shut-down feels like. Going in, I was worried they were going to go down the “he goes mad, loses control, and kills people” path, a route so well-worn by now it must be cutting into bedrock. They didn’t, but a lot of reviewers seem to have seen that anyway. More than one has described Arthur as a “narcissistic psychopath”. In fact he’s the first onscreen Joker who isn’t a narcissistic psychopath. Nor does he exhibit manic behaviour, another first. Arthur’s uncontrollable laughter and his delusions and I think his smoking are symptoms of his illness. His violence is not. His first couple of killings are self-defence; all the rest are cold, deliberate choices. When he kills, he’s not losing control. He’s taking control.
• Joker does not paint a hyperbolic caricature of its antagonists. As a neurodivergent person I promise you: what Arthur faces in the movie is what we face every day. Unlike Arthur I have a supportive family and a lot of kind friends, but this good fortune doesn’t erase the contempt and the mockery and the name-calling and the occasional water-balloons and eggs, nor assuage the cumulative effect of being routinely disregarded and excluded and passed over and left out of things. If this is not happening to you it’s because you are not neurodivergent. I’ve mentioned before the time when I described some of this to a casual acquaintance and the response was a sympathetic “Wow, I guess some people just have mental problems.” No, this is how people treat people with visible mental problems.
• Joker does not refute the concept of male privilege or white privilege. Arthur has male privilege; he doesn’t have to fear sexual harassment even when he’s being beaten up, let alone in the normal course of his day. Arthur has white privilege; the police interview him very politely several times before there’s any question of them shooting him. What Arthur lacks is neurotypical privilege, which is when people listen to what you say instead of mocking your appearance in public and throwing things at you in the street. If you want to argue that “privilege” is a misleading word, since it doesn’t necessarily imply that someone is privileged in the colloquial sense, I sympathize, but this is the terminology we’re stuck with.
• Joker is not Todd Phillips whinging about people not laughing at the Hangover series. Yes, this is a take I’ve heard, and I give it full marks for inventiveness. But it doesn’t fit the movie very well. OK, yes, we’re supposed to sympathize with Arthur when he attempts to do stand-up comedy, but “attempts” is very much a key word in that sentence. If that scene is a symbol of the Hangover series, then what Phillips is telling us about the Hangover series is that he screwed it up and it was shit.
• Joker does not ruin the Batman mythos. This was part of the “hyperbolic caricature” take; the idea was that Thomas Wayne, in particular, turns out to be a bad person, which then casts Batman’s life-long quest to avenge him in a rather unpleasant light. Well, frankly the saintly depiction of Thomas Wayne in the Dark Knight Trilogy always struck a false note for me, and was only prevented from ruining the movie by his very limited screen time. (A billionaire CEO who takes time off from CEO-ing to be a life-saving doctor? Really?) The fact is, Gotham is a shitty city with people in it who have the money to fix its shittiness but choose not to. There’s a limit to how good those people can believably be.
  
  If you can see past the limits of Arthur’s manifestly unreliable viewpoint, Joker portrays Thomas Wayne as a middling-decent man whose shortfall of empathy for the underclass is due to distance rather than callousness. That, and the fact that three people he’s responsible for have just been, you know, brutally murdered. It would have made him a more callous man if he’d paused, in that moment, to consider whether they’d done anything to bring their own deaths upon themselves. And I can hardly blame him or Alfred for taking it the wrong way when some dirty man off the street reaches through the gate of Wayne Manor and fondles his kid.
  
  Now, how would you build a new Batman franchise out of this? Assuming Joaquin Phoenix can be persuaded to break the “Joker” curse and become the first actor ever to play the character in more than one live-action feature, here’s my sequel concept. Twelve years after the murders of the Waynes, Gotham is split into the very rich in their fortress houses and the very poor in the slums and back streets. The police are semi-militarized and brutally gun down anyone who inconveniences the rich, but no-one protects poor people from being robbed and killed in the streets. Obviously this is a spawning-ground for organized crime.
  
  A Manson-style cult following has grown up around Arthur, and is being quietly financed by rich gang bosses (with names like “Cobblepot”, perhaps?) who find the chaos and the fear and the drain on police resources convenient for their own purposes. Arthur continues to try and maintain control in the only way he knows how, but he’s now surrounded by people who measure worth by kill counts, and he knows if he shows a hint of weakness he’ll be their next trophy. His uncontrollable laughter has come back.
  
  ...And then a shadow shaped like a bat begins appearing in alleys and on rooftops, targeting those who prey on the poor but refusing, unlike the police, to use deadly violence. Let’s have Bruce Wayne get kidnapped by the Joker cult and escape, and then spend some time knocking about the slums incognito and seeing Gotham from underneath. Let’s have him call the police on a robbery, and give him a big character moment when the police mistake the victims for perpetrators and shoot them. This prompts him to (a) fight the criminals himself, (b) work outside the police system, and (c) never use a gun. His character progression must lead him to realize how his parents’ insulation from Gotham’s underclass helped create the forces that killed them.
  
  Because I’m quite sure of two things about this movie: there is no way DC is going to let this success lie while the DCEU flounders, and no way it can be shoehorned into the DCEU continuity.