TOO SERIOUS?
Joker’s release in an era of mass shootings drives debates over glorification of violence
Note: This story contains plot spoilers.
After mass shootings this year, Americans are embroiled in a debate over the nature of the perpetrators and the factors that drive them.
Now, Hollywood is about to weigh in.
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival has explored many fraught issues, from immigration to criminal justice to Nazis doing slapstick. But it has just surfaced perhaps its most charged topic yet: What propels someone to pick up a gun and begin killing complete strangers?
The film is Joker, and while it comes in the form of a comic-book movie, it is the opposite of light.
“Set aside that it’s the DC (Comics) universe,” Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the festival, said. “Just think of it as a great character study that goes really dark.”
Warner Bros. brought Joker to the festival hoping to launch an award-winning run for a film that has become one of Hollywood’s most closely watched and potentially explosive movies in years — a study of a man coming unhinged, carrying out random acts of deadly violence and igniting a populist revolution.
Joker, which will be released in theatres Oct. 4, has proved to be divisive, not just because of the traditional range of esthetic opinions but because of what the movie represents.
The movie focuses on the pre-Joker Arthur Fleck, circa early 1980s Gotham — a sad-sack clown slowly unravelling under his troubles and finding solace in a gun and mask — and becoming a folk hero in the process. It stars Joaquin Phoenix and is improbably directed by Todd Phillips, the filmmaker behind the Hangover comedies.
The stakes are high for Warner Bros., whose DC Extended Universe has struggled to land phenomena at anywhere near the consistency of Disney’s rival Marvel Cinematic Universe (with only one DC release, Aquaman, of more than $1 billion at the global box office to Marvel’s nine). That Joker won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival ups the ante.
But the talk at this festival, which more than any other gathering sets the tone for Hollywood’s all-important Oscar season to follow, shows that the stakes are a lot higher than even the battle for bragging rights.
Some commentators have decried Joker’s message.
Time’s Stephanie Zacharek wrote that Phoenix’s character “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels,” she wrote, referring to the “involuntary celibates” group of frustrated males whose beliefs have come up in several mass killings.
“In America, there’s a mass shooting or attempted act of violence by a guy like Arthur practically every other week.
And yet we’re supposed to feel some sympathy for Arthur.”
Warner Bros. is understandably eager to play down any such talk.
That’s in part because the current climate has led rivals to cancel movies — Universal Pictures, most recently, scrapped The Hunt after last month’s shootings in Ohio and Texas.
The studio is no stranger to the debate about the relationship between superhero-villain violence and the real-world kind. The company was behind the release of The Dark Knight Rises — the movie that was playing at an Aurora, Colo., theatre when a gunman opened fire in July 2012, killing 12 people. The shooter cited the movie as an intentional choice.
Phillips maintains that the goal is not to make Fleck a hero as his actions become more violent.
“How do you make a movie with white face and green hair and run it through as realistic (a) lens as possible?” Phillips said after the screening. “Because we don’t believe you fall into a vat of acid and are turned that way,” he said, referring to the Joker’s comic book origin story.
Those with a long memory might recall the moment 30 years ago when two reviewers warned that Spike Lee’s conclusion of Do The Right Thing, in which a black character tossed a garbage can through the window of a white-owned pizzeria, sparking a violent confrontation with police, was “dynamite under every seat,” as Newsweek’s Jack Kroll said at the time. David Denby of New York magazine even wrote that Lee would be partly responsible “if some audiences go wild.”
That moment has since become an example of cringeworthy mischaracterization of and overreaction to social violence on screen. Warner executives are eager to make the comparison.
In case none of this seems timely or charged enough, the film has the chance to plunge itself into the 2020 presidential election.
The revolution Fleck’s actions unintentionally set off — an eat-the-rich mob unleashes to overthrow the banking system — is fraught with unclear political symbolism. The mob could be either Republican Trump voters or Occupy Wall Street progressives.
From the moment the screening ended, the debate was on over whether Phillips had made a brilliantly inscrutable work or a movie as elastic as the protagonist’s face.