Joker is just a symbol
Gotham’s bad boy reflects insecurities of his fictional city and the real world
Spoilers ahead: This story contains plot points about Joker, up to and including the end of the film.
Worries that Joker — the new movie documenting one possible origin of Batman’s nemesis — would spark violence from disaffected young men in the “incel” community were overblown. There was no violence, and the film broke box office records.
More importantly, though, the Joker isn’t an inspiration for incels at all. Rather, the movie positions him as the forefather of antifa, the loosely organized left wing collective that has gained prominence in the Trump years for its sometimes-violent clashes with right wing protesters.
By film’s end, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has inspired a mass protest movement. But it’s one that’s aimed squarely at the one per cent. Fleck’s murder of three investment bankers becomes a flashpoint, pitting Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen)
— a billionaire and would-be mayor who simply wants to make Gotham great again in the face of decline, corruption and violence — against a group of masked bandits wielding “RESIST” signs.
Indeed, Joker is one of the more fascinating documents of our time: Warner Bros. has spent US$55 million making a movie in which antifa kills Thomas Wayne and, we presume, creates the Batman. It’s no wonder the provocateurs at Venice rewarded the film the Golden Lion, while the stiffs at TIFF sniffed.
The Joker created by director Todd Phillips and Phoenix is not a mastermind so much as a symbol. He has no minions, exactly, but the streets by film’s end are filled with those he has inspired with his acts of vicious retribution. Phoenix portrays the Joker as no architect of destruction. Rather, he’s simply a flashpoint.
There’s a shot in Joker that echoes a previous iteration of the character: his head against a cop car window, staring out, he sees the chaos he has caused and begins to smile. One can’t help but think of Heath Ledger’s head out the window of a cop car, taking the wind in his hair like a dog whose owner has let him up in the front seat. But the differences between the two characters are vast. Whereas Ledger’s Joker claimed to be an agent of chaos all while setting up infinitely intricate plans and plots, Phoenix’s Joker is that chaos.
If Phillips is a director whose main concern is cruelty, Christopher Nolan is a director whose main concern is identity. And in The Dark Knight, he uses the Joker as a means of getting at the identity of Gotham’s citizenry: Is it, at heart, vicious and base, and thus beyond redemption by a masked vigilante? Or noble, and thus worthy of said masked hero absorbing the sins of the city?
Nolan’s movies in general come across as extremely skeptical of Gotham’s public. In Batman Begins the masses are literally weaponized and turned against each other via the Scarecrow’s (Cillian Murphy) fear-inducing chemicals. In The Dark Knight Rises, we see they need little encouragement from Bane (Tom Hardy) to start ransacking the homes of the wealthy. And even in The Dark Knight, we see them try to kill a whistleblower at the Joker’s behest, but by film’s end they refuse to cross the line into outright mass murder. One cheer for Gotham, I suppose.
But it’s Tim Burton’s Batman that comes closest to understanding group psychology. There’s a funny moment when the Joker (Jack Nicholson), who has hijacked a press conference about Gotham’s cancellation of the town’s bicentennial parade, finally gets everyone’s attention. We’ve seen a cross-section of Gothamites — blue collar workers, punkish bikers, low-lifes in a bar — studiously ignore their TVS despite the strange things transpiring on it. Until, that is, the Joker says he’s going to be distributing $20 million in cash to anyone who shows up. This piques their interest! This gains him admiration.
And, at the end of the day, this has always been and may always be the most compelling iteration of the Joker. Incels, antifa, agents of chaos: that’s all interesting and timely, but temporary. The simple fact of the matter is that few of us are looking for a symbol. We just want a guy who will tell us what we want to hear and throw some money our way.