From the bottom of the deck
Joker is a risk, but a calculated one, for Warner
Hollywood’s latest comic-book movie, Joker, arrived in multiplexes last week, and it has all the makings of a juggernaut.
The R-rated film, which portrays the DC Comics villain as sharing the psychological traits of real-life mass shooters, has artistic legitimacy, having won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last month. Its star, Joaquin Phoenix, has been singled out as a sure-fire Oscar nominee.
But Joker is also causing deep unease. Some people, including a few rank-andfile employees on the Warner Bros lot, worry that the violent, hyperrealistic movie is potentially dangerous — that rather than critiquing the societal failings that have given rise to the US’s mass-shooter crisis, the film instead legitimises such atrocities and could provoke more of them.
Amid the critical praise are scorching reviews that use words like “irresponsible”. The FBI has warned about ugly online chatter surrounding Joker,
prompting police in cities including New York and Los Angeles to step up theatre security and reigniting the debate over First Amendment rights versus Hollywood accountability. Relatives and friends of those killed during the 2012 movie-theatre massacre in Aurora, Colorado, sent a letter to Warner Bros expressing disquiet over Joker and its empathetic depiction of the character.
Warner Bros has gone on the defensive.
“It is not the intention of the film, the filmmakers or the studio to hold this character up as a hero,” the studio said.
Joker got its start in 2016, when Todd Phillips, who had directed men-behaving-badly comedies for Warner Bros like The Hangover and Old School, told Greg Silverman, then the studio’s president of creative development and production, that he had a wild idea. Phillips wanted to make a gritty character study of the Joker in the mould of Taxi Driver,
dispensing with the cartoon, buildings-imploding fantasy of most superhero movies and placing the story more squarely in the real world.
“A way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic-book film,” Phillips recently recalled in an interview with The Wrap, an entertainment news site.
In particular, Phillips wanted to give the Joker a new backstory, one that ended up making the character strikingly similar to disturbed young men who were perpetrating mass killings in real life, including the one who carried out the Aurora massacre. (In the comics, the villain falls into a vat of chemicals and comes out a disfigured maniac.) As the violence escalates in Joker, the character becomes a hero to the disenfranchised.
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It was a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic-book film
Silverman and Kevin Tsujihara, then the studio’s chairman, were stunned. It had been widely reported at the time of the Aurora massacre that the gunman, whose hair was dyed reddish orange, had told police that he was the Joker. That account was later debunked, but the character was still associated with the episode in the public consciousness. How did Phillips possibly expect the studio to buy into his idea? Warner Bros, after all, sold Joker pyjamas at Wal-Mart.
But they gave him permission to proceed with a script. The discussion with Phillips came as Warner Bros, once the dominant studio in Hollywood, had begun to sputter. Trying to compete with Disney with films like Pan was proving disastrous. Marvel was soaring by using a lighthearted formula while Warner Bros had seemed to lose its superhero touch, most recently delivering the critically reviled Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. The rise of Netflix, and the over-reliance by studios on bloated sequels and reboots, was starting to keep ticket buyers on their living-room sofas.
Warner Bros agreed in March 2018 to make Joker, with the studio’s new marketing chief, Blair Rich, emerging as a vocal proponent and Toby Emmerich, the new chairman of the movie division, judging the script too good to pass up, according to four people involved in the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain relationships. Still, there was division among the ranks, people said. Other senior executives were disconcerted by the level of violence and ultra-bleak tone. They were also dealing with an unhappy Jared Leto, who plays the Joker in the studio’s ensemble Suicide Squad series and was not keen to have a competing performance. But the company did take measures to mitigate the risk.
Warner Bros brought on two co-financiers, Bron Studios and Village Roadshow, reducing the studio’s exposure — and its potential profits. The movie cost US$55 million (1.7 billion baht) to make, a relatively modest amount for a major production.
By the time Warner Bros began revving up its marketing engines for Joker in late August, however, the cultural and political landscape in the United States had grown even more heated, making Phillips’ nihilistic movie feel even more on-the-nose. Fears about safety in public spaces had increased after a rash of mass shootings, including one at a California agricultural festival and one at a Wal-Mart that left 22 dead. The Joker publicity campaign has been tumultuous. When a film critic for a British newspaper asked Phoenix an uncomfortable question at a press junket — was he worried the film might “perversely end up inspiring exactly the kind of people it’s about, with potentially tragic results?” — the star walked out of the interview. The critic, Robbie Collin, said it took “an hour’s peace-brokering” with a Warner Bros publicist to resume the conversation.
In other interviews, Phoenix appeared more at ease with the topic.
“If you have somebody that has that level of emotional disturbance, they can find fuel anywhere,” he told IGN, a video-game and entertainment news site.
Warner Bros was forced to address the matter when the Aurora parents went public with their letter, even though the missive made clear that it supported the studio’s right to free speech. Other Aurora parents told reporters they were OK with Joker.
“Make no mistake: Neither the fictional character Joker nor the film is an endorsement of real-world violence of any kind,” the studio said. “At the same time, Warner Bros believes that one of the functions of storytelling is to provoke difficult conversations around complex issues.”
The studio then banned reporters from the red carpet at an LA premiere.
“I think it’s time to let the film speak for itself,” Phillips said in a brief introduction inside the theatre.