National Post (National Edition)
SHOULD WE BE AFRAID JOKER OF ?
In the lead-up to the film’s release, worry over Joker’s potential to incite violence has been expressed by everyone from critics to law enforcement. Are their concerns realistic? Or is it all a matter of cultural commentators getting carried away?
‘Do you know how I got these scars?”
So the late Heath Ledger’s Oscar-minted Joker asks his sparring partner Batman (Christian Bale) late in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a film driven in both plot and marketing by the devil-may-care ethos of its villain. It’s a question the uncanny clown prince of Gotham asks throughout the film with studied unseriousness, offering a different false origin story with each incarnation. The elasticity of his answers gets at the enduring appeal of one of the great comics villains and perennial Halloween costume favourites, that the Joker means whatever a given audience wants him to mean, his eerie rictus grin is a Rorschach test for whatever unstable threat they fear the most.
Despite Nolan and Ledger’s reputation for crafting the definitive take on the character, with regrets to luminaries as varied as Cesar Romero and Jared Leto, their take has been repudiated by Todd Phillips’s Joker. Phillips, whose film has already earned the Golden Lion in Venice, positions his standalone portrait of the villain as a gritty character drama with one foot in the world of comic book origin stories and one finger on the pulse of what makes contemporary bogeymen tick.
Explanatory where The Dark Knight is cryptic, Joker deep dives into what the previous depictions have suggested are shallow waters. Yet for all its efforts, it doesn’t get much further than Ledger’s bogus mythologies, rendering much of the hopped-up discourse surrounding whether the film might inspire violence amongst angry young men who see themselves in the film’s purple-clad folk hero hopelessly off-base. It assumes an ideological consistency and clearness of intent that simply isn’t there in the film.
Starring Joaquin Phoenix as an alienated mama’s boy named Arthur Fleck, Joker filters the titular character through the ready-made psychological context of other 1970s anti-heroes. The film cribs shamelessly from the put-upon loners of Martin Scorsese’s output in the period, borrowing scenes from Taxi Driver, the plot from The King of Comedy and the star of both. Robert De Niro is on hand as a Johnny Carson-esque talkshow host whom Arthur watches starry-eyed on TV, just as De Niro’s character in The King of Comedy doted on Jerry Lewis. While that context and the setting in Reagan-era America in 1981 might make Joker seem a product of the past, Phillips is eager to make his killer clown say something incisive about the present — all but begging the audience to ask Joker how he got his scars. It’s a fresh approach in theory, but one that doesn’t do much to enhance the thin mythos of the character, an incorrigible troll who perhaps works best as an elemental threat without beginning or end.
From his first appearance in Batman No. 1, where he was created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, the Joker resonated as an out-ofthe-box malevolent jester figure with chalk-white skin, garish green hair, and an unexplained facial deformity that twists his face up into a permanent smile. Though he was later given a backstory in “The Man Behind the Red Hood,” which reframed him as a thief who was maimed after a foiled robbery left him bathing in a vat of chemical waste, the Joker’s comic book appearances have him largely working as a malevolent trickster figure without easily digestible motives, often disrupting Gotham City’s status quo for a laugh and the odd monetary gain.
Although the character’s power has typically gone hand in hand with his air of mystery, the sense that he has always just been there bubbling under the surface of Gotham’s civil society (and, by extension, ours), Phillips’s attempt to psychoanalyze and situate the ubiquitous villain is hardly new. Alan Moore’s one-shot comic The Killing Joke, first released in 1988, re-imagines him as a failed stand-up comic and lousy father turning to crime to supplement his meagre income. His psychopathy is treated as a predictable and perhaps even understandable overcorrection to the madness of the global conflicts he hears about on the news and the tragedy of one bad day that took away both his wife and his face.
Throughout the comic, we see Moore reckoning with the character’s cultural endurance. He acknowledges the extent to which the Joker is a free-floating signifier of chaos — “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice,” he quips at one point — while endeavouring to pin his psychosis down through his black-and-white flashbacks to Joker’s past as a comedian struggling to put food on the table. He strives to give readers a rare insight into the humble beta male origins of a larger-than-life enemy whom even Batman, great detective though he may be, repeatedly calls unknowable.
Whatever one thinks of The Killing Joke, which Moore himself has criticized over the years, Phillips seems to have taken the wrong lessons from it. As welcome as Joker’s tale of woe might be as a riff on a previously underwritten character, in the comic Batman clocks it as little more than a sob story — an unhelpful explanation for his actions that doesn’t take into account that most people’s origin stories are steeped in bad days and trauma, too. Implicit in Moore’s book is the idea that grounding the Joker’s mean streak in real-world disappointments reduces his psychology to a multiple choice quiz when it’s his indeterminacy that makes him appealing.
Enter Joker the movie, which wields its protagonist’s various points of damage as symbolic cudgels against most of what Travis Bickle finds annoying in Taxi Driver: Dirty streets, aloof politicians and modern alienation. Arthur’s characterization is comically over-saturated, as if Phillips took it as a challenge to out-explain Moore by saddling the Joker with an abusive mother, a cutthroat work environment, a failed comedy career, a gun he’s inherited from a co-worker, various undiagnosed mental health disorders and an austerity government that’s cutting the social
services he needs to survive.
Just as Nolan did in The Dark Knight Rises, which envisioned Catwoman and Bane as nascent Occupy Wall Street types armed against the largesse of Gotham’s billionaire class, Phillips even briefly imagines his Joker as a Robin Hood figure. He inspires revolutionary violence against the world represented by the still adolescent Bruce Wayne, with whom Arthur feels a sort of choked kinship thanks to his mother’s old job as a maid at Wayne Manor.
Lest one get the idea that the typically libertarian director is smuggling in heretofore unseen liberal values about the importance of a social safety net (let alone more radical ones about the moral imperative to eat the rich), Phillips makes his movie politically noncommittal, bordering on incoherent. His shyness about whether we ought to send in the clowns or send them to Arkham Asylum feels downright timid for a filmmaker who’s been going on in recent days about the impossibility of making comedies in this hostile “woke” climate. He seems to have done just fine for himself, after all.
That reluctance to commit hasn’t stopped liberal cultural commentators from wondering whether the film might prove to be a force of evil in the world, inspiring incel types who identify with Arthur’s awkwardness around women and frustrations at work to pick up arms (and clown masks) and march out of the theatre. This speculation is more dangerous than the actual film, and seems more likely to put screenings at risk than anything in the movie. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but if Joker is going to inspire anything it’s likely to be hostility toward the phoney friendliness of talk show hosts and annoyance at people like Thomas Wayne, a moneyed centrist who values the awful white-collar stooges on payroll as family but doesn’t so much as tip his domestic workers at Christmas. There are worse things to incite, and Joker should be lucky to have even that kind of influence given how muddled it is.
Joker is not without its pleasures, chief among them Phillips’s theatrically grand, often colourful style and tactile facsimile of Scorsese’s urban dystopias. Phoenix is as magnetic of a presence as ever. His physical pain and embarrassment at being misunderstood through his laughing fits make us forget that Phillips hasn’t bothered to specify whether he is living with a real condition. And there is a brute force power to the moments of sudden violence, whether in Arthur’s self-defensive outburst against a trio of wellheeled stooges on the subway or his bitter renunciation of De Niro’s nice guy act, which reminds of Phoenix’s own discomforting appearance on David Letterman’s old show.
But its efforts to annotate and expand on decades of pop mythology prove hollow — as trite as the last Joker’s explanations but more obnoxious for their new pretensions.
JOKER IS AN INCORRIGIBLE TROLL WHO
PERHAPS WORKS BEST
AS AN ELEMENTAL THREAT WITHOUT BEGINNING
OR END.