For some, little humour in this Joker
Dark character study stirs fears in an era of regular mass shootings
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for the movie Joker.
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 comicbook movie, it is the opposite of light.
“Set aside that it’s the DC (Comics) universe,” Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the festival, said in an interview. “Just think of it as a great character study that goes really dark.”
Toronto was the first proving ground for Joker, which Warner Bros. brought to the festival hoping to launch an awardwinning 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 and the speculation about which political group will commandeer it — the Hollywood release as political weapon.
The movie focuses on the preJoker 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.
That Joker won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival — Warner Bros. is the first major Hollywood studio in the modern era to win the prize — ups the ante.
The victory leapfrogs it ahead of Disney, which this year became the first studio to notch a Best Picture Oscar nomination for a comic-book movie ( Black Panther).
With a relatively modest $55-million budget (all figures U.S.) and a large marketing campaign planned, Joker is an attempt to notch one for the AT&T subsidiary as it seeks to compete with the market leader.
But the talk at this festival, shows that the stakes are a lot higher than even the battle for corporate bragging rights.
Some commentators have vigorously decried Joker’s message.
Time’s Stephanie Zacharek wrote that Phoenix’s character “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels,” 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.” The film “lionizes and glamorizes” the character, she wrote. She concluded, “There’s a sick joke in there somewhere. Unfortunately, it’s on us.”
Zacharek and those who disagree with her view have been confronting the essential questions surrounding the movie: By peering so closely at a killer, is Phillips trying to understand his mind or glorify his thinking? Indict the mental-health system that failed him or cheer that he broke free from conventionality?
At the post-screening party, a debate broke out among journalists and industry executives over whether the movie could become part of the texts cited by future mass shooters.
Even if the causation between media violence and real-world shootings is statistically unproven, a few asked, couldn’t the movie still become part of the problematic context for them?
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.
But it’s also because 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.
In case none of this seems timely or charged enough, the film has the chance to plunge itself into the 2020 presidential election.
One theory, advanced by liberals, is that the Joker shares commonalities with President Donald Trump, fuelled as he is by a love of performing and crowds. Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver wrote the movie in 2017, shortly after Trump took office, so the camp could make a case for the timing.
Meanwhile, 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.
And that will probably weaponize the movie politically Both the right and the left can use it to demonstrate bad acting by the other side.