How an audacious director made Batman’s Joker her own
‘The People’s Joker’ reimagines the classic character as a trans woman
“I had a nightmare last night,” said Vera Drew, the writer-director-star of the superbly subversive new superhero pastiche “The People’s Joker.”
“You know how all the Marvel movies take place in, like, these big boardrooms and warehouses? Like, the most drab places on Earth? I dreamed that I was doing a press day in one of those buildings and, within the dream, I was feeling very confined and stressed out.”
In reality, Drew was talking to me via Zoom from her apartment in California, calmly munching oatmeal in between questions. Her anecdote, meanwhile, contained multitudes: of all the ways to look at the wryly righteous, postmodern-art object that is “The People’s Joker,” the metaphor of splashing some lurid, dreamy colour all over the bland, corporatized edifice of contemporary comic-book cinema may be the most vivid.
A palpably handmade creation combining cheap-looking live action with multiple forms of handdrawn and computer animation — and featuring characters drawn from the DC cinematic universe — the film is a conceptual marvel; its joyride through a scarily dystopian Gotham City doubles as a virtuoso exercise in intellectual property renovation and an audaciously politicized act of pop-cultural critique.
It imagines Batman’s arch-nemesis as a closeted trans woman (played by Drew) navigating an underground comedy scene lorded over by an ethically dubious version of Bruce Wayne; having been medicated into docility by chemically enhanced conversion therapy that forces her facial features into a guilty rictus grin, our heroine gradually finds her voice as an anarchic, irrepressible standup satirist.
It’s a narrative that simultaneously honours the Joker’s rich history on the page and screen while boldly allegorizing aspects of Drew’s personal and professional life, including her transition, her Hollywood aspirations and a psychologically draining romantic relationship.
“Batman has let me explore my identity in a way that feels safe,” said Drew, who worked as a writer and editor for various alt-comedy luminaries including Tim Heidecker and Sacha Baron Cohen before embarking on her feature debut. “I wanted a wild, unbridled version of that.”
The project began life as a fanstyle re-edit of Todd Phillips’ Oscarwinning 2019 hit “Joker,” but the more that Drew thought about the different historical iterations of the character, the more she realized his iconography could be an ideal vehicle to tell her own story, theoretically insulated from legal repercussions according to the rules of parody and fair use.
“The legal side of it was just the how and why of getting to play in the sandbox,” said Drew. “The movie is like me grabbing a Jared Leto action figure and a Barbie doll and pretending it’s my ex-fiancée arguing with my mom.”
The reference to “Barbie” is not accidental: in a way, “The People’s Joker” is the antipode (and for some, the antidote) to Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar comedy, which nodded to both LGBTQ fandom and toy-industry autocritique, albeit gently.
Not only does “The People’s Joker” reach out directly to audiences tired of empty identity politics — like the much-maligned scene in “Avengers: Endgame” where a gay character is given 10 seconds to mourn their late partner before disappearing from the narrative — but it recognizes and hyperbolizes the queer elements that have been latent, or overt, in superhero stories for decades.
“There have always been conversations around sexuality in comic books, like people complaining that Batman was turning kids gay,” said Drew. “(The Joker) was such a useful archetype in the context of parody or fair use. This is an archetype who is a trickster, who rejects rules and creates chaos, and tears down the old order. The movie is talking about that exact same thing.”
Drew admitted that she’s gotten a bit burned out recounting her film’s origin myth: the electrifying September 2022 Midnight Madness screening at the Toronto International Film Festival that turned “The People’s Joker” from a hot local ticket to an international film cultural talking point.
The festival ended up cancelling the other screenings in the wake of an ominous letter from a company rumoured to be Warner Bros.; a year and a half later — and following plenty of careful wrangling — the film is entering wide release via the independent distributor Altered Innocence, including more than 70 theatres in the U.S. and Canada. (It shows twice in Toronto, on Saturday and Tuesday at the Revue Cinema).
Rather than reflect on the premiere, Drew said she’s been fascinated to see how the film plays to different audiences, reactions that speak to the contradictions lurking beneath its antic surface.
“When we play the movie at 7 p.m., it plays like a drama,” she said. “When we show it at midnight, people are laughing at everything, including the conversion therapy scenes. I like playing with extremes. There’s a reason that jokes that are in poor taste work. We knew that if we were going to lean into those things — whether it was edgelord humour or extreme sincerity — there would also be room in between those things for nuance.”
Before we finished, I asked Drew jokingly about her chances of becoming the third actor — following Joaquin Phoenix and the late Heath Ledger — to win an Academy Award for playing the Joker (she doesn’t like her chances).
She was more interested, though, in a different thought experiment: which previous version of the Joker did she think had the most charismatic, desirable energy?
“As far as Jokers who check all the boxes for me, it’s Cesar Romero,” said Drew, paying homage to the live-action 1960s “Batman” television series.
“This hadn’t clicked into place for me until after I made the movie and it’s because (Romero) was kind of gay — he had this swashbuckling, pirate-Kenneth-Anger-beatnik vibe to him. The fact that he refused to shave his moustache under the clown makeup … not only is it one of the most diva choices ever, but it adds this level of chaos to the character. Nobody ever comments on it … it’s too chaotic. And it’s perfect for Joker.”