It’s like the good, the bad and the ugly — only without the good
IWENT to see Joker because you can’t not go to see Joker. I walked into a newsagent’s last week and I could hear Rock’n’Roll Part 2 by Gary Glitter playing on some device behind the counter. I knew that this was from Joker because I had read something about this extraordinary scene in which Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role does these tremendous dance moves down a flight of steps to the Glittertastic sound — the article also assured us that Glitter would be getting no royalties from the movie.
I knew then that I would have to see this film, because if its makers are using anything associated with the monumental British pop records of the early 1970s, they surely know what they are doing. And if it ends up being blasted out of a speaker in a shop in Co Wicklow, it has clearly done whatever was required of it.
There is a kind of a cultural law that when a film gets into the global consciousness as this one has done, when it has moved into your head to this extent, there it will stay until you go and see it. And then it will stay in your head, but at least you will know why.
The triumph of Joker is that it’s supposed to have a kind of a comic book origin, it’s supposed to be set in some imagined hell in the past or the future — yet it feels like a pretty straight take on the state of the world in 2019.
Yes, it heightens and it contorts and it manipulates reality like any movie — but it still seems alarmingly recognisable to anyone living in these troubled times.
This is the really scary part — not just the film itself, which of course has many deeply frightening episodes, but the fact that when you walk out into the world afterwards, you don’t necessarily feel like you’re steeping into a very different place.
In Gotham City, the multitudes are scrambling for survival, while a tiny minority of the super-rich are protected behind the gates of their mansions — public services are wasting away, and increasingly there are damaged individuals who have figured that the only way to get any kind of recognition is to commit some atrocity.
Yes, this is a movie, but it could also be a current affairs programme with extra make-up and costumes and a bit of Gary Glitter.
And through the terrible life story of Arthur Fleck, the Joker who is an unfunny stand-up comedian, it explores the attractions of the dark side of the human soul, how there is this perverse kind of freedom to be found in embracing all the badness in your being — because maybe that’s the only thing that works for you, in what is otherwise a wasteland of cruelty and disdain.
This has been the controversial aspect of Joker — the notion that if you happen to be the proverbial “lone nut”, they’re playing your song here.
But again we step out of the cinema and we find that we don’t necessarily have to look to poor unfortunate Arthur Fleck to find cases of men prospering when they hit that rich vein of badness in themselves, and they run with it all the way.
We are living in a time in which several of the leaders of the free world and indeed the unfree world, happen to be bad men. They are bad in the way that cartoon baddies are bad, in the sense that they are unambiguously bad.
They are not bad in the traditional sense of the politician who is rarely telling the truth, it is more the case that they have abandoned any idea that there is such a thing as an objective truth and that it is desirable.
I think of filmmaker Michael Moore’s great line that Trump is “always lying and always telling the truth, which is what makes him such a great performance artist”.
He is “always lying” because, well, he is always lying. But he is also always telling the truth because anyone who has a functioning sense of what is true or false will know that he is lying — so to them, in a twisted way, he is always telling the truth because you always know where he is coming from, and it is always a bad place. Always.
This is the remarkable thing in men such as Trump and Boris Johnson, the fact that they are always acting in bad faith, that they know no other kind of faith to be acting in. Which makes them in a certain way, quite reliable.
The old-style leaders with their upsides and their downsides could throw you a bit. You mightn’t know which side was the dominant one at any given time. Which could be confusing.
That’s all gone now in the leadership of the UK and the USA. We are constantly in the presence of their badness, these men who have indeed prospered greatly by obeying the darkest voices in their heads.
They’re not called
Arthur Fleck and they’re not comedians. And you can’t just leave these Jokers behind in the picture house.
‘Trump and Boris are always acting in bad faith, they know no other faith to be acting in...’