It’s probably saying something about this day and age that so many top grossing movies that aspire to true drama are based on popular comic book IPs: A medium that aspires to parable but mostly just relegates itself to bombastic navel-gazing, forever worried about gaining relevance with a mass audience without losing relevance to its hard core of aging fans.
It’s in this stead that I’ve mulled over Joker, the new movie that takes on the usual Batman/Joker duality by making its iteration a supervillain origin story. It doesn’t exactly work, either as a drama or as a comic book movie, tho the reasons for each are similar as not. It works, perhaps, as a vehicle for Joaquin Phoenix to contend with Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson for Most Compelling Joker, but sadly he will have to take a distant third, not for his acting – he’s amazing – but for the writing.
The story of Joker remains largely the same throughout all iterations: Gotham, the comic book stand-in for New York (at times described as “New York below 14th Street at night in February,”) is dirty, crime ridden, inhospitable and always dark and cold. Batman is a billionaire industrialist and owner of the largest corporation in the city, who moonlights as a vigilante beating up what he sees as dregs of society. Joker is his foil: Obviously an extremist and psychotically insane but also with compelling arguments as to Batman’s effect on society – not just as a vigilante but as an capitalist. Wayne Enterprises, Batman’s business, is usually shown as a major employer with deep ties to the police and local government. Joker’s argument in most films is that civilization is a thin patina on base human instincts, largely governed by compulsion as anything else – a Hobbesian or Augustinian point of view, perhaps, though not strongly held – and Batman and his ilk are just as responsible if not more so for the sad state of existence as terrorists like Joker. In some cases, the argument is Batman creates Joker.
This is a political argument.
In the narrative of the comic book world, this works because Joker’s origin is deliberately mysterious – because he is nobody, he is everyman. His story as told by himself shifts to fit whatever narrative he hopes to achieve at the time, thereby always positioning himself in the perfect societal counter-argument to Batman’s attempts at what he sees as order. In effect Joker’s not unlike the chameleon nature of the internet forum troll: Arguments invented primarily to confound rather than based on lived sincerity, yet with the insistence and confrontational nature of having lived such lives. This lies at the heart of Nicholson’s Joker throwing away millions in cash during a parade right before releasing nerve gas or Ledger’s Joker pitting a ferry full of convicts against a ferry full of the bourgeois.
Phoenix’s Joker doesn’t really have that consciousness. And yet, it’s painfully clear that the producers of this movie really wanted him to. A version of “Bad Old Days” late 70s/early 80s New York is so lovingly crafted on the screen that the references are clear as day to any resident of the city; the grime and the graffiti are honed to a tee. It’s meant to evoke the New York of Bernie Goetz and Kitty Genovese and indeed this Joker even has a Goetz moment, shooting three finance bros in the subway (…all of whom are white, thereby avoiding any complicated message on race). It remarks on the cutting back of needed social services and indeed all civil servants have a harried, wane look to them, evoking the “Ford to New York: Drop Dead” fiscal crisis. It also references Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy so much one would think this movie is inviting comparison. If so, sadly, the comparison starts and ends with, “…but worse.” Travis Bickle is a disaffected loner who struggles with what he feels is his proper self-sacrifice to save the world. This Joker, named Arthur Fleck, is also a disaffected loner but harbors no such aspirations.
In fact, because in this iteration we know his real name and how he became the Joker, we can see that there is no statement to be made about society at all. Phoenix’s Joker is angry and aggrieved, but all his grievances are personal, not political. His mother is a delusional narcissist and he was abused as a child. He’s jumped by hoods and fired from his job. He pines for people who don’t know he exists or hold him in disdain. From that alone he might be considered a prime candidate for an incel hero, but that’s not entirely accurate. He’s more a character from the social texts of the 50s: An Angry Young Man, a Rebel Without a Cause. He lashes out violently and (somehow) ends up being the clown face of a violent, ostensibly populist movement but doesn’t care about any of that except to soak in the attention towards himself. The fact that the city is being beset by riots and protests is not really drawn on at all as a plot point, nor are the protesters or rioters afforded a communicated message, existing only as backdrop for the Joker’s own emotions. He is not feeding on the city’s energies; the city is feeding on his.
This is the opposite of a political argument.
That this movie is then produced during a time of great urban turmoil worldwide – from the self-dealing corruption threatening to tear our democracy apart, to the populist anti-foreigner rifts forming in the European Union, to extended protests in Hong Kong under China’s increasingly authoritarian thumb – makes it seem like it wants to say something about all that. It certainly carries itself with all the weight of such a dramatic role, and festoons every minute with the iconography of political tumult. That it doesn’t isn’t just odd, it’s at best an opportunity lost. At worst it’s an opportunity deliberately missed. This is likely for fear of offending any of the powers that be – from the corporations that produce this schlock to the governments art is supposed to critique – but a lack of a political statement is itself a political statement: One for the status quo. Indeed, since in this iteration Joker creates Batman and then completely omits a denouement, it must be assumed that the last word of the unease created by this film is intended in a sequel to be a re-establishment of order by… a billionaire industrialist with ties to the police. That’s a fun thought for this day and age.
