Left: a still from the first trailer for Joker.
Right: A photo of stairs in the Bronx I took a week before I saw the trailer,
completely independent of any knowledge of it. It's nice, isn't it? :)
It's not really the worst thing, but I'm bothered by a bunch of things in it, and one of my writing idols recently wrote an article attacking it as well, so I feel validated in coming forth to complain about Joker now. It's been like six months since it came out, so no one's getting hurt here. But seriously, it's got so many issues.
Source: Batman: Endgame
The essence of the film's problems is that it doesn't know what the heck it's talking about. The pitch for the film is that it's adapting the premise of the Joker's usual origin stories - mostly The Killing Joke, with a LITTLE bit of Zero Year - which is that before becoming the unhinged engine of violence he is, Joker was someone who wasn't just a normal guy, he was a HARMLESS guy; but someone who was also at the mercy of an uncaring world and eventually snapped in the face of bad luck and cruelty. The tragic point that's made is that we could all be him if we had the same bad luck and met the same bad people. So, you're upset at his violence, but there's the smallest bit of you that IS sincerely sorry for him, 'cause clearly he passed some limit of tolerance and endurance that put him on another level of dysfunctional and upset. But the truth is that he's still primarily a villain, and it doesn't matter that he had a bad past, it just makes him more compelling, 'cause we're disgusted by him and yet feel sorry for him. That right there is an EXCELLENT pitch for a story and the essence of basically every great tragedy ever - Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus, The Godfather, Breaking Bad - we understand what they're doing is wrong, but we also empathize with their suffering.
In contrast, Joker just decided to make a film where a guy has a hard time and then shoots a guy. It isn't interested in actually making him seem like a complicated person, and it doesn't even TRY to know anything about any of the complex topics it talks about, so instead of a nuanced, scary look into modernity that makes you question whether that could be you, it's just some BS for two hours and then ends. It's especially annoying because its two primary FILM influences - Taxi Driver and King of Comedy - are both EXCELLENTLY scripted and are honestly considered classics when it comes to modern isolation. And most importantly, perhaps this is just prejudice for the director, but these films were about:
A) The corrupt nature of New York City in the 70's, and,
B) The darker sides of celebrity fan support
And they were made by Martin Scorsese who is famous for:
A) Growing up in and making films about New York, and,
B) Being a celebrity and hanging out with celebrities.
In summary, he sure SEEMS like he knows what the heck he's talking about. Whereas the director for Joker is most famous for ... directing The Hangover movies. Not quite relevant to NYC ennui.
So - this film doesn't understand mental illness, it doesn't understand poverty, and it doesn't understand the violence it's promoting. I'm getting kind of in-depth here, but a lot of this comes from having actually lived in New York for a while, having talked to people who LIVED in New York during the periods the film covers, and having learned about some of the history people are actually talking about here. It's like an astronomer watching Armageddon; it's just a disrespecting of everything you know.
So, Point 1 - the big event of the middle section is completely missing the point of the event it's recreating.
When Fleck kills the three rich guys on the subway, it's meant to be a reference to Bernie Goetz, who shot five muggers on the subway when HE was riding the subway late at night. I've talked to my dad about this; until New York got cleaned up in the '90's, getting mugged was normal. That's the reason all the super heroes worked there in the comics. It was the reason for the idea that cities are violent and immoral.
New York isn't like that today. There aren't any prostitutes, there aren't any drug dealers; at least not in Times Square openly in the middle of the day. The subways aren't covered in graffiti, there's a good infrastructure and public services aren't overwhelmed or abused by the demands of its citizens every day. It's a normal and in fact safer-than-average city to live in. I walked through Central Park at night MULTIPLE times while I was living there and didn't have a care in the world beyond the usual concerns about walking outside at night anywhere in the world. And that is because the city has changed fundamentally. But in the '70's and '80's and the start of the '90's it was a violent and scary place, what the stereotypes would have you believe. And from there, that's what the setting of Joker is supposed to be. And that's what the subway shooting is meant to be - a take on a real event that was notorious when it happened, where Bernie shot five muggers who were trying to mug him on the subway as he was riding home. And at first, you know, the thing is, everyone else in New York had probably been mugged a million times, and he was getting mugged for the fifth time, so even if they didn't fully agree with him, they couldn't blame him for standing up for himself. But then what came out afterwards is that, well he was being robbed by a bunch of black kids from the ghetto and it turns out amongst other things Bernie was kind of a crazy person AND kind of a huge racist, so maybe he wasn't the best, most ideal example of someone taking the law into their own hands. And so the situation became a lot less straightforward.
And so this thing was at the intersection of a lot of things people cared about - things like violence and vigilante justice and police work and guns and poverty and yeah, I guess racism, and it wasn't as simple and straightforward as the initial narrative presented it. But in Joker, it IS exactly as straightforward as it's presented as, which is a bunch of well-off a-holes (who are EVIL! Because they're RICH!1!1!1!) beat up some perfectly harmless and undeserving schmuck and then he shoots them in retaliation. A kind of shocking but basically totally justified thing to do. And that's all there is to it. And so it's like we lose all the nuance of that and just get the simplistic "rich bad, not-rich good," which is a little silly, and so with that we come to the second problem, which is the attitude the film takes to discussing the rich versus poor gap.
Alfred the butler and Thomas Wayne, as portrayed in the comics and then in Joker. Note the difference in weight and the lack of apparent Italian ancestry.
So the second through-line of the film is that Arthur Fleck isn't happy because he's poor, and there these rich people saying, "oh, we can stop the poorness and save people," but it's meant to be clear that these wealthy people don't really care about helping people, don't really understand what it involves. And so thus they're basically bad guys cause they don't apparently really care, 'cause if they did they'd be out there doing it instead of talking about it on TV. But the thing is ... I guess that's true, but it's very simplistic, and then they just crash it when they have the sign at the protest which says, "Eat The Rich", which I think we can all agree in the modern day is the most simplistic, inflammatory, and "unhappy for both sides" statement that exists in class division discussion. The rich don't want to be eaten and the average person doesn't want to let you eat the rich and it's just turning the rich into orcs and turning the poor and middle class into poorer orcs and it's just talking crap and making everybody upset. Even if it's not meant to be taken literally, which of course it's not, it's still needlessly inflammatory. It’s like yelling “go back to where you came from!” to immigrants. It’s just something you don’t need to say. And so with that you can see the film doesn't actually know anything or more likely doesn't care about actually discussing this with nuance or layers or anything like that.
On the good side, I think it's interesting that both Thomas Wayne and the Alfred actor are both a bit chubbier than they usually are in any other adaptation; I think it's a good touch in contrast with Arthur Fleck's skinny onscreen body; it clearly SHOWS the divide between their circumstances of plenty and non-plenty, so the film does get points for that.
But aside from that, the point is it's not really saying anything meaningful, just alluding to it. And say, this is something that its influences once again did very well; Taxi Driver is really about a young guy with nothing going on this life trying to steal the notoriety of politicians by assassinating them; he's crying out for help, really, with his actions. King of Comedy is the same except it's with celebrities and with hijacking celebrity. And so there's always layers here and there's real time taken to ground it in something that feels realistic instead of you know, just some signs and some stuff on TV and some shots of Arthur flipping out in his crappy apartment. So they're not engaging with any of the issues; they're not saying anything about them, because each statement is just some inflammatory rhetoric that makes nobody happy, it's not an actual thesis. Some vague foreboding threat of something that doesn't mean anything.
So now we come to the third thread of the film, which is mental illness.
And I think the film does ... the IMPORTANT job, which is creating empathy for someone who has trouble with his feelings. Which is hopefully the great job of film - to give you empathy for something you normally wouldn't. And we certainly feel sorry for the character Arthur Fleck and want to help him have a better life. But it doesn't manage to do much with that. And the thing is, it does what I think is actually very easy to do with the Joker character, which is mishandle the relationship between craziness and malice.
Source: Batman: Hush
If we're perfectly honest to reality, Joker's craziness makes NO sense from a modern standpoint, because he was created in an era where we didn't care as much about mental illness, so crazy is just shorthand for flamboyance and malice and print-friendliness. So if we're being perfectly frank, NONE of this should make sense at all. But putting it just in the context of the usual Batman universe kind of craziness, even then the Joker film's brand of nuts doesn't line up with the usual crazy that works for him.
As I said, the premise of the Joker origin story is that he was a normal guy who had an extremely bad series of events happen to him that overloaded his ability to cope and led to him just going crazy - in real life, you know, it's kind of like a nervous breakdown where you're just stressed out by finals and work and everything and just freak out for a bit - but in Fictionland it's more fun to have him be crazy permanently. But from here we approach the question of what makes him evil, and ... working out and away from that origin ...
The honest truth - and this the default status quo of his character - is that he's a villain in the story because ... well, he's usually quite evil. And he consciously CHOOSES to be that way. THAT'S why Batman hates him; and you can see that choosing in any of the movies or video games or adaptations of the character. He's always like that.
The origin of Joker as shown in this game is far more exciting and interesting than anything shown in the entirety of Joker
And the truth is - mental illness aside - the Joker behaves very lucidly, so even if we accept that there's some mix of events and physical trauma that make him act the way he is - he's still acting day-to-day like a person who is malicious and evil and hurtful. This is an issue that comes up with special needs people and of course all the time with children; are they doing it 'cause of their special needs, or is it just them being a jerk, and how do I navigate between those? But in Joker's case, it USUALLY seems to be him being a jerk. So the question of his mental illness is overridden by the reality that he chooses to be malicious.
And it's like Taxi Driver, which was so good. You ARE sympathetic for Robert De Niro's character, because you see he's alone and disillusioned and unhappy and can't sleep and is surrounded by corruption and immorality. But that is overridden because we see he's also kind of a crazy, malicious person who wants to kill a politician because one of his staffers didn't have a great date with him and rejected him. And so we can have both malice AND sympathy for him. But what makes these characters compelling protagonists is that we see this malice OVERRIDING our sympathy. That's not what happens in Joker. Joker is just some poor guy, just so sad and so unhappy and so, so unhappy, and the big twists two-thirds of the way through of this unhappy film where we think there'll actually be some interesting development is SURPRISE - he doesn't actually have this big elaborate backstory, he's actually just ... UNHAPPY. We thought there was interesting backstory? Nope, just more unhappiness! And so it's just the one thing again and again, so it doesn't really engage with the material, it just hammers on the feeling and so we're left with nothing now; just dipping a finger in the pond, but not actually getting INTO the environment
And so the end result is that the film doesn't go deep. It's just beginning to end a film about how some guy is unhappy and starts at unhappy, then some things make him unhappy and then he gets unhappy enough that he hurts some people a little bit; still unhappy and then hurts more people still unhappy; and then he shoots a guy still unhappy. There's a difference between feeling sorry for a character and being immersed in a character's struggles, I guess, and this film did all of the former without any of the latter.
And even the surrounding events like the riots don't mean anything, because they're rooted in that shallow exploration of wealth and mental illness and New York and so it doesn't mean anything either. And I don't know if they're going to make a sequel, but if they do it should just be a straight Batman movie set twenty years later. Presumably Arthur Fleck will be like a 60-year-old Joker shuffling around foiling the Batman. I'd watch that. But this film didn't understand anything it was trying to engage on, and it probably did that on purpose, but it still didn't know those things or want to talk about those things. But whatever, he acted really good so obviously he earned that, but I just don't want any of my peers or friends or relatives to engage with this movie and think it's some profound thing. It's not - it's a basic idea. It's like a story you tell your kids - if you have unhappy things, in an unhappy place, with unhappy people, you will be unhappy. Be good to each other.
My name's Ephraim Belnap, and this film annoyed me.
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