A Bad Joke

Since the late Heath Ledger reinvented the Joker for The Dark Knight, there’s been a major shift in the cultural depiction of the most famous comic book villain once dubbed the Clown Prince of Crime. Focus shifted away from his charismatic personality and wicked sense of humour to exclusively hone in on his psychosis, his violent unpredictability, and his relationship to society, all part of an effort to make him feel like a more “realistic” villain. None have managed to make it work like Ledger though, missing the fact that part of what made that Oscar-winning character iconic was his uniqueness and mystique. And the attempts to copy that version of the character have gotten tiresome, hitting their apex with Todd Phillips’ Joker, a movie that conceives an origin story for a character always most compelling without one.

Further, Joker is a freshman film students’ idea of a “grown up” comic book movie, driven almost solely by a need to look and feel as removed from the typical comic book fare as is humanly possible. This is more or less confirmed by director Phillips stating his intent was to “sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film.” The premise completely dispenses with any of the periphery Batman material and continuity (until it becomes convenient), and goes out of its way to prove how dark and demented it is with overwhelming Scorsese homages and acts of brutality and psychopathy meant to appeal to audiences with a seething hatred of the comic book genre (or just seething hatred in general). The result is an insecure film devoid of life and meaning, miserable in the shadow of far greater films, both of the comic book and Scorsese varieties, yet with a grandiosity and unwavering conviction in its own self-importance as to make it not just dull, but obnoxiously dull.

I mention Scorsese, and it’s hard not to as the blueprints of Joker are about 50% The King of Comedy, 30% Taxi Driver (with the remaining 20% semi-original/Bernie Goetz inspired material). The 1970s setting, the socially awkward and disturbed loner with his warped sense of societal justice and delusions of his own respectfulness -it’s nothing new and nowhere near as revealing and provocative as it was back then, relevant though those movies still are. But Phillips is determined to mimic those films, down to specific scenes, such as one where Joaquin Phoenix’s title character, otherwise called Arthur Fleck, fantasizes about meeting and swiftly befriending his talk show comedy idol, and casting Robert De Niro as that character, effectively as the Jerry Lewis role opposite the upstart comedian he himself played in 1983.

Of course The King of Comedy knew it was a dark comedy, while Joker takes itself all too seriously. Fleck is not in the least bit funny or even maniacal, nor is he all that interesting, being mostly just a standard lonely, unsuccessful white guy with proclivities to violence, whose story and social qualms could be the manifesto of any white nationalist -which is the disturbing reality this movie can’t help but be set against, even as those involved would claim no responsibility or political intent for the messages conveyed by sympathizing with a dangerous killer and his point of view. Evidenced by Phillips’ response to this controversy, he seems unaware that movies don’t exist in a vacuum independent of context, that how stories are told is impressionable, and that not only did a previous self-serious outing for this character result in a mass shooting, but one of the movies he’s deliberately trying to emulate famously inspired an attempted presidential assassination.

This might not matter if Joker had a sense of self-awareness, but it doesn’t ever condemn him in any tangible way. This is the missing key ingredient of those Scorsese movies being referenced. Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin were never victims of an unjust world, for all of the formers’ rantings about how degenerate and rotten society is, there was never any mistake HE was the problem. But Fleck IS victimized, bizarrely so (there’s a scene where a trio of drunk businessmen tauntingly sing “Send in the Clowns” to him); he’s harassed and beaten and mocked for his pathological laughing and dressing like a clown (which is his job) shifting the blame for his actions from himself onto some vague definition of “society”. Yet Joker offers barely any substantive social commentary. Aside from a largely unexplored critique of underfunded mental health initiatives, everything in the way of the films’ portrait of wealth disparity, class consciousness, poverty, protest movements, and capitalist systems is impotent and hollow, scratching only the surface of these heady issues and simplifying them to a condescendingly black and white degree. It points out there’s a problem and thinks that alone is saying something. For the films’ superiority complex, it’s got no more social nuance than any superhero comic from the 1950s.

There are things to praise though. Phillips may be aping the movies’ style but he knows what he’s doing with it. There are great shot compositions throughout the film, meaningless though they may be, purely visual sequences that have a richness all their own. The cinematography is thankfully not as grim and grimy as it could have been and there’s some cleverly used setpieces -the scene from the advertising of him dancing down those steps is particularly nicely shot and edited. It at least gets that a Joker movie should be visually appealing. As far as dark-for-the-sake-of-dark comic book movies go, it’s the best looking and most technically interesting one since the Dark Knight trilogy by a long shot. Phoenix’s weird (nothing new for Phoenix) performance may be desparate and pathetic; but actors like De Niro and Zazie Beetz are good under the circumstances. And I approve of the conventionally unconventional music choices, standards like “Smile” and “That’s Life” as thematically lazy as they are, being used to underscore certain moments.

Joker ended on a line I could see coming a mile off, as it perfectly fit the movies’ aesthetic theme and Phillips’ attitude throughout, already it seems on the defensive against detractors. The movie isn’t without things to defend, and certainly there’s an audience for its relative subversiveness of modern blockbuster cinema. But the idea floating around that Joker is somehow better than the average comic book film because it’s different and more complex is absurd. It tells the same story we’ve heard a dozen times since Taxi Driver (and see play out on the news on a regular basis), says nothing new about the character or “society” -indeed of all the origin stories to give the Joker, this one has to be among the most boringly pedestrian; and its preoccupation with being taken seriously and self-loathing as a comic book property is indistinct from Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman’s similar attitudes.

The Joker is a highly intriguing and captivating character -he has been ever since his 1940 debut- and he’s a character very versatile to interpretation. This interpretation is stale and easy, and I would definitely be more enthused about a Joker movie that had the courage to play the character to more of a Cesar Romero or Mark Hamill take, or something else entirely new that’s not dependent on wallowing in despair and contempt. 

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