Joker is dumb.
“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema… Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” ~ Martin Scorsese on comic book movies
For the record, Martin Scorsese is absolutely, 100% wrong about comic book movies. They may be loud, and built around plenty of action scenes, but comic book movies absolutely can be the cinema of human and extraterrestrial beings conveying emotional, psychological experiences. I still proudly hold The Dark Knight high as a cinematic masterpiece for reasons that should be self-evident by this point, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not so much a capitalist nuclear warhead that it cannot take a break and be about the human element. I would challenge anyone to watch Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and not being moved by the complex interpersonal relationships of the characters, or watch Infinity War and Endgame and not feel the existential dread of all their favorite characters disintegrating into nothing and the impact that has on those that survive. Comic book movies are not, as Scorsese claims, a theme park attraction. As films like The Dark Knight and most of the later movies of the MCU prove, comic book movies are not the hollow, brainless shells of real human emotion and real world issues, they absolutely can be smart.
Joker is not that.
I watched Joker, expecting the movie to move me, or disturb me, or say anything to challenge me, and I have walked away feeling none of those things. I only feel indifferent towards Joker. And yet, my indifference is so overwhelming that it cannot help but loop around to obsessive hatred. Joker does not say much about the world we live in, or our current climate of mass violence and mass discontent. It is a tale of a man whom is made into a monster by the society that he lives in, that monster just so happening to be one of the most famous comic book supervillains of all time. But perhaps that is what makes Joker so insulting to me. It has caused much controversy, yet it is a movie far too absorbed in crafting said monster to have a statement that causes controversy. Or to have a statement at all. In fact, Joker, at its very core, is dumb. It is dumb, and the fact that I am currently obsessing over something so dumb is infuriating. So that is why I write. To put this dumb thing out of my misery, to end my own personal insanity caused by this dumb thing.
Joker is, first and foremost, the origin story of the Clown Prince of Crime, and it is an origin story to its own detriment. It is the story of how one man could be pushed to become one of fiction’s greatest nihilistic demons, but the movie is terrified that its audience will not be satisfied with just any justification for how a person who is more force of nature than man came into existence. It is so terrified, that it spends the entirety of two acts throwing things at Arthur Fleck, the man who would become the Joker, in order to justify his transformation. To the movie’s credit, Joaquin Phoenix plays Fleck extremely well, and the narrative comes up with a fairly convincing setup for him in its first act. It throws an awful society at a mentally challenged person, then gives that mentally challenged a gun, and then throws more of the awful society at that person until he snaps and turns a case of self defense into cold blooded second degree murder. It’s a fairly realistic setup, one that mirrors real life serial killers, and as a bonus, the film also sets up a fairly interesting consequence of this act — this triple murder causes a chain of events to occur that leads to a swell of protests and civil unrest targeting the corruption and general wretched-hive-ness of Gotham City. These protesters end up wearing clown iconography ala the clown makeup Fleck wore during his triple murder. One might think this would be a setup up to the Joker becoming more of a meme-like figure, how he would interact and possibly lead this civil unrest while basking narcissistically in the glow of attention, perhaps targeting people whom were emblematic of the city’s corruption, not unlike a certain famous vigilante.
But nope. The movie mostly ignores that in favor of flinging more backstory poo at Fleck, because the movie is apparently not convinced that you are convinced that Fleck has jumped off the deep end. This is despite the fact that Fleck just got done murdering three people and then doing an interpretive dance about it. It is here in the second act that the movie becomes an exercise in redundancy and contrivance. The movie writes itself into a corner over-establishing Fleck’s insanity at the expense of all other character traits. Fleck is too unstable to make rational, life preserving decisions, and would realistically make stupid mistakes like leaving a mountain of evidence pointing to him as the culprit of the Subway murders, or killing somebody, then letting the witness to the murder go free, as well telling the witness where he’s headed next. But instead of quietly writing off these contrivances or perhaps giving an in-universe justification, the movie decides to try to follow these developments to their logical conclusion and, surprise, surprise, ends up having to make its supporting cast down a bunch of stupid pills in order to have the plot progress in spite of itself. In doing so, it raises a giant red flag over these plot contrivances and makes it so the Clown Prince of Crime is borne because everyone was too incompetent to take any of the many chances they were given to stop him.
But how do we know any of these events are actually real? How do we know if the things we see on the silver screen are the truth when the film also attempts to establish that Arthur Fleck is an unreliable perspective? Thankfully, we know what is real and what is fiction, because the film is very talented at being incredibly obvious. We know to feel tense in a scene because the violin drone that makes up 90% of the soundtrack tells us to. We know when Fleck is either going to do something disturbing or murder someone or both, because the violin starts buzzing and Fleck starts laughing a lot. We know that Fleck’s girlfriend is a delusion right from the get go, because everything she does is far too convenient for Fleck. The movie goes out of its way to show that no, she is not in fact real, Fleck was merely talking to inanimate objects the entire time she was on screen with him. We know we’re not really supposed to sympathize with anyone in this movie outside of Fleck, because in this movie’s logic, in order for Fleck to jump off the slippery slope, he must be pelted with as much poo by everyone around him as possible, and therefore the movie must not frame anyone with any real sense of empathy or depth. Unfortunately, using modes of film-making this on-the-nose clashes with the movie’s attempts to be ambiguous, and therefore the movie’s attempts to frame Joker as a somewhat unreliable narrator fall apart on a technical level. One cannot have ambiguity when the film is constantly telegraphing its next move, and when there is no ambiguity, either moral or narrative-wise, there cannot be tension. Thus, the movie fails to be an effective thriller as well.
There is a debate between movie-goers as to which portrayal of the Joker was the best, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, or Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. I believe that debate is missing a key point of how movies work — a performance is not simply the acting of an actor, it is how the performance is portrayed by the camera, how it is lit by the lighting crew, how it sounds coming out of speakers, and how the character itself factors into the overall narrative of the movie. On that note, both movies are lit well, the camera tells you all you need to know about these characters, and the sound design is adequate. But on the subject of how each character factors into their narratives, ask yourself: what does The Dark Knight say as a film? We could probably be here all day talking about how Heath Ledger’s Joker is such an effective narrative villain. He is defined by his belief that people are inherently evil and selfish and is skilled at getting people to prove him right, but he is also undone because this belief does not allow him to account for how people can also sacrifice themselves and do the right thing, and that puts him in contrast with his nemesis, Batman, whom is aware of how evil society and humanity can be, but has chosen to rise above that and fight for those that evil would stomp on. With that in mind, what can we say about Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker? He’s a mentally disturbed loner that jumps off the deep end (twice) because society kept pushing him to jump off the deep end, and society doesn’t inherently try to stop him from jumping off the deep end out of collective interest because…
Because society is apparently full of incompetent fools who don’t do the obviously smart thing in the moment.
And that’s the movie’s main downfall. It relies on Joaquin Phoenix to carry the narrative, but the narrative itself doesn’t have a thesis statement about the nature of how people become mass murdering psychopaths outside of “because society threw poo at someone”, which is a thesis statement that is ineffective and easily disproved. Most people who are bullied, tormented, or had their parents gunned down in front of them in an alleyway as a child do not become mass murderers. Most people who are mentally ill do not become violent killers. Even if they do, it is not a sympathetic reason for someone to start murdering others in cold blood. The movie knows this too, and that is why it feels it has to spend two entire acts flinging poo at Arthur Fleck and creating an entire world of unsympathetic idiots, because otherwise it’s convinced that you won’t be convinced that Arthur couldn’t dive off the deep end and become a sadistic mass murderer.
But, if the movie was smarter and took the time to do actual research about how people become as such, it might find a lot of material about how real mass murderers are generally not people who have been abused by society, but in fact are narcissistic psychopaths who have isolated themselves from society out of self loathing and stewed themselves in murderous revenge fantasies. This is because they believe themselves to either be unfairly denied what they are owed and/or because of a twisted belief that killing a bunch of people will impress an audience of some kind and give themselves gratification in return. The movie has these elements inside of it, and could have used them, but chooses to ignore them in favor of giving Arthur Fleck not one, not two, but 21 bad days stretched over the period of a two hour movie, instead of a mercifully condensed single graphic novel that has far more to say about the subject than this movie does.
Again, Martin Scorsese is absolutely, 100% wrong about comic book movies, but one thing he said rings true for Joker, a film he originally wanted to be a part of. Joker is the theme park version of mass murderers. It is a shallow, in-your-face, and dumb take on a societal problem that has been plaguing the fears of American citizens with a redundant and contrived narrative to feebly back it up. In the year of our Lord, 2019, we must ask ourselves, what is the value of a movie that makes millions of dollars off of evoking a controversial subject while at the same time having nothing meaningful to say about it?