The Real Joker
I nearly dodged seeing Joker. The comic book movie genre has grown old, and Hollywood produces scarce good cinema these days. But people I trust seemed to like Joker, so I took the plunge. I’m extremely glad I did because Joker may be the most important movie of this era.
What is this era, anyway? Oh, haha. That’s a joke. This is an era in which anything interesting I might say about this era will draw fire. Think on that for a moment.
Next, Joker is no comic book flick. Nor is it the vacuously dark and “edgy” horror story dismissed by many of this era’s primary film critics. This is a serious movie about serious topics that requisitions the comic book genre, within its traditionally darkest story, to draw in an audience that’s ready (and demanding of) some stark reality (or as close as you can get with stylized fiction).
Before I really dive in, I’m going to make this plain: Joker is nothing like what the pundits and professional reviewers say it it. In fact, that they get it wrong is part of the point! As I’ve said, that’s the era we live in.
Joker is not liberal or conservative or right-wing or left-wing. It’s not Antifa and it’s not the alt-right. However, if you look straight at it with plain eyes, you’ll see the commentary on not only the extremes, but the real source of those extremes. Why hack at the leaves when we can get at the root, anyhow?
While political elements are there as part of the story, Joker is a mental health movie, and a cautionary tale about ignoring important flaws in the organization of our entire society. As such, Joker pushes back at the many faulty partisan critiques at once, and confuses exactly those whose ignorance most matters. This includes large swaths of the media and even the well educated critics whose keen minds we depend on when analyzing any art that reveals some important aspects of the world around us.
Joker is incisively political by remaining apolitical in its coding.
My goodness! Who is left who can help make sense of it all?!
Perhaps you can. There are no oracles better than your own keen mind, once you disentangle it.
This is going to be a long story, so strap in. And if you haven’t seen the film yet…spoiler alerts. In fact, I’m going to spoil nearly the whole damned enterprise. But if you haven’t seen it, perhaps you’ll understand why you should. Ye have been fairly warned. Forgive any mild misquotes. I get them mostly right, but don’t have a script on hand.
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First, all the acting jobs were top notch. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is one of the best in cinema history, considering all he had to pull off (which is hopefully clear by the time I’m done). Frances Conroy pulled off exactly what had to be pulled off, and Zazie Beetz did the job of pulling off hope and despair. Of course, I don’t expect any of them to win any awards. My favorite film in childhood, Lawrence of Arabia, didn’t win best picture, and nobody I ever voted for (ever) won an election. I don’t do popular well, it seems.
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The movie begins in a brick office in Gotham, the comic book equivalent of New York City, as Arthur Fleck applies his make up. Other clowns go about their preparatory work. A report on a radio or TV reveals that the city is in the midst of a garbage strike. The people who take out the trash aren’t working.
Arthur practices a forced smile. A tear rolls down his face, carrying a streak of dark eye shadow with it.
Outside, Arthur holds up a sign while a piano player adds festive noise to the streets that resemble the Big Apple of the 1980s. A group of five punk boys, maybe 10 to 16 years of age, grab Arthur’s sign and he makes chase. Once off the avenue and in an alley, the boys jump Arthur, beating him badly. Ink spills out of the flower from his lapel like blood from his heart.
Arthur is one among the dregs of the big city. But the critics who call him self-pitying don’t get it. He’s doing better than you would expect of a poor man in his condition when all is said and done, and he eats his own pain with barely a complaint. He is the man who lives with his elderly mother, whom he bathes and cares for, and who tells him to “put on a happy face” [which he does with paint when he can’t] and “bring joy and laughter to the world” [which he tries, and sometimes fantasizes about].
Arthur is a good man! At least, Arthur is a man who intends goodness, though he makes people uncomfortable. Arthur gives forgiveness in understanding of the punks who assault him. He entertains a child on the bus. He holds the door for a young, beleaguered single mother. But given the opportunity, Arthur refuses to pile on the one man around him over whom he might hold social rank (were he to take it): the midget who is an office assistant at the clown office. Unfortunately Arthur suffers from a condition in which he laughs inappropriately. Really, Arthur laughs when he is in pain, and we’ll find out why.
We next find Arthur in the office of a jaded mental health social worker. She asks him questions. He answers, but she doesn’t really care to put effort into listening. He asks, “Is it me or is it getting crazier out there?” Next we find out that Arthur spent time locked up in a hospital for unnamed mental health problems. He thinks maybe it would be best to up his medication, but the social worker tells him that he’s on seven medications already. “I just don’t want to feel so bad, anymore.”
Why does Arthur feel so bad? In truth, everyone in the city seems mentally unhealthy in one way or another, just about. (Why does it take Arthur to see this? Can nobody else recognize it?) Randal, his clown coworker, is a bully. The kids on the streets are punks, taking out their pain in turn on others. The elites of the city are variously revealed as psychopaths. His mother suffers from PTSD and delusions. But Arthur’s condition is different. He has a tick that reaches out and smacks you in the face. It’s like Tourette’s syndrome, but because it comes out as a high pitched laughter, makes everyone intensely more uncomfortable. People look away or distance themselves, sometimes flinging various insults as a method to dig an emotional moat. Arthur tells us himself: his malady is not the pain. People’s reactions are the pain.
And that just makes him laugh more. And yes, that’s about as creepy as it can get. Creepy-feeling, at least. For the most part, Arthur allows people their distance, and retreats to his isolation.
The disengaged mental health worker isn’t going to help him find hope for his predicament.
As mentioned, Arthur cares for his mother as best he can, with limited means. In the evenings they watch a late night comedian, Murray Franklin, and Arthur fantasizes about meeting Murray on his show. He longs to become a comedian himself, turns his mental health journal into a [terrible] joke book, and attends a local comedy club to enjoy and study. A daydream perhaps more intense than the average aspirational hope. After all, this man’s pain is more desperate than most.
Arthur even imagines a relationship with his cute neighbor, the single mother whom he once stalks through part of her day.
Back at the office, Randal gives Arthur a gun. Who knows where this gun has been or what it’s been used for, but Randal clearly wants to look like a good chum — -the bully who protects his pal from bullies. But the gun gets Arthur in trouble when it falls out of his coat at a hospital while he sings and dances to entertain sick children. Arthur gets fired from his job by a boss who has already told Arthur that he makes everyone uncomfortable, and needed little excuse to pull that trigger.
Things are going pretty badly for Arthur. How could it get any worse? On the subway ride home, and group of wealthy, spoiled brat banker types harasses a woman. Arthur’s squealing laughter draws their attention, giving her the opportunity to walk to another car. The three men surround Arthur and attack him. Another beating.
Let’s pause here for a moment. Have you ever heard of Napoleon Chagnon? If you don’t read up on works or controversies in anthropology, you probably haven’t. Chagnon died two weeks before Joker opened. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences who spent time with the Yanomamo, a tribe of indigenous Amazonians. After time spent with the Yanomamo, he penned The Fierce People, painting the Yanomamo as a violent society, and likely genetically so. Controversy erupted in debate between the sociobiological explanation Chagnan offered and the sociocultural position favored by others in his field.
“Just call it nature versus nurture, asshole!”
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I just wanted to introduce the scientific terms for posterity. You can put that on my tombstone.
The question: Do nearly a third of Yanomamo die violently due to a genetic predisposition toward conflict? Or does something else, such as the structure of their society, play a more primary role?
Do we have enough evidence to make that call, yet?
At the very least, we can say that civilization exists due to the influences of our various institutions, the codification of game theoretic conflict resolution. Perhaps it’s all institutions that keep us safe. Perhaps the peaceful society that results breeds more peaceful people.
Perhaps the institutions keep us safe, but psychopaths climb to the top, motivated by the opportunity to better breed (and abuse people) that wealth affords them? Perhaps neither Chagnon nor his detractors got all of it right! But the further we go into the future, the more I look to economist Douglas North and his fixation on the economic value of institutions. The further we progress, the more work institutions are doing. We better keep an eye on that…
Back to Arthur…good, kind, malformed Arthur is pushed to the extreme as three grown men kick the snot out of him. It’s not kids this time, and if they’ve gone this far, these maniacal goons may have neither the moral compass nor the fear instinct…BANG! BANG BANG! BANG! Arthur kills two of them and shoots the third in the leg as he flees. Arthur stands up, and in the moment, hunts the third man down, off the train, limping toward the stairs at the desolate train stop. Arthur shoots this last man in the back.
All three men dead, Arthur bolts and runs to find himself in a park bathroom. He slams the door and catches his breath. He breathes. He relaxes. Arthur can finally relax. He feels good. Arthur begins to dance, as if to some imagined symphony, finally playing in tune with his life.
What. The. Hell. Just. Happened?
This is a key moment in the story, and a key place where pundits fail to call a Rorschach test a Rorschach test. Some will say that Arthur “broke” or “turned evil” in this moment. Various pundits will make allusions to one or another populist movement. But let’s take a look back at the Yanomamo, and the differences between us and them. In a primitive society, people fight when something important is at stake. Heck, dueling was only outlawed in most states gradually throughout the 1800s. Probably to keep the educated elite safe from the psychopaths (ushering in something like an era of employment?). Fighting is natural to our species, which is why we develop such complex layers of laws to keep us from killing one another from day to day! That’s why we accompany those laws with lessons of morality and adherence to legal and religious tradition. But when push comes to shove, we kill. So long as we have agency!
Arthur had always lacked agency. His condition made him the juiciest target for those causing pain, intentionally or unintentionally, but a combination of moral training and social mores kept him from throwing down with the jerks who caused him so much pain from one day to the next. Arthur ate all the pain.
And that’s why he always felt so bad. That’s why he could feel the city getting crazier, too. The pain he bore was a mental health barometer.
But taking action into his own hands, which he would only do when forced, relieved all that tension. Arthur felt an existential weight lift from his shoulders.
So he danced.
Killing is ugly. Killing is immoral.
Also, you’re an animal. Yes, you are. You’re an incredible animal! But you’re an animal. Your training takes you far from your instincts, and if the two are in conflict, you suffer.
Thankfully you don’t suffer all the time. But Arthur did. All. The. Time.
It was only a matter of time before the gloves came off. Because, just like me and you, Arthur is an animal.
No, this isn’t a blame it on society story. The structure of society didn’t pull the trigger. Yet, it would be too easy to end the story with, “Well, I guess Arthur is a bad guy, now.”
If neither explanation is correct, what is?
Maybe the answer is that we’re not yet done perfecting society. And listen up, buddy, crowds are amassing on the streets. People are in pain, dying of addiction, killing themselves, and devolving into nihilistic fantasy drones one step away from pointing a loaded gun at whoever harmed them (or they imagined harmed them) last. Society separated too wide as we surpassed Dunbar numbers of various technological stabilities. And the psychopathic leadership we have now doesn’t get it, doesn’t want to handle it, and doesn’t fund solutions. In the U.S., we dismantled our mental health institutions, drug the crap out of kids who can’t sit still for long enough in a brick box, and point fingers over partisan lines (of political and also other varieties) because we’re too focused on secondary and tertiary problems. Or maybe just too focused on our own lives. Because we can focus inwardly. Stay inside. With our TVs. And our smart phones.
If you’re not part of the solution, are you part of the problem?
No. We’re just a mentally unhealthy society that doesn’t recognize the poison leaking in. We need to be smacked in the face with it. We need to crawl, coughing and wheezing to the nearest exit, breathe, get up, then go back and look for survivors to rehabilitate.
Evil, if we want to call it that, isn’t necessarily anybody’s fault. Or maybe it’s everybody’s fault, but that’s not the point. The point is that we need to fix it.
That’s what Joker is about. It’s a story. There is a problem. This problem is distilled madness of the highest order. And we need to fix it.
At home, Arthur’s mother writes letters to her former wealthy employer, Thomas Wayne, telling Arthur that the mayoral hopeful is a good man, and must surely be sympathetic to their plight. Arthur reads one of these letters and finds that she is pleading for attention and care for their son!
Okay, we’re far enough along in this journey that I’m going to stop reconstructing the film in pure chronological order (if I had even adhered to that). We have the setup of a strange, sad man living in the ghetto with his mother, trying to live a decent life despite some form of mental illness that we don’t yet fully understand. But let’s talk about Thomas Wayne, the real joker of the film (seriously).
Arthur, at his emotional low, finds out that, according to his mother, he is the bastard son of Thomas Wayne, and that his mother signed papers helping Thomas Wayne ensure secrecy of all relations. Arthur goes on a journey to find out the truth of the matter — a journey on which he meets Bruce Wayne at Wayne Manor, reaches through the gate, and manipulates Bruce’s face. Probably a lot of the audience doesn’t know what to make of this, but given the way Arthur studies his own face throughout the film, he may be examining Bruce’s teeth, looking for resemblance. If you’re thinking that Arthur isn’t bright enough for that, you’re mistaken. Arthur is brain damaged in a particular way, grossly under-stimulated, and suffers from psychosis, but Arthur shows a resourceful nature throughout the story. Watch it again.
Arthur is interrupted by Alfred, Thomas Wayne’s butler, who proceeds to tell Arthur that his mother is crazy, and that pisses off Arthur who isn’t convinced that he isn’t Thomas Wayne’s son. Arthur also sneaks into a movie gala, and after donning a disguise as an usher, confronts Thomas Wayne in the bathroom. “It’s me, dad!” After telling Arthur that his mother is delusional, Thomas Wayne punches Arthur in the face.
Arthur journeys to Arkham Asylum and requisitions his mother’s mental health file. In it, Arthur finds out that his mother took on a boyfriend who beat the crap out of both of them, almost surely resulting in Arthur’s inappropriate laughing during awkward or painful moments. Arthur’s mother told the interviewer something like, “He was always such a happy boy. I never even heard him cry.”
Right, because the naive mother (and that was her fatal flaw) taught her poor boy to always put on a happy face. So, he repressed the effects of his beatings. Then, for the rest of his life, he repressed the pain inflicted on him by everyone in society.
However, the Arkham files convince Arthur that his mother is delusional, and that her delusions have led to his sad, painful life of isolation. The weight is crushing. He visits his sick mother who is by this point hospitalized, and tells her that he always thought his life was a tragedy, but now he knows it’s a comedy. This can mean a lot of things, but they all come down to one thing: he is a joker to anyone who matters. There is nobody who can care for him, and there never will be. His joy would have value to nobody, but his pain can be a source of amusement.
Arthur then suffocates his own mother with a pillow.
Later, just before Arthur is to appear on his favorite late night television show with famed comedian Murray Franklin, Arthur finds a picture of his youthful mother, with a hand-written note from Thomas Wayne (initialled “T.W.”) who tells her how much he loves her smile. Could these words be innocent? Technically yes, but certainly not. A man doesn’t pen those words to anyone but his lover. Thomas Wayne really is Arthur Fleck’s father. The joke was on Arthur and his mother all along, and now Arthur is guilty of murdering the one and only person who ever loved him.
Also, Arthur Fleck (the Joker) and Bruce Wayne (Batman) are half-brothers, separated by lives of love and disregard in the most disgusting family engineering imaginable. The latter, destined for a materially pampered life, the former destined for a most twisted, mind-wrenching torture: mental and emotional schism. All set in motion by the man who tells Gotham that he is their only hope [as mayor]. What a joker.
Stepping back in the plot fold, Arthur gets a visit from Randal, the bully clown, and Gary, the midget from the clown office who sometimes find himself the butt of Randal’s jokes. They ostensibly came to console Arthur over getting fired. Arthur says he is in a good mood, celebrating his mother’s death (he doesn’t yet know that she told him the truth). Arthur has died his hair green, signifying an acceptance of a new persona that he will carry with him to the Murray Franklin Show. Arthur murders Randal, then lets Gary go, telling Gary that he was the only one who was nice to him [at the office].
While Arthur has suffered a traumatic schism, Arthur still carries with him the basic sense of those who are good to/for him and those who are not. Previously Arthur swallowed all his own pain, kicking the trash instead of an actual person when angry, for instance. But Arthur isn’t just out to kill at random. He is out to kill those who cause him pain, very specifically.
Next we find Arthur, green-haired, face painted, dressed in a vivid red suit, dancing down the stairs out on the street with Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” playing. Arthur feels good again, having murdered another of his tormentors. But let’s stop here for a moment…Gary Glitter? Gary Glitter fell out of the public light after being unmasked as a pedophile. I strongly suspect that Phillips is reaching out of the film, right at society’s elites. Yes, this is a movie about a horribly abused child who strikes back at his tormentors when stretched to the brink. Distilled madness finding the source as its target. This particular song is a statement. It’s a line in the sand where pedogate is the child abuse scandal of our era, covered up by the elites through the media. No wonder Joker gets such chilled reviews (as we’ll discuss more later). Who’s laughing, now? Arthur delights. This is his triumphant moment of comedy!
(Also, it may be the case that Franklin Murray’s name is meant to connect us to what might be the most famous cover-up of child abuse scandal in American history, centered around Franklin, Nebraska, which pointed to the very top of the American political pyramid.)
What is a joke, anyway? What makes a joke…funny? For the whole movie, Arthur cannot reach past his severed emotional connection with the world to write a single funny line. He imagines a relationship with the adorable single mother down the hall to help pump himself up in a courageous attempt to take the stage at the open mic at a comedy club where he fails dismally. Jokes are subjective, of course (something Arthur observes later on the Murray Franklin show, telling us something about the wide chasm between his intelligence and his ability to connect socially). We find a joke funny when it resolves some kind of tension either that the teller sets up, or that already exists due to the psyche or mental schema of the target audience.
This tells us what’s happening when Arthur kills. When Arthur kills, he resolves tension. Arthur finds the only comedy of his life in the slaying of those who piled up so much abuse on him that he ditched the reality of the moral laws he obeyed for his whole life. This is worse than sad and awful. This should truly horrify you. This should horrify us all. But what should really horrify us all is wondering whether there is anything actually different about Arthur, as a baby being born, joining this world out of a mother, then distanced by an absent father who was perfectly capable of taking care of them both.
Arthur doesn’t get people. Arthur cannot get people. But in his search for comedic brilliance, he hits the head on the nail. To him, that’s worth dancing about.
After getting chased by cops who probably know that Arthur killed the three Wayne employees at the subway, Arthur makes it to Murray Franklin’s studio. Arthur had idolized Murray Franklin who was the subject of some of Arthur’s fantasies. But Murray Franklin got ahold of Arthur’s pathetic attempt at stand-up comedy and mocked it on air, which Arthur saw from the hospital room where his sick mother had been recovering. Now Arthur has been invited to the show to once again play the clown, but insists on appearing as the Joker.
What’s the difference between a joker and a clown, anyhow? Arthur had been a clown, somebody who mocks himself. A joker resolves tension. Arthur confidently smokes a cigarette and takes the stage, kissing the female guest and revelling in the moment. After some back-and-forth with Murray Franklin during which Arthur admits to the slaying of the men on the subway, and Murray Franklin mocks Arthur’s pain as “so much self-pity”, Arthur murders Murray Franklin in front of a live audience.
Throughout the movie, the trash strike and other tensions present in the city have inspired throngs of protesters out onto the streets. They’ve adopted clown masks to show a kind of appreciation for the clown murderer of the three psychopathic corporate goons. These Antifa-like protesters are not Arthur. They are angry. They are at odds with the governing elite. But they know nothing of the true nihilistic extremes that Arthur found (or that found him). But as Arthur is driven away by a police car, some of them ram a truck into the police car, and drag Arthur out. Meanwhile, one of the protestors recognizes Thomas Wayne, ushering his wife and child Bruce away from the chaos through an alleyway, and gun downs Thomas and his wife.
A dazed Arthur regains consciousness, realizes that the chaotic protesters around him are cheering for him, and finally connects with an audience.
In the last scene in the film Arthur speaks with a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum. Like the social worker, she lacks the ability to connect with Arthur. She shows no intention of understanding him or what he’s been through. She asks questions that don’t relate to his story or his madness. He laughs. She asks what’s so funny. He smiles, “You wouldn’t understand.” Next we see Arthur strolling, care free, out of the room, tracking bloody footprints. He gets chased by a guard.
That’s a wrap.
In my organization, I left out a few important details. One of those is the presence of black women in Arthur’s life. Arthur lives in the ghetto, and most of the people around him are black including the social worker in the early scene, a woman on the bus who chides Arthur for attempting to clown for her son, the single mother whom Arthur fantasizes about, the only black person in the theater where Arthur confronts his father, and finally the psychiatrist he murders. In Gotham, as in most of American history, black women are the least respected members of society, at least ordinarily speaking. Who has less respect? Aside from criminals, it’s the mentally ill. Throughout Joker, we see clearly that Arthur is so low in the estimation of society that he is below every one of these women in power and respect. However, while politics has begun to catch up with the elevation of black women, at least rhetorically, we still live in a world in which terminology surrounding the mentally ill still gets weaponized as insults, and the mentally ill themselves are largely removed from common public presence, by encouragement or coercion. We closed the mental hospitals, so prisons and streets “house” the worst off.
Except the narcissists. Why the narcissists? What do we do with them? In the case of Thomas Wayne, we elevate them! They tell us that we “may not realize it, but I’m their only hope,” and many a Penny Fleck believes that everyone must think so. Through her rose-lensed heart, she just knows that he will take care of her. She cannot fathom what evil he has wrought.
Narcissism is generally a co-affliction. It goes hand-in-hand with psychopathy, sociopathy, or more debilitating disorders to the afflicted like borderline personality disorder. Narcissism is the crafted veneer that passes a monster off as a hero, or at least highly normal. Neurotypical. It can be easy to detect, but is usually hard due to survivor bias. The dumb narcissists get no attention from their prison cell. The bright ones thrive. And reproduce.
Arthur Fleck is no narcissist. In fact, that’s why there is no in between for him. Either he is committed to handling the world in a moral fashion (“I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable”), or straight-forwardly murderous with no apologies (“You get what you fucking deserve”). Penny Fleck gets declared narcissistic, but is more simply delusional in a post-traumatic commitment to her naive existence. Franklin Murray is narcissistic (“It’s a clean show”). Thomas Wayne is pathologically and brutally narcissistic (“She’s crazy” *WHAM!*).
One of my friends dove head-first into the unreliable narrator aspect of the story and debated whether anything at all happened. While not unreasonable, we can really insert such a proposition into any tale. But I don’t think that we should unless and until we’re given a direct and decipherable cue. Besides, Joker is billed as an origins story. I don’t think, “This is what an insane person told a psychiatrist he disliked and promptly murdered,” is very interesting at all. But the story, as told, with appropriate subtraction and accounting for the clearly presented moments of Arthur’s imaginary friends, is particularly poignant, and makes for a spectacular Rorschach test.
As such, I did not interpret Arthur has having killed the Zazie Beetz character. In a terrible moment for him, he enters her apartment instinctually seeking some kind of comfort that he has imagined for himself, from her. That’s when we find out that he imagined it all. “I really need you to leave. My little girl is sleeping in the other room.” Arthur marches down the hall to his own apartment and we see him laughing that uncomfortable laugh or moral-Arthur who laughs at his pain and awkwardness. She never delivers him any pain, and as with Gary, he has no reason to harm her. He’s quite embarrassed to have made her afraid.
Critics Addendum
While this review could stand alone, it shouldn’t. Joker (the movie) reaches out into our world, and so shall I. I’ve claimed that the critics, the professional sense-makers of art in our society, have it all wrong, but I’ve only barely scratched the surface. To skip this part of the exercise would risk the Joker reaching directly into our world.
While millions of Americans pour into theater seats to behold Joker, the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott really throws his energy into making dismissive comments. You’d think anyone who writes, “To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting,” and refers to the film as, “afraid of its own shadow, or at least of the faintest shadow of any actual relevance,” and brands its defenders with labels like “bad faith, hypersensitivity, and quasi-fascist groupthink,” wouldn’t bother following up with six additional paragraphs. The inept paragraphs that follow are punctuated by a shallow description of Joker as “less a depiction of nihilism than a story about nothing,” which is one of the greatest self-pwns in the history of art critique, and that’s no small feat. Fortunately for Scott, his embarrassingly obtuse attempt at a snub is behind a paywall.
Writing for the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw calls Joker, “the most disappointing film of the year,” then pens off a shallow synopsis that ends by describing the main character’s transformation as “humiliation and despair become too much to bear, Arthur gets hold of a gun and discovers that his talent is not for comedy but for violence.” Hear that, guy-taking-a-life-threatening-beating? Raising a hand back at your tormentors in self-defense is just a pathetic form of self pity. Listen to your betters and put on a happy face, why don’t you? Bradshaw cannot see through his own cognitive dissonance to make the connection between what he misses about Arthur’s story and the separate vector of the populist movement that adopted his likeness. After some historical discussion of Scorsese and De Niro, Branshaw laments that Joker couldn’t somehow further punish incels and internet trolls, demonstrating his inability to love his enemy: the impoverished [in any form]. That’s okay, I bet he has black friends.
At the New York Post, Sara Stewart calls Arthur Fleck “a violent maniac” from the get go. To be fair, Stewart at least references how, “Arthur Fleck sheds his sad-sack chrysalis and emerges into full-blown Joker mode,” but she goes on to explain to us exactly how she missed essentially every important facet of that story while making use of a solid SAT vocabulary and more advanced phrases like “Kabuki-esque”. In the end, all she can do is to “imagine that Phillips embedded this one with a wry message: Toxic masculinity is, actually, no joke at all,” for which she provides no further discussion and seems to aim at Arthur himself without a single word in her review about Thomas Wayne (or Rupert Murdoch, ahem).
At Roger Ebert dot com, Glenn Kenny pans Joker so that Ebert doesn’t have to take on the task. Like a few other commentators, Kenny makes some historical references to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. He questions whether Phillips “really cares about income inequality, celebrity worship, and the lack of civility in contemporary society,” while demonstrating no understanding that Phillips portrayed these as effects of the larger root cause. As with most “elite” reviewers, I strongly suspect that Kenny’s lashing out demonstrates either narcissism covering for his role as a sociopathic underling of a psychotic elite or narcissism covering for borderline personality disorder. Aw, heck, I’ll do the polite thing, feign Hanlon’s razor, and say that I’ll assume he’s just not that bright.
Okay, I don’t know who this Mark Hughes guy writing for Forbes is, but he either missed the memo or Forbes, a news source dedicated to covering billionaires, is one of the rare journalistic organizations that doesn’t fear what the elite might think of Joker. It would take me a few more pages to go into why this doesn’t really surprise me, so I won’t. But while Hughes liked the movie very much, his review is still rather thin given the subject matter. For all I know, it’s just another advertisement, but I honestly don’t know whether I should just assume so or not.
Dozens of other professional reviewers missed most or all of the point, intentionally or not. Many dig into the white maleness of the film, hammering home the beleaguered point that telling a story about a while male is some kind of crime these days, while simultaneously missing the commentary about the many black women throughout the movie. Even when Time spots most of the black women, they invert the device implying that they “are visible but they are not seen”. Ironically, Time missed the brief (though certainly not trivial) placement of the black woman in the theater. Unlike other reviews, the Time review mentions the actual existence of Thomas Wayne (and Alfred) in the movie, but only insofar as “they are more palatable to a core audience which predominantly looks like them.” Somehow Time missed the point that these white men were the primary villains, and that was quite clearly in contrast to the various black women whose flaws were more ordinary and understood on an ordinary human level.
On the topic of mental illness, the Hollywood Reporter thinks that Joker “shouldn’t have relied on [it]”, then goes on to cite several jokers psychiatrists who conclude that it’s irresponsible to suggest a primary link between mental illness and violence. Instead of digging into the specifics of Arthur Fleck’s life, and numerous reveals, they dismiss his suffering as “cultivation of a grievance” and then wind up talking about mass shootings and Trump, because they cannot escape that their job is to insert specific political narratives into anything and everything, no matter how large the problems they ignore and how deliberate that looks. In doing so, they affirm the movie’s theme.
Not entirely unrelated, perhaps now is an appropriate moment to view this graph from thinkpress.org:
The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t get it all wrong in its muddled article (we should be thinking about the world as mass shooters see it, and Joker provides one fictional anecdote), but incorrectly concludes that Joker blames all violence on mental illness, or something like that, and fails to focus on the events of the movie. I sometimes wonder whether we were all watching the same flick.
Then there is this post by “best selling author” E. Michael Jones of Culture Wars Magazine: “The movie pushes these disaffected, young white men towards nihilism. They want you to go out and pickup a gun, and they’re praying that this happens.” No, E. Michael, or Mr. Jones, or whatever you’d like for me to call you, the writers of the movie want for us to think about unaddressed root causes of nihilism. Maybe you should adjust your bow tie to help you tune in.
While I’ve focused here on the elite movie critics, I did read a handful of reasonable reviews (mostly imperfect, but with some good sense and I at least know the reviewer cared to watch the film before deciding what to write) once I made a few internet searches for specific terms. Most all of them were at outlets I’d never heard of, which is interesting in itself. That includes a reddit thread that links to a small time YouTuber making the link to fatherlessness. Perhaps we must simply accept the need to talk with regular people and each other about the pressing issues of today, and come to conclusions using the amazing thought organs that we possess. Maybe that’s the best way to prevent ourselves from being gaslit by uncaring narcissists who want power of society, but have no intention to use power to care for anyone, much less children.