Perhaps because the times of the present are so expectedly nihilistic and void, it only made sense for co-writers Todd Phillips and Scott Silver (who has the rougher-hewn indie credit with movies like Johns, The House of Yes [as a producer] and 8 Mile) to set the stage for The Joker’s origin story in 1981 when there was still a pre-technology prayer for “salvation”–although the grit of “Gotham” looks unmistakably like the late 70s, likely from all those Scorsese movies the duo studied as inspiration. To that end, one of the most popular songs of the 70s (charting both in ‘75 and ‘77) was Judy Collins’ recording of “Send in the Clowns,” from the 1973 Stephen Sondheim musical, A Little Night Music.
So sure, maybe we can believe the song still remained firmly enough in people’s consciousness for a Patrick Bateman-type douchebag working for Wayne Enterprises to mockingly sing it to Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) in a clown costume on the subway. As he approaches his prey, he ominously sings, “But where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns.” This after he and two of his fellow shithead coworkers hone in on him after he scares away a woman they were harassing. Arthur, of course, has had a trying day. It’s bad enough he was fired from his clown-for-hire job after a gun fell out of his costume while performing at a children’s hospital, but what almost hurt more was his boss telling him that his own “friend” and fellow clown, Randall (Glenn Fleshler), sold him down the river by saying that Arthur had come to him to buy a gun several days prior when in truth Randall had been the one to insist upon Arthur having it without being asked. Seeing that he has nothing left to lose and pushed once more to the brink by a society (as represented by the rich white male–which is comical in a way considering so many are writing this movie off as a glorification of bad white male behavior) that has dismissed him as a freak of nature time and time again, he decides to at last wield the only tool left at his disposal, popping them off one by one as a final means of defense. For the men feel “provoked” by Arthur’s non sequitur cackling from his perch on the other side of the train car thanks to a neurological condition that causes him to laugh apropos of nothing and usually at highly inopportune moments.
This occurs previously on public transportation as he makes a little boy smile while sitting on the bus seat behind him. His mother, a black woman, turns around to scold him for bothering her son, prompting him to laugh uncontrollably. That The Joker’s villainous trademark is something that is deemed offensive by everyone when exhibited in the “wrong” context is particularly telling in this scene. Laughter is something that puts people on the defensive, despite being billed as “the best medicine”–that is, if you’re laughing at the “correct” thing and for the “appropriate” length of time. What this boils down to is something The Joker later insists to late night talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro, acting in homage to one of his own best movies, The King of Comedy, in which he plays an aspiring comedian obsessed with a talk show host): “Comedy is subjective,” and that if he finds killing three white collar assholes hilarious, then it is.
Ah, but back to the bus scene. Handing this scandalized black woman his laminated card that explains his condition, she still appears vexed, burdened by his mere presence even. As though Arthur is deliberately trying to ruin her day. Or worse, is playing up his madness to avoid being chastised. In spite of the brevity of this scene, it is rife with implications. For in the hierarchy of what dictates discrimination, with black people–black women–on the lowest rung of the ladder, there exists a rung even farther below that: the one for the mentally ill. Disenfranchised and stigmatized by others to the point of making their condition all the more aggravated (indeed, there’s a reason many mentally ill people end up homeless, only for their abuse on the streets to exacerbate something that could have at least been neutralized), they feel ostracized from the world, as though there is no place for them in it. And there isn’t. At least not in a mainstream capacity. That’s how someone taking all their rage, rejection and resentment and turning it into anarchy is born.
The Joker is not purely evil, of course, for few beings start out that way without a catalyst toward jumping off the deep end and into a pit of vileness from which they cannot return. For what’s the point? It’s not like life outside the pit was any better. Like most emotionally damaged people, we can look to their first point of contact and communication in life–their parents–for how they became the way they are. In Arthur’s case, all he has is his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy, always adept at playing the batshit matriarch), who he lives with in a very Norman Bates capacity (for echoes of Psycho, too, are all over this film), even bathing her in one scene that’s enough to induce yet another wave of nausea (for there will be many scenes like this to audiences throughout). Devoted to her in the face of her patently delusional preoccupation with Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen)–yes, Bruce Wayne a.k.a. eventual Batman’s father–he only slowly starts to unearth the truth about her, and the past she inflicted upon him, toward Joker’s final act.
Of course, living with his mother doesn’t help to quash the idea that this movie is a love letter to white male incel types–an ignorant oversimplification. For just because the lead character happens to embody all the characteristics most loathed by the American media at the moment, does not mean his plight is not applicable to most people, particularly those living in the bowels of a city like New York. Those forgotten by a government that cuts programs they need (in this case, causing Arthur to go off his meds) and relegated to the sidelines of existence like little better than the looming “super rats” mentioned in the news headlines of the movie.
This, too, smacks of the Scorsese portrait of Travis Bickle. The overt comparisons to De Niro in Taxi Driver (especially as Arthur practices using his gun in the living room of his apartment) are underscored by another influence Phillips was affected by while creating the script: Chantal Akerman. “Ironic” not only because she is deemed one of the most feminist directors of the twentieth century (and Joker is deemed somehow misogynist incel porn), but also because Akerman decided to become a filmmaker on the night she saw Pierrot Le Fou. A character who bears many similarities to Arthur: destructive, nihilistic and with absolutely nothing left to lose on his patchy path to no specific goal other than whiting out the pain of existence with debauchery.
In this sense it seems strange that a society that prides itself on being the horn of plenty for those who know how to play the capitalism game is surprised by those who, when not given anything by such a rigged system, rail against it. Because they have nothing to lose. Wouldn’t it, then, behoove society to be a little more generous with its distribution of wealth to the “crazies” (usually, the last of the remaining starving artists on the planet) they deem a threat to the very fabric of their fat cat existence?
Apparently not, as Thomas Wayne calls Arthur and all those like him nothing but clowns, jealous of the rich because they’ve actually made something of their life (with the help of the circumstances that come with congenital wealth). This in the wake of Arthur’s triple murder on the subway prompting headlines like: “Kill the Rich: A New Movement?” Though, of course, not really. The contempt for the wealthy in America has been brewing since the early days of European settlement in that country (and the associated ousting of “the poor” a.k.a. Native Americans powerless against more advanced weaponry), when the voraciousness for land that would only appreciate in value played into the money-hungry nature of modern capitalism. As the centuries have passed, this vitriol has consistently cropped up in various movements, most memorably during the anarchist-rooted Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011. That New York is so often a hub for this kind of mounting rage should be telling that maybe it’s not the best place for fragile souls to live, lest they transmute into The Joker.
Except, unlike most protesters, The Joker has no cause, telling Murray, “I’m not political” and “I don’t believe in anything.” These sorts, to be sure, are the most dangerous of all to a society that needs to understand people’s motives for “off color” behavior in order to tell themselves that there is logic and reason to even the most egregious tragedy. In Arthur’s copious notes from studying various comedians in nightclubs, he writes, “People want you to behave like you don’t.” Want you to stifle and subdue all the feelings that might make you act “outrageously” in a public space. Or make others in any way uncomfortable. Precisely the very thing that Arthur cannot do already on account of his laughing condition. As he stops bothering to try catering to the decorum expected of the “civilized,” he feels more and more like himself, therefore better than ever. The sound of “That’s Life” by Frank Sinatra playing at the end of every Murray Franklin show no longer seems to taunt him so much as motivate him to be the person he always was.
Yet, to most, this is a “celebration” of “freaks” taking their anger out on others to a level of harmful extremes. As such, Joker has been ridiculed by such critics as Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post for continuing the “dubious darker is deeper tradition.” Though this hollow assessment (of a movie dubbed by some as being equally hollow) is at war with those who favor the unbridled honesty of a “portrait of anxiety and nihilism stemming from poverty and systemic oppression” (as Saibal Chatterjee for NDTV phrases it). When a film is this polarizing, of course, there can be no denying its greatness, for it touches so many nerves within people–forces them to feel all those icky and unpleasant emotions that society tells them it’s not “polite” to. And that is precisely what true art is supposed to do. Not, contrary to what other Todd Phillips movies have done, appeal to the lowest common denominator by making them laugh. Though, incidentally, this is precisely The Joker himself’s intent. At least initially.
To the point of “lowest common denominator” humor, one can tell Phillips and Silver are using the time frame of 1981 to their utmost advantage in terms of being able to get away with midget and handicap jokes that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to if this were in the present. Flouting the current hyper-sensitivity of everyone to sexual predators already known and yet to be unmasked as well, Arthur embracing himself as The Joker on the now immortal steps near Anderson Avenue and W. 167th Street dances gleefully to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll, Part 2.” Though one feels almost sorry for that Bronx milieu as a result of all the Instagram-related emulating traffic it’s about to get in the coming years. Maybe it’s just the karma for all the teenage heckling Phoenix got while filming that particular scene (a seeming overlap of the scene in which a group of New York teens–always notoriously ruthless in their verbal brutality–pluck Arthur’s “Everything Must Go” sign from him while he’s on the job as a clown).
As existence in Gotham continues to put Arthur’s psychological wherewithal to the test, his bouts with hallucinated reality intensify, which might eventually lead one to question how much–if any of what happens–is real (for good Fight Club-inspired measure). Whether or not real, however, there is constant truth in the illuminations of the outlandish divide between rich and poor. Most markedly evidenced by a massive poster of the Charlie Chaplin-starring Modern Times outside of Wayne Hall as the economically fucked and marginalized riot outside in another telling contrast when pitted against the calm and unbothered rich and powerful people watching the movie on the inside. A fitting metaphor for times both modern and ancient if ever there was one. That Chaplin’s Little Tramp character in the movie ends up repeatedly angling to get locked up in prison simply because he can’t fit in with the societal conception of “modernity” (pushed out of his factory job by the advancements of industrialization) is a fitting overlap with Arthur’s own foreshadowed fate as he enters Arkham State Hospital in search of his mother’s file and asks the clerk how it’s possible to end up in here. He shruggingly notes that sometimes people just have nowhere left to go. Or rather, people who can no longer bear the thankless agony of keeping up appearances in a culture that pretends to be civilized when in fact it is more barbaric than the deepest recesses of the jungle. In short, as Bukowski once wrote, “Until people learn to excrete and copulate in public they will neither be decently savage nor comfortably modern.”
Ergo, is The Joker the modernest of them all as a result of his fresh out of fucks forever crudeness? That, of course, depends upon what side of the socioeconomic spectrum one is watching the movie from. Are you on the inside of Wayne Hall yukking it up over Modern Times, or on the outside boycotting them?
