Todd Phillips’s dark origin tale depicts a struggling Joker’s deeply troubling descent into madness – and certainly, nobody is laughing
Arthur Fleck has a laugh that suggests under a hyena-like cackling that he may be sobbing instead. It’s a laugh that shakes his entire body — an emaciated, spindly frame, — and ignites a pain in his eyes that could have only come from a lifetime of traumatic events. He laughs on the bus, where he frightens children and mothers, and on stage where he attempts a lifelong dream — stand-up comedy — only to become the tail-end of the joke. It’s a maniacal laughter that contributes to an intimate portrayal of an iconic super-villain and of the devastating effects of damaged mental health, that make ‘Joker’ such a nuanced, conflicted and important film.
The film begins with troubled party-clown and wannabe stand-up comedian Fleck, stretching a smile from ear to ear with a single tear cutting through thick makeup. It gives an important preface to the vast remainder of the film; there’s no costume or CGI, no blatant similarities to the ‘grimdark’ superhero movies. It’s a faraway DC lore that deviates from what we’ve come to know of the genre. It’s not a film that needs special effects, nor is it about them.
The beaten-up Fleck in a broken-down 1980’s Gotham has been mired in controversy. It’s a film that by simply existing, is feared to spark anarchy and copy-cat violence and murder; and though some of the films uglier, self-serving messages create empathy for a killer, it won’t have the impact some critics are saying it will. It ascribes simply too much importance to a self-pitying fantasy.
There are certainly elements to the film that are designed to test particularly empathetic viewers. Fleck starts with so little and loses it all, in progressively more devastating increments against a grungy and squalid setting that seeks to undermine him at every corner. It’s oppressive, and hypnotic, and it thrusts viewers into a chaotic world that retreats further and further away from its protagonist.
The city is rife with crime and ‘super-rats’ and porn films play in the cinemas. It teeters dangerously close to a revolution before Fleck even becomes ‘Joker’. Almost every interaction Fleck has with this world is of devastating consequence; he is simply a product of a childhood of trauma, neglect, malnutrition and a system unwilling and somewhat unable to help. Revoking empathy from Phoenix’s character is deliberately difficult.
On the one hand, we as viewers identify with him. We suffer when he suffers; when his jokes fall flat, when his medications are taken from him in an economic crisis, when he is beaten senseless by the people of the city. We see him as someone we want to succeed, by natural instinct, so when he fights back against a city that fights him, we feel both exhilarated and horrified. He is a symbol of the poor and marginalised, but still a killer; he is highly multidimensional, flawed, nuanced and the subject of criticism. He is both glamorized and stripped completely bare.
This is both what is beautiful and problematic about ‘Joker’. The blatant discomfort that follows viewers in an ideological contradiction makes the film such a divisive conversational topic for viewers; Fleck is disturbing and violent, but the world around him is cynical and cruel. He lives in a society of eventual rioters that need very little incite to violence, and he is both drowning and celebrated in it. There is an inevitable explosion of revolution by the downtrodden, with Fleck as their hero.
It’s a biting and excruciatingly honest contradiction that will leave viewers unnerved and conflicted. Perhaps this was Phillips’s point.
Comentarios