I wake up to Franklin Graham on my newsfeed.  I rarely like anything he says, so this is a shock.  But he’s ranting about the depravity of the new Joker film and how it has scared people, how it shows the moral depravity and hypocrisy of Hollywood liberals who advocate for gun laws and put out this puerile filth.  No doubt, he’s been working this into his shtick at the rally he’s been holding up the road at the local concert venue. Perhaps that’s why the algorithm lords have converged to put him on my newsfeed this morning.  The modern world is a mystifying place.

 

I don’t want to cast aspersions on things I don’t know, so I won’t talk about his rally up the road, but he’s not wrong on the Joker part.  Apparently, people are scared.  After all, there was a mass shooting at a Batman film in 2012, and if internet chatter is to be believed, the FBI was worried that a film about a crazy clown who inspires chaos might actually inspire real chaos.  It flew under my radar, but my friend told me there did seem to be beefed up security when I went to go see the film Friday night.

 

And he’s not wrong about the violence;  there are some graphic scenes, though not as much as the naysayers may have you believe.  What’s more disturbing is that the film says uncomfortable things about violence in the context of the society.  People were worried that Joker would create copycat killers (apparently, soldiers were told to be on alert) but critics like Graham (and perhaps anyone who didn’t see the film) can easily miss that the film makes prescient critiques about the society in which copycat killing would be perpetuated.

 

This is not a comic book movie for kids, which for me is something of a relief.  I’m a huge fan of the original Nolan trilogy (as with any film he makes, really), but I’ve felt overwhelmed by the glut of the superhero films, a trend that apparently Martin Scorcese agrees with.  The morality of comic book films has become too stifling; the superheroes may have moral flaws, but not enough that they don’t ultimately come out in the end, even being lionized in death. Nolan’s Batman may have started the trend to make brooding superheroes a moral dilemma, but seeing the same universe through one of its primary (if crazed villains) is something of a transformative step.  What would MCU look like if we had seen it through they eyes of the Malthusian Thanos?

 

That said, many have stated that the film asks us to empathize with the downward spiral of Arthur Fleck.  With the story told from his perspective, he is certainly more humanized than any superhero villain in past comic films.  Even Ledger’s legendary turn at the chaotic clown was intentionally vague and misdirecting in its origins. With Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, we see where he comes from, we see his inability to integrate into society, existing just on the fringe; we see the tenuous strings of the social fabric unraveling around him. We may feel sorry for him, but we don’t root for him.  Even as he commits his first murders–perhaps an accidental perfect storm of his nervousness at losing his job crashing against three assholes on a train with the chance occurrence that he has access to a gun he barely knows how to use–he isn’t even pulling for himself to be this character, even as the violence empowers him.

 

The narrative challenge of the film comes through seeing through Arthur’s delusions.  In this (and in many other ways) he mirrors the path of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, a film to which director Todd Phillips admits there is obvious comparisons.  Early in Taxi Driver, Bickle signals how out of touch he is with society.  A troubled vet, he drives with compulsive insomnia through the night, and even as he has some hope at regular human contact with the beautiful Betsy (played by Cybil Shepard), we see how out of touch he is immediately as he takes her to a porno theater on their first date; but perhaps more damning is how clueless he is to how inappropriate the gesture really is.  Bickle is out of step with contemporary society–often because society is corrupt, but just as often because he is. Throughout Taxi Driver, Bickle is often not aware enough to know the difference, and he seeks violence as a means to make society conform to what he thinks it should be. (warning: nudity in the below clip)

  For Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, the inappropriateness of his laughter sets him apart for others.  In nervousness, he laughs inappropriately, making him a pariah. What others find humorous, he attempts to fake laughter to fit in.   And while the general sympathy for mental illness or good will for how he cares for his mother may endear him in some ways, his lack of boundaries, his lack of remorse as he dances in a mirror after his first killing, makes us always keep him–like Bickle–at arm’s length.

 

But the city of Gotham embraces the symbol of an anonymous clown, and this seems a key to the truly shocking nature of the violence of the film.  Rather than expressing fear at the the thought of a killer clown, the rank-and-file citizens of the city seem to embrace the clown who killed as some sort of justified vigilante.  The film makes no qualms about this; the rampant economic anxiety and class envy in the city makes people identify with the clown, not the dead, upper-crust stock brokers who he murdered.  To be fair, while murder may have been excessive, the film makes the three victims out to be pretentious assholes, harassing a woman on the train before they turn their violent tendencies to the clown who can’t stop laughing.  But when they are identified on the news, they are noted as “good” because of their jobs, their education, their economic success. Thomas Wayne, a billionaire capitalist extraordinaire, claims them as family, as all his employees are, and that people who side with the clown are all clowns.  Rather than take this derisively, the citizenry embraces the characterization.

 

The context is clear.  Gotham in the The Joker has a clear divide between the rich and the poor, and the poor are pissed.  Nowhere is this cemented more as they mob up to protest a high society function.  Here, the wealthy show up in their tuxedos to view Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, it’s own critique on the heavy handed weight of capitalism and industrialization, its dehumanizing effect on the modern man.  In the scene where Fleck sneaks into the theater, we see the crowd guffaw in uproarious laughter at the famous roller skating scene.  But as Wayne leaves the theater to relieve himself and Fleck to confront him in the restroom, we must remember the next scene of Modern Times.  The Tramp awakes in the department store.  The wealthy women who have come to shop turn up their noses in horror, and once again, the Tramp is out on the street, penniless, jobless. hopeless.

 

Before you think this a socialist screed, consider the writings of 20th century philosopher John Rawls.  Rawls wrote extensively in A Theory of Justice about the inherent inequalities in a capitalist and democratic society.  But rather than critique those inequities, Rawls justified them with something called “The Difference Principle.”  We didn’t need equality of economic circumstance, he argued, as long as the inequity benefited everyone, even the lowest in the end.  So, if the capitalist enterprise is truly one in which “a rising tide raises all ships,” then even those near the bottom of the economic ladder will allow for the system to persist in the knowledge that they are better off this way. But early in this film, we get the suggestion that the Difference Principle doesn’t work as Arthur’s scant government-funded mental health services (already administered in what looks like the basement of a warehouse) are closed in a budget cut, leaving him unsure where his medication will come from next.  The rising tide is drowning him. In Joker, the unwashed masses have no hope that the wealth of the wealthy benefits them, and even if we don’t pull for the clown, the bleakness of their situation makes them cheer for him as striking back a blow for the little man against the big bad forces of the industrialist billionaire class.  This provides a striking but subtle departure from Nolan’s trilogy as much as anything. In Batman Begins,  the oppression of the city is through crime and drugs.  Bruce is frequently told how wonderful his father was, trying to save the poor of the city, giving his son hope to be noble, a shining example for his son to aspire to in saving the poor of Gotham.  In Joker, Thomas Wayne is not this distinguished paragon of virtue, and oppression is not the fault of traditional criminals and drug dealers.  Though Thomas Wayne is running for mayor on the promise of helping the poor, it comes off as empty political rhetoric.  It is not “the criminal” who is the oppressor, it is more structural elements of society in which the poor are hopeless. In the end, as in all Batman origin stories, he is gunned down just the same.

 

 

“Come see the violence inherent in the system.”

 

  It’s one of my favorite Monty Python lines.  Joker surely didn’t have me laughing, but this line came up in my head over and over again.  Any attempt I’ve made to ponder this film as a deterministic screed–making the ambiguous collective “society” as the villain that inevitably creates The Joker–falls short.  To do so, it feels, is to give Arthur some sort of pass, as the billiard balls of his abusive pass bounce against the grey, apathetic wall of the modern economic state. And yet in this film, we can not have Joker without the system in which he grows.  The violence in the system is part of the morality of the film.   In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the peasant in the muck pushes back against Arthur’s claims of divine right to rule the lowly peasants.  But Dennis (he’s not old), argues deftly with political philosophy refuting Arthur’s claims to the throne. Frustrated, Arthur pushes him into the muck, a comedic metaphor of the rich oppressing the poor violently.

 

 But the violence inherent in the system of Gotham is not so obvious. It is not Thomas Wayne pushing punching Arthur Fleck in the bathroom.  It is a violence that grows from the pressure the system exerts when its most vulnerable are at their breaking point. And it becomes obvious when we examine another allusion to a famous film of the 1970s.

 

In the 1976 Oscar Winning Film Network, Howard Beale, and aging newscaster soon to be put to pasture found himself in the grind of an economic media system that was no longer about truth.  Though not as desperate as Arthur Fleck, Beale’s lot in life was most certainly trending toward the worst–once serious nightly journalism was beginning its still declining trend toward the news-entertainment hybrid predicated on outright exploitation that often dominates our view today, soon to morph into the internet driven “like” culture that favors the sensational over the substantive, the flashy over the fulfilling, a loudmouth like Alex Jones over an intellectual like Noam Chomsky.  Beale, at his wits end, goes on a rant that he is sure will get him permanently fired, but his famous “I’m Mad as Hell! And I’m Not Going to take it ANY MORE!!!” resonates with the frustrated public.  

 

Naturally, the new wave of journalist business men elevate his status for ratings.  Rather that treat his anger, his troubled life with empathy, they exploit him, encouraging him to go to even crazier heights as the ratings climb higher and higher.  But as soon as he begins to push the buttons of those in power, he is sacrificed, his death run on the news right next to the advertisements, his mental downward spiral and death exploited to move product. (SPOILER ALERT)

 

Like Beale, Joker’s Fleck is also first put on television for exploitation. By the time his hero, Murray Franklin calls, Fleck has almost completely unraveled, his illusions about himself and his world dashed, unemployed, without medication, and already a murderer several times over.    Driven by an outsized need to belong and receive praise, he jumps at the chance to be on the show, unaware that as his horrid stand-up performance has become a viral sensation, unaware that the media producers elevate him as an object of scorn and ridicule, not because they enjoy his comedy.  And as this scene comes to its gritty close, a repetition of Network’s multi-screen ending mixes the images of horrific violence and mundane advertising to show that this too tragic scenario becomes its own spectacle to extract wealth and value from the masses.

 

In this case, Arthur Fleck is neither hero nor villain, but in some way another commodity.  From there (much like the case of Black Mirror’s “Waldo”) he takes on a life of his own as a symbol.  It has happened since the beginning of the film as the hordes of discontented Gothamites don the mask in protest.  Even though the clown is chaos, even though the clown is violence, even though the clown is disruption and disregard for all norms of polite society, the masses embrace him.

 

Here as well, Fleck is like Bickle, whose failed attempt to assassinate a politician leads him to hunt down a pimp and free a thirteen-year-old girl–an act of violence that would lionize him as a local hero.  What makes Bickle different is that after heroism, he fades back into the insomniac nights of the New York City streets. Broadcast on television to worshiping throngs, Fleck becomes a leader and inspirer of men.

 

In this case, Fleck is the violence inherent in the system.  He is not a hero in the story, but he becomes a populist hero to the masses, even if he didn’t ultimately seek this power.  Over and over, studies on the causes of the global rise of new populism leads back to two main variables: the disatisfaction with the ruling elite of of a culture and a distrust of the traditional news to tell the truth.  Here, Fleck’s Gotham has these elements in spades: vacuous promises of wealth politicians that do little to change economic disparity (represented by Thomas Wayne) and the glossy mendacity of the media ( represented by DeNiro’s Carson-esque Franklin)  In 1997 Philosopher Richard Rorty predicted such shifts would move society precisely in this direction: given a general distrust of leadership and knowledge provided by those selected to rule them, the masses would turn to a disruptive force; chaos in their favor would be better than democratic planning that worked against them.  In Gotham, the clown who seems to have a similar enemy is their clown, and they will support raise him up as leader against the bureaucracy that they fear will never work in their favor.

 

Luckily, the dust has settled and no actual violence occurred with the release of Joker; and after a flurry of thought pieces and hand-wringing,  Franklin Graham has no doubt gone to fearmongering a new hot button topic, the world has gone on to dissect other movies, and we can be a little more calm and rational in this discussion.   It seems safe to come out. The armed guards at the theaters have gone home.  

This week in class, as my students begin a new paper draft, many wanted to write about the film, and we frequently talked about if we could analyze Joker though the character-driven or horror-film lens. But for me, it is not the imagery nor the maniacal protagonist that causes the terror. The images of violence are gruesome, but is the violence inherent in the system that is the real horror.  It is not an act of murder that shocks and scares, it is the potential for violence and upheaval that exists when people are at their wits’ end, it is the powder keg of a discontented society, bursting at the seams with economic anxiety and mental disclarity, precariously ever on the edge of disorder, breathlessly balanced, in the fearful hope that some madman will come along and light the fuse.