Do I Look Like I’m Joking?

Joker.
Movie Review by Derek Power.

Where to begin? No, seriously, where to begin? I’m not kidding here. Why are you chuckling? Do you think this is funny? Am I some kind of clown? Do I amuse you?

Huh? Huh!

I’M ASKING A QUESTION HERE! WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?!?!

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Had you there for a second.

But to be so serious, the trailer for Joker, which opens in theaters this weekend, gives us a portrait of a man who’s not quite right to begin with, sometimes rejected and even beaten by the people around him, and eventually donning the clown face and purple suit that we’ve all come to know and love (or not) from decades of Batman movies, comics, and TV shows. All set against the background of a gritty 1970s-looking Gotham which clashes with the cheerful Jimmy Durante Smile though your Heart is Breaking soundtrack like the dissonance of a disordered mind.

Where can you begin in evaluating a film that looks at a character like the Joker?

For a character that’s octogenarian, the Joker still manages to provide new angles and approaches and has become for screen actors what Richard III still provides for stage ones (screen too). For a character from perhaps the most widely-known modern myth, he has become the closest that man has created to something on the level of Lucifer and makes all the other classic mythic antagonists—Ulysses’ Poseidon, Beowulf’s Grendel—seem like, well, clowns. But as an idea, the Joker has also come to embody not just moral evil, but also the non-rational. Thus, a better question to ask is: how can you make rational what is already irrational?

Perhaps the best approach is to start by saying what the movie is not. After all, by eliminating statements you know to be false, you get ever closer to understanding what it is.

It is not a comic book film.

Let’s start simple. Yes, this is all based on characters from DC. But apart from that and the clear influence of the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke (more on this later), Joker owes extremely little to any established lore found in any Batman comic. Thus, it is nothing like what we now consider comic book films based on the current crop like that eleven-year effort which concluded with this year’s Avengers: Endgame. But it’s not just a matter of a clear storyline with a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist. If anything, the usual antagonist is this film’s protagonist in that everything in the film is shown through Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) eyes.

It is not an origin story of the Joker

Despite its title, this is not a definitive telling of how the Joker became the Joker. For starters, it owes nothing to established comic lore. There is no nod whatsoever to “The Man behind the Red Hood” (originally Detective Comics 168, February 1951), which is the earliest story for the Joker and gave us the “dropped into a vat of chemicals” origin. Even the story that many have used as a Joker origin story—the aforementioned The Killing Joke (written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland)—is not really an origin story and hearkened back to the earlier Red Hood story. In fact, during The Killing Joke, the Joker tells Batman that his own memory of events keeps changing over time, which could be viewed as one of those escape clauses so liberality could trump continuity.

It is not some soft franchise reboot

Without getting too much into the spoilers, there are moments that suggest this is some attempt to restart a DC cinematic universe to compete with the now fairly complete Marvel one. But personally, I don’t see it happening and if it does, it won’t be through this film.

It is neither a rehash of the past, a single allegory of the present, nor a forecast to the future

By this point, you have no doubt heard the numerous comparisons of Joker to the works of Martin Scorsese and, in particular, Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983). There is no denying it. Hell, Robert de Niro is even in it as Murray Franklin, who could very well be Rupert Pupkin finally getting his act, and his act together, and becoming a kind of Johnny Carson/Ed Sullivan type. But at the same time, Joker is not a carbon copy of those films. On the whole, it certainly owes plenty to those American films of the 1970s, plus or minus, starting as early as Midnight Cowboy (1969) and even going into the 1980s (for upcoming and seasoned viewers: note a marquee sign toward the end of Joker).

This film is also not some statement about the current state of the world. You can attribute Tolkien for me personally disliking or distrusting allegory, but the Oxford don has a very good point. Allegory is a one-way, single lane interpretation of a story and often marked by a specific time and place. Times and places fade into memory and then into dust. In the end, nothing beside remains. And so, it would be unfair to attribute allegory here.

And finally, the reason why it is not some future forecast is for me the same reason that Stanley Kubrick once gave film critic Alexander Walker about A Clockwork Orange (1971…and another point of comparison for Joker). Walker recounts, “It is not a forecast, it is a fable.” And to tie up all notions of time, any observer of the human condition—and especially over the last half-century or so—will not be surprised (after the shock dissipates) by anything shown here. The reason why Shakespeare is still relevant four centuries or so on is because human beings still do the same stupid nonsense. And like what has happened, a lack of care and forethought will mean the future can be its own “remake” of the past.

A-HA! I think I have something as to what it is. Basically, my Twitter assessment is thus:

It is a film that looks at an apathetic, even violent, world through an insane man who then becomes more insanely violent.

Good night, and good luck?

Joker (2019)
Dir: Todd Phillips
Scr: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver
Prod: Bradley Cooper, Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen
Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing behaviour, language and brief sexual images

Derek Power is a musician/once aspiring filmmaker who lives in a society somewhere in eastern Massachusetts. He makes music under the name キラヨシ and can be found at kirayoshi.bandcamp.com. He can also be found being too clever for his own good on Facebook and Twitter.