Joker (2019) - Glorification or Condemnation?

It's been about two months now since Joker came out, and I think the red mist has descended enough that we can approach this subject with a little more objectivity, unclouded by either the initial release hype or the backlash. To recap, Phillips' origin story about the titular clown prince of crime generated a pretty explosive reaction on its general release, with some people crowning it as a masterpiece, whilst others (an arguably more vocal proportion) despised it, claiming it to be some kind of incel rallying cry that encouraged and condoned the idea of alienated men violently retaliating against society.

Either way, this is certainly not a film that's skittered by unnoticed, and love it or hate it, a lot of people have strong opinions of it. I'll be honest, I put off seeing Joker for a while, partially because this is the same conversation that crops up every time any vaguely controversial media comes out, especially when violence is the subject, and also because while the controversy is at its hottest, trying to form a genuine opinion of a film based on its own isolated merits can be pretty tricky when all you can think about is spotting the points of contention and trying to work out who's side you're going to be setting up camp in. So I gave it a few weeks. I reviewed El Camino, watched some other stuff, tried not to read too much more about it. And by the time I went to see it, my expectations were about as neutral as I could get them: I didn't go in expecting anything more than just to be entertained.

Ok, so let's get to the point. Is Joker good?

Yes.

Is it a masterpiece?

No.

Is it r/gamersriseup: The Movie?

Not really.

Kinda anticlimactic, to be honest. My first impressions were good, but as it started into its second act and I became less sure about where it was headed, I became less sure of myself. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I was somewhere in the middle of the debate, but the more I've let the film sit with me, the more I've grown to respect it. And when it came to actually writing this post, I realised I actually liked the film a lot more than I'd initially realised.

In fact, and this is probably going to be quite a concerning statement considering the supposed philosophy of the film, but I felt like the film had a definite impact on me. I wasn't quite the same person once it finished, and it had this kinda lingering presence in my head for days to follow, which I would generally say is a good sign. A film's got to be doing something right if it continues to dwell and ferment in your mind long after seeing it like a fine wine.

Having said all that, and I want to stress this, it's not the second coming of Christ. There's nothing here that's particularly groundbreaking, it's really just an old idea well-executed. For one thing, if anyone's seen Taxi Driver recently, then conceptually Joker might ring a few bells. In fact, Joker essentially is a reimagining of Taxi Driver, only with a more generalised, less sexually-focused theme of emasculation. I've heard that The King of Comedy is a more fitting comparison but, having not seen it, I can't personally comment. Regardless, the Scorsese influence is clearly present, made more tangible with the knowledge that Scorsese was originally on board to direct.

Let's get some of the more 'reviewy' bits out of the way. Firstly, and this will probably come as a shock to no one, but Joaquin Phoenix is fantastic as the Joker. There's a kind of eeriness to his performance, a constant sense of something lurking underneath the surface. It's genuinely disquieting and even though we do (initially) sympathise with him when things go wrong for him, we never feel totally comfortable around him either. Honestly, Phoenix's performance is the film's MVP, and without him, I don't think the film would have had nearly the same impact on me. The film's atmosphere has a very oppressive quality to it, and the world of the story feels very distinct and tangible, and I found it all quite absorbing. Aesthetically and technically, everything's on good form, but there was nothing that really stood out besides maybe the sort of muted 80's production design, which went a long way towards establishing the kinda grimy, seedy environment that's essential for a story like this.

I also think it's important to note that I don't think Joker should be treated as a comic book movie. Even though, yes, technically this is a supervillain origin story and presumably counted as part of the DC cinematic universe, I don't think either of those contexts really match the film and what it's trying to achieve. Joker feels very much like its own one-off, self-contained entity, really more of an art-house film that just happens to feature a popular comic book character than anything else, and anyone going in expecting a Batman flick, even something Nolan-esque, I think will be disappointed.



Now, it feels like there's a billion and one things I could say about Joker, and it's definitely a film that warrants discussion and analysis. While writing this post, I've found it almost impossible to write about everything in the film I feel worthy of comment, or at least to enough extent as to do every topic justice, while still keeping this thing focused. So for the time being, I'm just going to concentrate on the key issue that seems to be at the core of all this controversy: whether the film's intention is to glorify or condemn the views and actions of its protagonist.

Personally, I believe it's the latter.

My reading of the film revolves mainly around the way in which the audience is positioned to view the narrative, or in other words, from whose perspective we are seeing the events. Furthermore, I believe the way this perspective changes as the film progresses tells us everything about how the film wants us to judge Joker. Now to talk about this properly, we've got to head into spoiler territory, so if you are still hoping to see Joker for yourself, skip ahead to the end for my conclusion.

At the start of the film, the audience is squarely positioned with Arthur Fleck, our protagonist. We see the world how he sees it, sometimes quite literally, as we are occasionally shown fantasy sequences, where we see how Arthur wishes to be seen or how he has convinced himself he is seen. Most notably of these is one where we see him as an audience member on Robert De Niro's TV show (I know he has a character name, but, ya know, it's Robert fuckin' De Niro), where he is picked to come out from the audience and is garnered with almost fatherly praise and support from De Niro, along with an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience. Now, a fantasy sequence is about as subjective a view as you can get, so subjective it didn't happen, so it is clear that we are positioned quite intimately in Arthur's perspective, where we are invited to sympathise with him as our protagonist.

Reaching what is roughly the midpoint of the film, it is suddenly revealed that the romantic relationship established between Arthur and his neighbour was also a fantasy. And it does this by cutting to earlier shots from the film where the neighbour was present, then showing them again, only now she's completely absent. Not only are we seeing that Fleck's version of reality is untrustworthy, but the way this sequence is edited suggests a transition away from Fleck's subjective point of view towards a more objective, third-person perspective, where we are now invited to regard Fleck from an emotional distance, instead of directly sympathising with him like before.

Scribble forwards to the end. Fleck, now insisting on the moniker Joker, has done some pretty fucked up things, and as his actions become increasingly mean spirited and unjustified, naturally we begin feeling more and more uncomfortable and are withdrawing what sympathies we might have felt towards him.

Crucially, we get to the television interview, and I think there are two things really worth pointing out in the lead up to this scene. Firstly, we see Joker interacting with comparatively normal people, people who haven't met him before, and whose comments and interactions now provide us with a fresh set of eyes with which to look at Joker and see what he looks like to everyone else. A second opinion that kinda makes you reevaluate and think "oh shit yeah this guy's a nutter", in case you hadn't already clocked it. Secondly, Joker has been unpainted for the majority of the film, and only at the end does he dye his hair and put on his makeup (with the exception of his work scenes in the first act) and once it's on, he stays this way for the remainder of the film. Now, surface-level analysis, this marks his final transformation from poor Arthur Fleck to criminal maniac Joker and the end of his arc. Hmm, yes, very insightful. "His eye paint is blue because he's depressed, give me my GCSE, sir". But also, there's something inherently disassociative about disguising one's face. The face is the broadcaster of emotions, so when a face is obscured it becomes harder for an observer to read and thus there's a kinda primal mistrust we have towards masked or painted faces. And regardless of how much effect that has on you personally, there is still a subconscious link present, and so when we see Joker amongst a group of normal people, not only does he obviously stick out as the freak amongst them, but he becomes this kinda inscrutable threat, an interloper amongst humankind who doesn't fit in and should be feared. Again, yes, this seems obvious considering the conceit of the film, but the crucial point is that now our perspective has been shifted to that of an outsider looking in on the Joker, and thus we too begin to see Joker as they do, no longer a protagonist we support and understand, but a threat that we fear. That's audience positioning.

We get to the interview, and Joker begins his 'we-live-in-a-society-esque' speech, that I know some of my friends have ridiculed, and from a certain perspective, rightly so, because the film also ridicules it. And here's kinda the crux of my argument: if Joker was a film that glorified its protagonist and his actions, then this speech would be a perfectly executed monologue, scathingly criticising the world of both the film and reality, leaving every other character speechless in its wake, like some demented alternate-universe Atticus Finch. As Joker finishes, there's a pause before De Niro's character begins clapping. Then some others join in and the room descends into rapturous applause. Or, in other words, pretty much what happened in Fleck's fantasy at the beginning.

But no, now we are seeing things from an outsider's perspective, and resultingly, Joker's speech rightly comes off as the ravings of a maniac. Not only is his point almost incoherent, but he is constantly interrupted by De Niro's character, who criticises his argument, and essentially becomes an audience surrogate that says all the things that we're thinking. Joker is humiliated and verbally defeated, and by a character no less that Joker, or Fleck at least, looked up to and trusted the opinion of, practically idolising him.

Not only does this juxtaposition with the first fantasy highlight how much the audience positioning has shifted over the course of the film, but it also shows how far Fleck's character has decayed, how far he's fallen and that this is not the same character we were rooting for in the beginning, and absolutely should not be rooting for now.

And that, to me, is how this film condemns the actions of the Joker. This sequence is instrumental in understanding how the Joker should be interpreted, and my reading is that he is a joke, ridiculed by those he is trying to intimidate and completely unable to defend his ideology against even light scrutiny.

Now, conversely, one could argue this scene the other way, with Joker being publicly ridiculed by those who can't understand his point of view, and when he finally snaps and shoots De Niro dead, he sort of comes out on top, as if resorting to violence is an adequate solution when someone emasculates or in some way threatens your ego, and that kind of justification is more or less where the controversy is coming from. Not helped by the fact that Joker is then regarded as a hero and a king by the crowds of oppressed thugs tearing the city apart. My only answer to that really is that we see Bruce Wayne's parents gunned down (for like the twelve hundredth time on screen) by one of the thugs inspired by the Joker, and that kinda recentres the moral compass and reminds us "hey, these are the bad guys, by the way."

And about this idea that the film, or any film or media for that matter, is going to justify mass shootings and other terrorist acts is just as flawed and fear-mongering as it's always been. It happened in the nineties with Mortal Kombat and Doom and Natural Born Killers and the counter-argument still hasn't changed in twenty-five years: the people who commit these acts are sick in the head and media is not the thing that pushes them over the edge to become killers. The media is always labelled as an easy scapegoat for politicians to blame so that suburban mothers have something meaningless to protest to make them feel like they're doing something proactive, while the true root causes of the problem like gun control and inadequate mental health care go ignored and the cycle repeats again.

Interestingly, the only moment in Joker that really gave me the school shooter vibe was when Joker tells Gary that he won't kill him because "you were always kind to me", which is such a memey cliché that I'm not entirely sure it wasn't intended as a joke. And I think that about sums up my verdict on the depiction of Joker, there's a sort of knowing cynicism to the way he's presented that makes it seem like we're supposed to be ridiculing him, and certainly not taking him, his actions or his ideologies seriously.

End of Spoilers

Ultimately, there's definitely room for debate as to what extent we are being invited to sympathise with Joker and to what the film is trying to say. While I definitely have my own clear reading of the film, my conclusion is that Joker is a film that can be whatever you want it to be. Those looking for an absorbing and disturbing portrait of a criminal maniac will find it, and those looking for a condoning of incel fantasies will find that too. People will find whatever they expect to find in Joker, and that to me is why the film has been so divisive. When people argue about films, a common phrase that gets uttered is "did we watch the same film?" And maybe through our own subjectivity, perhaps we don't all see the same. It's a cinematic Rorschach test which is simultaneously all and none of its readings and instead positions itself somewhere between all these different ideas, allowing its audience to join the dots in whatever way makes sense to them.

My final word is thus: love it or hate it, Joker is undeniably a work of art. It's admittedly quite a tricky thing to define, but I believe art is, at its centre, about deriving meaning through interpretation. And the fact that so many people have seen this film and yet come away from it with such distinctly different interpretations, along with the fierce discussion it has provoked as to its intent, proves to me that this is a film of artistic merit, and one that I think has certainly left its mark on society.

...Goddamn it, of all the words to end on.

Joker - 2019 - Todd Phillips - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: High

Extra Rambles: When Does Context Matter?

Anyone who's ever studied screenwriting knows that character is key. Knowing who a character is, their background, who they care for and why they're doing what they're doing, are all essential for telling an engaging story. Right?

Recently, I watched The Shallows, a shark-based survival thriller from a couple of years back that threw this entire concept into a new light for me, by having a character's backstory and context feel unnecessary. Every scene that attempted to establish details about who the protagonist was and why they're here came off as incredibly uninteresting, and for once I don't think it's just bad writing. It's bad writing and something else. And I think that 'something else' is worth exploring to see whether there is some hidden intricacy of screenwriting here or if I'm just trying to over-analyse a mid-tier Jaws ripoff that the writer couldn't be arsed to redraft.

So here's the premise of The Shallows: a girl goes surfing on a hidden beach and is attacked by a shark, leaving her stranded on a rock a short distance from the shore. With her injuries worsening, the tides rising and no sign of the shark giving up the hunt, she must find a way to get back to safety before it's too late. That's it. Simple right? Could practically be a short, an interesting supposition considering how the story is structured: in a film that's under ninety minutes already, it takes the best part of half an hour before our protagonist even ends up in the above scenario.

Instead, the film opens with a flash-forward that hints at how the film will end, followed by a lengthy sequence where our protagonist reveals key details of who she is and why she's going to this beach and what familial connections she has as she speaks to a nice local who's driving her there. Albeit he, at least, is sort of important later. Then when she reaches the beach there's another long scene as she video calls her sister only for her dad to join and start lecturing her about her studies, and very unsubtly telling the audience most of her life story. This is what's called an exposition dump and it's generally agreed to be the worst possible form of explaining anything to an audience; the dialogue equivalent of just handing someone a textbook and instructing them to read it. But not only were these scenes lazy, and actually pretty laughable too, for all the wrong reasons, but they were also almost entirely superfluous.

The only things we actually need to know are thus: the beach is secret and thus mainly empty of potential help, and our protagonist is a medical student who surfs. That's it. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant to the scenario. We don't need to know she has a sister who's back at the hotel, we don't need to know she's got a dead mother who told them about the beach, we don't need to know this is a pilgrimage and we don't need to know her dad is concerned. None of these characters are involved in the plot or have any effect on the outcome of Nancy's plight (oh yeah, the protagonist's name is Nancy, by the way), and consequently could be comfortably deleted from the film with no repercussions.

It feels like they've attempted to make Nancy a more fleshed-out character by adding a load of extra character relationships, but these really don't tell us anything about her. We learn so much more about the kind of person she is from her interactions with an injured seagull than we ever do from her family. In fact, the only real addition offered by knowing about Nancy's family is that she has a motivation to live, but I assumed that much from the fact that she's trying to get back to the shore in the first place! She's not like Padme Amidala, losing her will to live as one loses a contact lens in a crowded locker room. You don't have to explain the motivation for something as inbuilt and universal as basic survival needs, and those are pretty much as complex as The Shallows' character motivations ever need. It just isn't the kind of story that requires in-depth character context.

In something that's more character-focused, like a romance or a drama, then this kind of extended backstory is more relevant since the story is pretty much pivotal on the very essence of these characters and their backgrounds and social relations. If we don't know anything about this hunky charming man or what he stands for, how can we empathise with the leading lady who falls for him?

While something like a horror film doesn't really need this because their stories operate on a more primal level. Here's a human, here's a nasty monster who wants to eat the human. Who will win? It doesn't matter if the human's from Stoke-on-Trent or if they prefer jam to marmalade because we already automatically sympathise with their desire not to be eaten by the nasty monster (I mean, unless you're into vore, I guess. No, don't look that one up, it's not worth it). The desire to not be killed is just naturally hardwired into our species and so as a character motivation, it not only transcends boundaries of race, class and taste in fruit preserves in terms of relatability but by the same metric, also transcends the need for an explanation since every human on the planet naturally understands it.

It's pretty much the same concept as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: the closer your protagonist's motivation is to the bottom of the pyramid, where all the universal needs like food, water and air are, the less you need to explain them. While if their motivations are higher up the pyramid, focusing on more complex things like self-actualisation or self-esteem, then the need to explain the motivation is much more pressing.

The ultimate question then is, is this a matter of genre or merely the format of the story? Is The Shallows' attempt at character context misplaced because of its horror-y trappings or because the story itself is just too straightforward to require it?

Midsommar, for example, is a horror film that's also incredibly character-focused, so even though its characters are still motivated by a desire to survive, they also have way more complex, personalised struggles which drives a lot of the horror they're put through. And so while it, too, spends a while establishing it's main characters' backgrounds, it is entirely necessary for the rest of the film to work, unlike The Shallows.

I imagine format is more likely the culprit, since The Shallows could have very easily been a thirty or forty minute short if it had skipped its waffly intro and started on the shark attack, and probably would have been stronger for it. "Arrive late, leave early", as the old adage goes. This issue of context could be as simple as trying to over-explain a story that has nothing to hide. But then while short films tend to gravitate towards simple characters to fit the restraints of the format, that doesn't make character context mutually exclusive: not all short films focus on inherent universal needs, and some will inevitably need to establish their character's background.

So what is the answer? I don't think there is one, or at least, not one that can easily be rationalised in a post of this length. Consider this instead, a starting point for a wider discussion: Is there a correlation between genres and character complexity? Can a story have too much context? Or is all this just the ravings of a lunatic who got bored during an exposition scene?

Yeah, that sounds a lot more plausible now that I've written it out.