Review: Joker chokes on sympathy for the devil

By Katherine Monk

You could say Joker is socially irresponsible. While you’re at it, you could also point a finger at Todd Phillips for inspiring angry white men to pick up a gun and get even. No one is going to argue with you. But why so serious?

Joker so accurately portrays the underlying psychology of the present Zeitgeist, that it’s more like a piece of modern Shakespeare, surveying the folly of humanity through a contemporary lens, than any original manifesto.

The Joker already existed as a character. We already knew he was a giddy sadist — a trait established all the way back with Cesar Romero, who consistently tormented Batman with everything from table saws to sea urchins. We were also aware of the tragic, real-world echo the character created in the wake of Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight: the murder of innocents in Aurora, Colorado.

Something about the white-faced clown with his sad eyes and wavy green hair appeals to the despairing souls among us. He is the fragile ego unleashed, empowered by makeup and amoral chaos. So yeah, we already know this guy. Joker simply gives him a pop culture context to exploit, and explore, the sea of resentment seething beneath us, eroding our institutional foundations with every new tide of misinformation.

Something about the white-faced clown with his sad eyes and wavy green hair appeals to the despairing souls among us. He is the fragile ego unleashed, empowered by makeup and amoral chaos.

Phillips begins the backstory of the DC Comics villain (who first appeared in print in 1940) at the dawn of the 1980s, when corruption scandals and strikes crippled big cities, and personal wealth became a collective obsession.

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) lives with his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), in a humble Gotham apartment. She is frail and watches television all day, a pleasure she and Arthur share at night, when they stay up to watch Live with Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) — the Carson-esque late night host. Penny is so embarrassed about her meagre existence, she thinks she should write a letter to Mr. Wayne, her former employer, to ask for money.

Arthur thinks it’s pointless and a needless humiliation, since she was just an employee. Besides, he’s got enough crow on his plate already. He was jumped by thugs while doing his job as a dancing clown. His bid to become a standup comedian seems doomed as a result of a neurological condition that causes him to laugh uncontrollably at random moments. And he’s also on the verge of losing his favourite job entertaining sick kids, because after he was jumped, a colleague gave him a pistol.

Arthur tries to do everything right, and for a while, the system tries to back him up with a few threads of psychiatric support and health care. Yet, when budget cuts leave him isolated and unmedicated, he’s left on the curb with all the rest of the forgotten trash accumulating on Gotham’s sidewalks. Terrified of being erased and ridiculed, Arthur surrenders to his paranoid psychosis, and takes revenge on those who want to tear him down.

Where things get complicated is the emotional response. Phillips lets us sympathize with the vigilante actions. He also shows the masses chorus approval, embracing Joker as a new folk hero because he targeted the elites and privileged assholes.

By being the main character, the arch-villain inevitably becomes the hero. It’s what Hollywood expectation has done to us. We’re trained to sympathize, or at least admire, the guy with the most screen time — because the more we see him react to different situations, the more opportunity we have to relate to him on a human level. We can begin to see ourselves, even our ugly parts, in the flickering mirror.

Where things get complicated is the emotional response. Phillips lets us sympathize with the vigilante actions. He also shows the masses chorus approval, embracing Joker as a new folk hero because he targeted the elites and privileged assholes.

Yet, this Guy Fawkes is a fake. He’s not fighting for any cause, he’s only protecting his fragile ego, which is where you have to take Phoenix’s bizarre, physical performance at twisted face value. Gaunt and haunted, his vacant mug presents a jarring alteration from the familiar. His masculine features have sunken into his skin, leaving his eerie blue eyes gazing from hollow sockets. Phoenix nails the psychotic gaze, hammering home the anger with little more than a look and a manic laugh, but it’s the body language that does all the serious talking.

Mean Streets: Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a man who feels like he doesn’t belong to the world, and wants to avenge his wounds.

When Arthur becomes the empowered clown, Joker, he dances. Gracefully. His fingers hover in space, his legs lift effortlessly into arabesques. He is light and airy — because he ditched Arthur, the loser male identity, and birthed Joker, a dancer in makeup who no longer plays by the old boy rules. He doesn’t play by any rules, except the ones he makes up along the way, for his own amusement — and empowerment.

The embrace of moral abandon is where Phillips isolates our moment in time, forcing us to process our preconceptions about “heroic” behaviour. He shows us how the axis of good and evil can shift polarity in a broken heartbeat, to the point where we can be manipulated into seeing the hate-filled villain as hero — because we, too, have hate in our hearts.

Is there a redeeming struggle between good and evil? Is Arthur tortured by his actions? Does director Phillips feel a need to insert a moral centreboard into this imagined origin story oriented by real-world experience and seemingly amoral times?

He shows us how the axis of good and evil can shift polarity in a broken heartbeat, to the point where we can be manipulated into seeing the hate-filled villain as hero — because we, too, have hate in our hearts.

Nope. Not at all. The movie tells its story without apology, and Phoenix plays it to the serrated edge, conjuring a modern take on Milton’s Paradise Lost, where we’re asked to find sympathy for the devil after being cast out of heaven by what, he claims to be, a “vengeful” power. Satan declares he will never “bow or sue for grace with suppliant knee” with the Almighty. He refuses to apologize, explaining “to be weak is to be miserable… [so] to do… good will never be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight. As being contrary to his high will, Whom we resist.”

The whole point of Paradise Lost was the fall has already happened. Only by understanding the psychology of Satan’s motives, and his deeply human flaws, can we fully process the perpetual battle for our soul.

Todd Phillips totally gets the postlapsarian concept. As the writer and director behind The Hangover trilogy, he grasps the full power of the fall, and he lets us process the whole thing in sickening slow-motion. Moreover, he understands his own medium, and fills his frames with references that speak to similar social ills, and a shared moment in time. For instance, he casts Robert De Niro as the late night talk show host Murray Franklin, which isn’t just a tip of the hat to Martin Scorsese’s seminal outsider story, Taxi Driver (1976), it’s a direct allusion to 1982’s The King of Comedy — Scorsese’s dark satire of the celebrity age revolving around a psychotic stand-up (in this case De Niro) who kidnaps a late night talk show host (Jerry Lewis) in the hopes of becoming famous. Also, there are obvious parallels to Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), as well Dog Day Afternoon (1975) — two more movies that speak to a fractured society, and personal disconnectedness.

The result is a selfie of our warped, ego-fuelled moment. We feel powerless. So we celebrate the “bold rebel” despite his clearly villainous actions and his absolute disregard for the rule of law. In short, we’re worshipping the devil. Joker is merely using comic book narrative to show us how and why we’ve lost our collective sanity. The fact that people find it objectionable may be the best news of all. It proves we’re still capable of discerning good from evil — at least in the comic book universe, if not the real one.

@katherinemonk 

Read more of Katherine Monk’s movie reviews in The Ex-Press archive or Rotten Tomatoes. 

THE EX-PRESS, October 4, 2019

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