Szabó Zoltán - Joker (2019) - Review

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There is No Punchline: Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019)

 

“ANDREA: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!

[…]

GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.”

(Bertolt Brecth, Life of Galileo)

The post-WWII superhero myth has, for the most part, drawn its efficacy from being the purest distillation of the US’s image of itself, with its most recognized figures serving as the embodiments of American exceptionalism and imperial power. The traditional superhero figure gains his or her (let’s be honest, mostly his) powers from nuclear radiation (no historical degree needed to see why the Japanese counterpoint to this tendency should be the creation of monsters by nuclear power gone awry), acts above and beyond the bounds of both domestic and international law, ostensibly serving the good of the many while remaining unaccounted for the potential dangers their mere existence carries. Even those films which dramatize the inherent tension between the paralegal activities of our beloved vigilantes and the interests of the wider community (e. g. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Zack Synder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, or the Russo brothers’ Captain America: Civil War) generally end with reasserting the complete sovereignty and autonomy of the so-called heroes (we would need so many scare quotes around this word here that I am not even going to bother); and yet, despite all signs pointing to the contrary, most people still insist that the American tendency towards fascism is either non-existent or a relatively recent phenomenon for which one particular person – whose name may or may not rhyme with “dump” – is responsible entirely. Taking its cues more from Taxi Driver than from Iron Man, Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) is one of the more recent examples which pride themselves in interrogating the foundational premises and conventions of the genre, here specifically in the form of providing a genesis story to Batman’s titular arch-nemesis, this time played by the always excellent Joaquin Phoenix whose performance as the most notorious villain of the Batman universe at the very least rivals, if nor surpasses, that of Heath Ledger.

The initial controversies and concerns which surrounded the film’s release, though turned out to be unfounded, already indicate that the film, regardless of its particular strengths and shortcomings, managed to tap into those fears and anxieties which have largely occupied the collective consciousness of the American populace in recent years. Those of us who are unfortunate enough to have retained some vague memories of Phillips’s earlier works (I mourn the tender childhood memories I must have lost in exchange to have the scene forever imprinted in my brain where Phillips, having cast himself as a creepy foot-fetishist, proceeds to suck on Amy Smart’s toes in Road Trip) most likely do not remember them for their pertinent social criticism – and, sure enough, Joker often shows all the grace and subtlety of a bulldozer in trying to get its point across through pointed newspaper clippings (“KILL THE RICH”), emphatic diary entries (“The worst thing about having mental illness is that people expect you to behave as if you don’t”), diverted messages (“DON’T FORGET TO SMILE”), conspicuously placed signs (“EVERYTHING MUST GO!”), as well as through a lengthy monologue at the film’s climactic point which seems to drain the work of all possible ambiguity and leave no doubt as to where it’s primary thematic concern lies. Accordingly, the film is not so much interested in the capacity of a figure like the Joker, the embodiment of pure chaos and anarchy for its own sake, to either destabilize a harmonious social formation or to capitalize on its inherent antagonisms; rather than presenting him as an ephemeral force of evil, Phillips tries to understand the specific material circumstances and socio-economic tensions which can produce such a character in the first place.

Thus the film, from the very first moment onwards, pursues two interlocked directions simultaneously, and it does so with varying levels of success: it attempts to thoroughly demystify the figure of the Joker while also providing a portrait of a deeply polarized Gotham City and its discontent citizens. Already the opening shot makes this connection perfectly clear by showing Phoenix’s Joker applying his clown make-up and inspecting his forced grin in the mirror as snippets of a radio broadcast underscore his activity, detailing the dire situation of the city: unemployment is on the rise, owners are going out of business, the streets are littered with garbage due to the strike but the callers, evidently, are mainly concerned with its inconvenient sight and smell, as if it was not the problem itself but simply it having become visible and affecting them personally which proves bothersome. The Joker himself is completely ingrained in this system and likewise affected by the same social ills, although at this point he still goes by the name Arthur Fleck – and revealing his civilian name is only the first step in the systematic demythologizing of the character that the film carries out throughout its two-hour runtime. Each and every one of those character traits and personal quirks which he has come to be known for are grounded in perfectly ordinary situations and explained away with reference to institutional failures and family struggles, shedding light on precisely that aspect of his character whose indeterminacy had previously endowed him with an irresistible sense of mystery: his past before he became the Joker that we know. His make-up, as we find out, is simply a residue of his day-job as a party clown, his well-known antics and shenanigans come from his failed effort to make a living as a stand-up comedian, and his manic laughter turns out be no more than an unfortunate medical condition. Even his delusional fantasies have nothing to do with any sort of pathological violence; on the contrary, they express a profound yearning for recognition and human connections, both with the girl next door (with whom they exchange a mutual gesture of self-destruction right when they first meet) and with a late night TV show host who is both a comedic inspiration and a remote father-substitute for Fleck. He becomes who he is (that is to say, Fleck becomes the Joker) at the moment when he no longer resists these externalities. Having been abandoned by everything and everyone, he finally abandons himself (notice how he lets himself dissolve in his ritualistic dance moves after the first murders) and, for the first time, completely identifies with the maternal superego injunction: just smile and be happy.

When it comes to the socio-economic tableau of Gotham, the film is less concerned with how the current situation came to be (it remains at the level of a tautological “it is what it is”) than with its consequences. People are losing their jobs, social institutions become under- and defunded, while the economic and political elite (two sets whose Venn-diagram makes a nice big circle) who have the power to resolve these societal frictions treats the struggling crowd with nothing but contempt and disdain. The older Wayne appears on TV and does nothing more than regurgitate the myth of meritocracy and the self-made man, while insulting the very people whose support he supposedly seeks in a manner that evokes Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” speech and its subsequent reappropriation by the opposition: “…those of us who have made something of our lives will always look at those who haven’t as nothing but clowns.” The film employs a populist, anti-rich rhetoric insofar as it understands that the mob who eventually start looting and rioting have real, justified grievances and the spontaneous outburst of violence is nothing more than an acting out of this complete impasse that they find themselves in. But therein resides also the danger of such an event: without a positive vision as to how to change things for the better, the unruly crowd can easily be hijacked and their struggles invalidated at the moment when it is seized by reactionary forces and spearheaded by someone like the Joker.

Phillips’s work is a timely film whose significance is overdetermined by the historical moment that produced it. It is formally derivative, full of Scorsesian tropes; its politics are somewhat murky and often feel like a serious cop-out; when it tries to say something profound, it regularly elevates the already obvious subtext into text and clearly spells it out for us, faltering into empty platitudes – and yet, despite all of these flaws, it manages to grasp something essential about the age it is embedded in, in such a way that we might look back upon it in a couple of decades for no other reason than to see how the Divided States of America was crumbling under its own weight in the late 2010s.