Joker: "The Killing Joke"

I went into Joker admittedly wary of the entire “controversy” around Todd Phillip's film. The whole thing seemed sensationalized as a ploy to create a weighty buzz around the film that would make it as close as possible to can’t miss box office. To a great extent I still believe that, but before I actually watched the film I genuinely had no idea what to expect going in. Did any of what I had read have any validity? Was the movie a rallying cry for incels? Or was it a brilliant misunderstood movie, with a message too unsettling to be heard just yet? Having now seen it, I have been converted (somewhat) to the group of critics who find the movies messaging to be problematic, though I’m still not sure future viewings might unveil the latter. I had to let the movie sit with me awhile, talk it over with family members before I discovered what it was that made the movie it so hard for me to just give the movie the unencumbered praise I was clearly ready to give Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. Ultimately I was reminded of a Dave Chapelle sketch, and something he said during the intro. Just before he begins the wildly outrageous "Dave Chapelle Story” I remember Chapelle remarking he would be afraid to write his own story because in essence he would be an unreliable narrator, and the temptation to embellish would be too great, and I found exactly in that moment what had been bothering me. In essence this was the almost inevitable folly of telling a story almost completely from the Joker's point of view. The movie wasn’t just unsettling because it took on the hard task of asking us to empathize with, and weigh the contributing factors to a murderous malcontent, it was unsettling because there was an invaluable piece missing from the execution of said task that invited an audience to not only empathize with the facts of what and who society marginalizes, or the nature of loneliness and outsidership, but to empathize with the fabrications and extremities of the Joker's behavior. What the movie did well was forcefully connect us to a person none of us wishes to be connected to through the universally recognizable devastation and frustration of being unseen, unheard, and unable to connect. What the movie omits is the line between us and him, by way of a nebulous, muddy line between what is real in the movie , and what is in the Joker's head. One could claim that many of the events that happen in the movie (it being told from the Joker’s own violently delusional point of view) are delusions, one major storyline is clearly revealed as just that, but therein lies the rub. You can make a movie like Inception and be unclear in the end about whether the whole thing is just a continuous dream , because at the end whether or not Cobb is choosing to live within his own self delusion really only effects Cobb. Being willfully ambiguous about the Joker's delusions effects the world around him and subsequently invites the audience to endear itself to a character who in no way is a hero or a reliable narrator. If you show people lionizing the Joker at the end of a movie, and the audience is left unsure as to whether he was really carted straight to the station or whether the city turned upside down as the result of a revolution started by a psychopath, (and especially if you’re saying that it happened exactly that way as a result of the superficial connection between the Joker and the rest of functioning society) you're (in the strictest sense of these words) not doing it right.

I could go on illustrating what struck me as problematic about the framing, and what I think they got wrong, but I always prefer the approach of illustrating a misstep by showing what it looks like when it’s done right. Another memorable cinematic character The Joker has a lot in common with is Anton Chigur from the Cohen brothers masterpiece "No Country for Old Men". These are two men who metaphorically represent a sort of apocalypse, an end to things as we know it. They are chilling, intimidating and unnerving precisely because they have psychopathic tendencies that can't be reigned in or anticipated by any consensus on logic or reason, because they live in a world so far outside the constraints and constructs of society, they function a lot more as a force rather than an being. They have their own sense of rules and extremely unique coding, and they're only predictability is that they are unpredictable. If you listen to other characters discuss them, you can see the bridge in the similar way in which they are described, and the complimentary construction in the similar way in which they discuss their disdain for "rules" in these two scenes. First the description of each by ancillary characters ...

Uploaded by W&H on 2018-08-18.

One, out of many, great lines from The Dark Knight. Alfred Pennyworth: [...] with respect Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man you don't fully understand either. A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government.

And then in their own voice on rules...

Anton follows Carson to his hotel room.

The Dark Knight Blu-ray 2008

Though the Joker in the Dark Knight is clearly a different approach, it’s not entirely different, just more removed than this film, and the point I'm setting up is that though these characters are clearly very similar, one movie (Two if you include the Dark Knight) understands it's character (Chigur) and lives in the truth of the character, so that it is impossible to associate in any way Anton with righteousness, or justice. Anton makes his decisions in a way that cannot be found appealing, or imaginable, the discomfort we feel when he is around is from the injection of chaos that the film continuously honors. The Joker on the other hand, has very little integrity regarding the chaotic frequency the Joker lives on. Phoenix’s performance provides the consistent element of surprise, but for all intensive purposes the movie functions with the straightforward A to B arc of a superhero movie. A linear set of happenings congregate and aggregate to help form and create what we will come to know as the Joker. The film plays fast and loose with the reality of what someone of that disposition would act like to make a more sympathetic character under the ideologically fair stance that these people aren't just born they are also made, but without confronting the things that bring about the extremes in their behavior. Forget his glaring whiteness in this very multicultural world, what about his narcissism? The movie makes out as if DeNiro’s late night host is an unnecessarily cruel dream crusher because it never disengages us from the Joker’s perspective. It never confronts in any meaningful way the facts that Arthur is in fact adamant about his ability to do something he is clearly not talented in, that he skips steps, and more importantly doesn’t even like it. This is not Tommy Wiseau, this is (as the movie’s own creators told us time and time again) Travis Bickle. His stalking of a woman is not played for it’s terrifying truth, we get none of the existential dread we got watching Chigur stalk victims because we see it only from the Jokers perspective. Zazie Beetz is never truly allowed to be a full being, to challenge for reasons that also have to do with plot device. The movie (Intentionally or not) continues on this way, skipping, dancing, laughing well past the line of superficial connection between the audience, society at large in the film, and the Joker, to one that would have us believe this is just a broken men just like one of us, just pushed a little further. It is disingenuous, and a dismal fabrication, indeed typical of someone like the Joker, but one that should have been better addressed during the actual film. Many of us believe we have been shoved to the margins to the point we might break, many of us fight back. Many of us deal with mental health, and those that deal with the deeper more difficult forms also know how society at large seems to care very little about listening to those who do, but most people dealing with either or both don’t go off and commit a trail of heinous crimes. There is a difference between the Joker and marginalized people, the movie (in the name of telling a story true to the nature of the Joker’s identity) just isn’t interested in drawing any. The danger of this position is not that it would invite or incite others to commit similar crimes under the guise of victimhood, but that it backs their claims without any formidable counterbalance. This is why I'm not sure of the efficacy of, and find myself baffled by the somewhat new trend of telling stories completely from the villains point of view. On it's face it's an absurd approach , and if it's not approached in the spirit of that absurdity, with other characters with some version of significant roles to bounce the signal off and echo back the true essence sound and meaning of their reprehensible actions then it becomes too easy to mistake their spoiled fruit as food for thought.

I think it's okay and even important to sympathize with the social incongruities that make or mold the Joker, or any terrible human being fictional or otherwise, maybe even his/their rage, but when his actions can at all be taken for righteous retribution?

As a vehicle for an actor (especially one of Joaquins talents) Joker is once in a lifetime. It's an intriguing idea that maybe works better as a one man show on Broadway, but as a film? It's far too isolated, and to make things worse, the better the performance the more likely it is that the audience is going to empathize, and sympathize with the narrative that drives him. Villains need heroes as a counterbalance to call them on their bullshit as much if not much more than heroes need villains to reflect on theirs. If not heroes in the sense of meta humans, or insanely rich but complex men or women, then in the type of heroism, and courage exhibited in a humble but straight-talking and intelligent wife like Kelly MacDonald's Karla Jean in “No Country for Old Men”. Or in long suffering sons like Russell Harvard's grown up H.W. Plainview in "There Will Be Blood", hell even another villain like Paul Dano's Eli Sunday can be a potent mirror from which evil can reflect and be reflected upon by the audience. But Phillip's Joker has none of these . None of which could be reliable because the movie is told so singularly from his perspective. So that if he says he let a person go because "They were always nice to him", or that he didn't murder his next door neighbor, or that a black woman rather unnecessarily and more to the point unbelievably told him to stop playing with her child on the bus , we are at the very least asked to believe it's plausible that these things actually happened, because there is no one to challenge any of it who doesn't have their own challenge rebuffed by their own membership in the very system the movie has compelled the audience to take umbrage with. This is not moral complexity it's negligence. If one were looking for what moral complexity should look like on film as well as the need for counterbalances, this scene from David Fincher's "Seven". would be a fine example..

SEVEN : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114369 (© Warner Bros) SPOILER AHEAD! This 8 minute scene of mostly dialogue has three main functions. At this point in the movie, in the beginning of act three, after the previous story twists, our expectations of what is to come are already well set up.

The scene begins with the question "Who are you really?" setting up the psychological impetus of the scene as a complex unraveling of who John Doe is. The scene is full of moral complexity, but John Doe is not going to get to tell his story unchallenged. While we may sympathize with some things John says, and even a few of his attitudes, the counterbalance of both Pitt' straightforward assessment and especially Morgan Freeman's acute observations ensure it's impossible to leave that theater feeling anything but that this guy is the absolute worst. He's impotent, fragile, weak, and pathetic, a tragic figure in some sense yes , but nonetheless gross. Thinking of the difference in these films and their effect , or rather the effectiveness of their portrayals I'm reminded of one of Sommerset's observations in Seven...

“If you were chosen, that is by a higher power. If your hand was forced, seems strange to me that you would get such enjoyment out of it. You enjoyed torturing those people, this doesn’t seem in keeping with martyrdom” - Sommerset (Morgan Freeman) in Seven”

Within the context of the film this is the actual unmasking of John Doe, and of Phillip’s film. It's the equivalent of the Scooby Doo teens pulling the the hood off of the episodes perpetrator. From that point on all illusions are put aside and the villain explains exactly who he is, and the audience sees him for exactly what he is, not what he wishes us to see. Sommerset in that way has also provides us with a revelation that we never really get to see or hear in the Joker which is that this is not some martyr who kills only out of furious passion those who have wronged him. His targets conveniently all disagreeable, and unsympathetic bullies, this is a killer, a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur, and that should've been the the ultimate resolution of Joker . It should've ended with him confronting that reality, and maybe then evading it as in Nolan's Memento - not with him being lionized in the midst of a revolution followed by him running through the Halls of an asylum after an allusion to him possibly killing a worker in an interview. I for one absolutely believe you can make movies about psychopaths, and killers, and all sorts of villainy. Mary Harron made one of the best ever in American Psycho with it's unabashedly scornful portrait of materialism, and greed as psychopathy, that embraces the very absurdity of its position as aforementioned, BUT you can't make movies ABOUT psychopaths if you catch my drift. If you don't make clear the actual motivations behind this kind of extreme behavior beyond Mental health, and victimization, then your setting up the stigmatizing of one group , and the validation of bullies and tyrants. Though I don’t know this makes The Joker a bad film, - despite my feelings about it's messaging I actually think driven by Joaquin's performance, and a long overdue interrogation of our framework around Batman and his family it's a pretty damn good movie, - but it does make the controversy and the debate around this film real , and deserved. The Joker gets to tell his own deranged story without interruption, or opposition to an audience willing and ready to listen, and while movies don't make us do anything , they do often color, inform, and help crystallize our philosophies, or ideological views. Given that realization it makes clear the responsibility of the filmmaker to tell stories that don't back ideologies that will help convince already lost, confused, and possibly deranged audience members of their own righteousness, and even if Joker doesn't necessarily defend a skewered perspective, it doesn't upend it either. Subjectivity is a killing joke in the context of heinous criminality, not in any corporeal sense as it relates to film, but in the essence of the moral drive of your film. You can make Bad Lieutenant, but not subjectively contemptible Bad Lieutenant, there is no place for subjectivity, or a lack of clarity in contempt around heinous acts of wanton violence, not in real life or on film.