Joker (2019)

What a miserable little film 2019's "Joker" is to be made into a cultural phenomenon.

The red carpet for "Joker: Folie à Deux" reminded me how much I hated 2019's "Joker". I was very glad to have forgotten it, because there is neither sense nor meaning that can be discerned from it. I hated the film so much I watched it twice, to try to not hate it, given its popularity, or attempt to understand why I hated it. Writing this now is particularly delicious because people seem to hate the sequel.

Let's aside the idea that the "Joker" is an appeal to the far-right. I don't give a shit about the "far-right", nor the "far-left", nor climate change, abortion et cetera, et cetera. The audience is the audience, the audience are people at the end, to have a thing against people is madness.

That being said, all the political commentary from "Joker" is on the director. The film has almost nothing in it so people see whatever they want in it. So yes, the film is definitely a far-right rally, and it's a pitch for Marxism. It's whatever the audience makes it out to be.

Because the film is fundamentally about a sad boy, and people easily project their own sadnesses on another person's sadness. "Joker" is not exceptional in this sense, but what works for "Joker" is that the main character, Arthur Fleck, is a fuck-up. He's honestly pretty dumb, and he's not going anywhere in life, not necessarily because of his dumbness but his lack of organization. If Arthur's life was merely sad, the crowd may recoil from it and look away; but because he's a fuck-up, the crowd at once projects themselves upon him and watch externally either one of two things, his future or his downfall, because the crowd also wants to see something of their own downfall in a fictional character.

That's it, that's the movie. If you haven't seen it, you have now gleamed all of the film's meaning, though you are missing out on a pretty good performance by Joaquin Phoenix, who says really bad lines and is given a character of zero psychological depth, but is exceptional at depicting the character's unsayable triumphs, as when Arthur finally gets a spot on the talk show, or when he kills the dudes in the subway. Joaquin is so good at depicting the extremes of emotion that can't be put into words, and I'm guessing, at least until I have evidence, that Todd Phillips, the director, had nothing to do with that.

But so we go on.

By the way, this is me literally trying to reconstruct the film from memory and memory alone. I'm not going to watch it again. I do have a decent regard for my memory, and I did watch it twice.

So the film begins with Arthur being moody in front of his psychiatrist and saying no one cares about him. But that's life: it's not so much no one cares about you, but how does one go about proving that care? I mean, his mother cares about him.

Arthur works as a clown. He is hired to advertise for a store. Some punks come and kick him around and steal his sign. Because they're punks. Right. But he decided to live there. And work there. He could just not live and work there. Jack Kerouac moved from New York City. Dumiel Daniel Thompson, otherwise known as MF Doom, moved to Georgia. In fact, the plot of "The Last Black Man In San Francisco" revolves around moving out to a place that is cheaper and may have better economic opportunities than highly-gentrified San Francisco; generally speaking people move into the city because of the higher possibility of employment. Both of these men lived longer, harder, poorer, and more interesting lives than Arthur. Maybe I'm sensitive to these kinds of things because I, dunno, actually study history.

Anyway Arthur gets on a bus and people are giving him the stink-eye because he's laughing for no reason. He hands a woman a card that says he has a condition. The woman does not want anything about it. That is fair. She is having a rough day too. People have rough days. But Arthur takes this personally and thinks the world is mean and cruel.

Memory's getting a little foggy now. Hold on. You see, the movie is so long and complex because there are so many scenes in which nothing happens and so you naturally forget details.

Arthur goes home and hangs out with his mom, who asserts that a famous late night talk show host is his father. Arthur knows it's bullshit, but he humors her. He does secretly want to be a comedian though, and haunts nightclubs trying to understand how other comics do it. Understandably, he is not a good comedian, at all, because he doesn't practice comedy all that much. Yes, you have to study comics, but you also have to get up on the mic and test yourself. Dave Chappelle had been doing mic work since he was in high school, though it's better to think he was born funny.

So Arthur buys a gun in case punks come and take his sign away. This is problematic because you can't bring a gun while you work as a clown. Oops. So he is fired, and really sad, and really depressed on the train when dudes in suits come and call him an idiot or whatever and start roughing him up. Arthur decides to shoot them. Why not! Fuck it! They're drunk and they don't have mothers! He then does a silly little dance and, what do you know, he becomes a hero.

I'm well-aware that this incident is based off of Bernhard Goetz, but it's well-worth noting that Goetz shot at four black teenagers and not three white adult men. Goetz allegedly once said, "The only way we're going to clean up this street is to get rid of the spics and niggers." Let that sink in. The shootings and their consequences are day-and-night different. So "Joker" fucks that up. If this is meant to be a satire, the film fucks it up.

OK, let me double down on this point because now I'm mad. Arthur kills three men, and he is hailed a hero. He killed three men who committed the grand crime of making fun of him. Not theft, not murder. In Goetz's case, he felt he was being robbed by the teenagers, which muddles the situation a bit. But no, two men have to die because Arthur felt bad.

Who - wait, let me get in all-caps, because I'm genuinely yelling at this point - WHO CONDONES STRAIGHT-UP MURDER?!?! There are people protesting on the street saying, "Arthur is not so bad of a guy, those fuckers deserved to eat lead!!! Because they're businessmen!!! Fuck the innocent!!!" I literally do not live in this America, and that people can believe this is a representation of reality is an insanity to me, it's an insanity and a sickness.

If the movie made it clear that there is a substantial divide between the world as Arthur sees it and the reality that is, then this is acceptable, but it's never clear whether the consequences as Arthur sees it are fabricated. That would make the movie interesting, wouldn't it? Arthur self-censoring his life so it fits his narrative. But if Todd Phillips is literally saying that Americans love bloodshed and people unconditionally love violence against those they hate, he ... is a monster. He is a true monster. That's an extremely fucked-up idea to sell to your audience that borders on saying Muhammed was a homosexual. Even after George Floyd, even after January 6th, to say that people hurt and kill for no reason other than that they think it's "cool, man", that's so reductive that it only merits the response that it's stupid, and I do feel miserable that people readily accept this message. But I'll give the audience credit for typically being smarter than me.

Anyway Joker, err, sorry, Arthur decides hey, maybe my mom is right and I am the son of the billionaire or the talk show host, I'm forgetting. He goes and harass the billionaire saying, No, really, you're my dad! and the guy, who is stressed out because people generally don't like him, calls him an idiot, maybe punches him a bit, tells him to get out, which he should do, he should get out, let the guy have his smoke break or his poop break. It's very strange to me that he decided his crazy mother was right, but one could interpret this as his psychological breakdown after killing some guys and his mom dying and not having meds, I think. In this way, after these traumatic events, he finds some solace in the fantasy, a hallucination in which he is a truly honorable man and he'll be forgiven for all his faults so long as he's a billionaire's son. I'll give the movie a pass on this one.

So the last night host thinks Arthur is super funny because he's such a huge fuck-up and decides to have him on the show. Arthur thinks, Oh this is great, now I get to regale people with my stand-up, not really understanding the context. Anyway Arthur gets upset, doesn't like being made fun of, the talk show host says, Hey, you're a murderer, you're a terrible person, and Arthur shoots him, in a kind of "kill your idols" way.

By the way, everyone in the movie is mean, but no one is actually immoral. Since the film came after the #MeToo movement, it would have been nice to show the inherent power inequality between the host and the people who work for him. But no, he's just a mean guy.

I guess the film could be interpreted as a fantasy on the part of the audience, depicting all the people the audience would like to kill for the most trivial of reasons, thus showing the innate violence in human beings. In this case, reality would be but a canvas on which we paint our darkest fantasies. That's an interesting theme. But it's impossible to pin this on the film because Arthur is exceptional i.e. exceptionally stupid. So yeah.

Another potential interesting theme is Arthur realizing that he's not rewarded for being nice and caring, but for being mean. That would actually be really funny! But no, the film isn't about that either, because Arthur really wasn't nice and caring, he was just a bored and indifferent person.

It's a shitty movie that looks kinda good. It's almost not worth talking about, but we're talking about it, because it's part of the DC Cinematic Universe or whatever.

This is the most miserable film to become popular, I think. I suppose there is a decent message of, "Be kind to strangers and be welcoming of their idiosyncrasies", but this is pablum, there's nothing genuinely compassionate or empathetic about this idea, because the film does not show the reverse or absence of this idea, and no, saying that "people not being nice to Arthur equals Arthur plugging up a bunch of people" is not a valid counterargument. This is a film only of sound and fury and I can't believe I sat down for so long to write about it. I'm almost glad that Todd Phillips put that massive "fuck you" at the end of the sequel, in part because I hope a third Joker film will become impossible to produce.

This is a somewhat-kinda double feature of Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis", so if you're curious about a movie that is similar somewhat thematically with "Joker", go ahead.