by Archita Mittra and Kaylee Craig
Perhaps, if the film had chosen to engage more deeply with its subject, if it had chosen to be more intersectional and political, it would have been more relevant and a more fitting commentary of our times.
Archita Mittra
Editor’s Note: Given the amount of media coverage surrounding Joker (2019), I wanted to explore the film in a different way. When I put forth whether anyone wanted to review the film, two of our writers were interested. Kaylee Craig and Archita Mittra graciously agreed to collaborate on the following article, resulting in a back-and-forth conversation about the film, what it misses, and why it’s worth discussing despite its harmful aspects. We here at IFP acknowledge that these harmful points deal with the lived experiences of many in our audience, and it is our goal to provide a space for conversation while respecting those experiences.
Major spoilers ahead, read at your own risk.
INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT PRESS: How does Joker play off of its predecessors such as the 2008 movie The Dark Knight? Given that Todd Phillips has confirmed how the film is supposed to be vague and open-ended, what did Joker add to the social discourse of the time we are living in as of now, one that is as highly polarized and characterized as the Trump era?
Kaylee Craig: The Dark Knight came out before the election of President Barack Obama. The Dark Knight took the mindset of America at the time, a society focused on the war on terror, gun violence, and a struggling economy, and heightened these fears cinematically, succinctly capturing the distress under the two-term presidency of George W. Bush. The hero of the film remained as the primary focus, but the relationship between him and the Joker could not be brushed off as simply a hero/villain dynamic like the two other films in this trilogy. Heath Ledger’s Joker preyed on our sense of morality and confusion, through Batman gradually resorting to vigilantism from his previous position of moral authority.
Joker (2019), by comparison, plants us right into the chaos of our times through the eyes of the villain instead of the struggling hero. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, Joker now serves as an obvious social commentary piece. He is humanized, and the line between villain and the human underneath is now blurred. It’s fitting for audiences in a time where our inner demons are given a social media presence and voice that inevitably creeps into our offline lives.
Our modern times are undeniably reflected in this parallel universe. We come to empathize with Joker as he struggles to live as a normal citizen from a struggling working-class background in a decaying metropolis. Fresh out of Arkham State Hospital for the mentally ill, he is forced into reality and a society that rejects him daily and violently. He wears two masks, as a clown in his day job and as a “happy”, fatherless, caretaker, and “normal” citizen in his bleak daily life, he is the epitome of a social outcast and underdog that we pity.
Through his perspective and power as the narrator, we come to see how normalcy and complacency are stranger than their counterparts. He struggles to healthily cope with what is largely out of his control and a general feeling of dissatisfaction all around him through his stand-up comedy and obsession with wanting to become a famous comedian who has it all, much like the comedian he idolizes, Murray Franklin (played by Robert De Niro). Fed these cultural narratives of rags to riches and survival of the richest all his life and throughout the film through different successful and influential idols, he believes in his dream so much so that his mind starts to confuse fantasy and reality. When his fragmented reality is forced into the spotlight and questioned, he takes the last plunge into the madness that these cultural narratives manifest for the working class.
You never know if what he’s saying is real . . . Whatever he’s saying, it’s very real to him. Whether it is objectively real, that’s questionable. But for him, it felt real . . . It’s really left up to you, to the audience, to decide what you think is real or isn’t.
Joaquin Phoenix, press interview
It is easy to blame the current president for these problems, especially when he only fuels the fire with his own tools of oppression and denial (e.g. tweets and every press conference ever), but these problems have existed for years as we can see through the Bush presidency, and even before that. As has always been the case, film and television of the horror, psychological thriller, and tragic comedy variety have a subtle way of revealing the problematic cultural narratives of the given time period they respond to. Joker excels in this and doesn’t shy away from utilizing our empathy to have us understand where we need to draw the line and what we need to change to save ourselves before our own inner demons consume us whole. And I would be remiss to not mention that these inner demons are entirely influenced by us being the product of our environment, and more specifically, our relationship to the state, an institution that is meant to provide and protect. How can a social institution do that in an individualistic society influenced by capitalism and cultural myths that are normalized daily? How can the state and its representatives separate themselves from the very environment that they share with their constituents? They can’t, and we are seeing this for better or worse today in this age of technological innovation where we are given the tools to manifest realities we once only dreamed of.
For Joker, the pistol Arthur Fleck was given at the beginning of the film becomes his weapon for manifesting that reality, a piece of technology that destroys; only then does he become accepted and seen. So, this film asks us, how are we as a society with our cultural narratives and technology strengthening the power our nightmares and dreams have on each other? And in this Trump era, how do we recreate a sense of normalcy . . . that doesn’t further oppress like it always has?
Archita Mittra: Joker does an okay-ish job at portraying class struggle and inequality within the capitalist framework. There’s a pivotal scene near the end, where Arthur’s depression, alienation, and frustration (stemming from his working-class background and a mental illness he has no resources to treat), is channeled into a moment of all-consuming rage and chaos ensues. It’s a harsh reminder of just how cruel the system that we belong to can be, in which the creation of people like the Joker, is a mere by-product of its own toxicity. Yet, the film’s politics are often intentionally and annoyingly vague. The Joker self-proclaims himself to be apolitical, yet he is lauded as a vigilante and the symbolic leader of the riots, by the countless working-class citizens dressed in clown-masks.
But the Joker is far from an “Everyman” figure, and neither can he adequately represent the struggles faced by the working class. At the end of the day, he is still a white cishet man, with clothes on his back, food in his larder, and an apartment to return home at night. Yes, it is heartbreaking when he is fired from his clown-job and when his Black therapist is forced to discontinue their sessions owing to a lack of funding, but he is still privileged among the lot of underprivileged whose stories are seldom told.
There are countless other people, belonging to minorities, and struggling with disabilities and battling sexism, racism, queerphobia and other evils each day, while trying to make ends meet. Of course, this point isn’t to invalidate the Joker’s suffering, but rather to point out how any depiction of class-struggle can never be so black and white. The unequal power dynamics in the “rich vs poor” divide, cannot exist without considering most importantly, issues of race and gender because otherwise, it becomes all too simplistic. The specificities of the diverse communities that make up a country like America dissolve in a sea of white-washed homogenous clown-masks.
Thomas Wayne who is easily an allegorical stand-in for Trump, only talks of the “less fortunate,” even referring to all of them as clowns, but the “less fortunate” isn’t one homogenous community, and neither does the film focus on building a sense of solidarity among different marginalized groups or adequately show how different communities are often pitted against and end up oppressing each other. Of course, having a one-man film that doubles up as Phoenix’s resume for the Oscar application, doesn’t leave much scope to engage with intersectionality. But perhaps, if the film had chosen to engage more deeply with its subject, if it had chosen to be more intersectional and political, it would have been more relevant and a more fitting commentary of our times. Yes, it provides Batman’s arch-nemesis with a definitive origin story, but it doesn’t delve too deep into the systemic and material conditions that supposedly create such people, and neither does it tell its audience how to be better. And by pitting Thomas Wayne as Arthur’s personal villain, as well as the ultimate threat that must be eliminated at whatever the cost, also ignores the systemic causes that repeatedly reinstate such figures in positions of power.
IFP: What about the film’s treatment of mental illness?
Kaylee Craig: The difference between Joker manifesting his dream of being a comedian and a person who does the same with their own dreams but with far more resources, support, and favored socio-economic status is that one outcome is seen as “crazy” and the other is seen as heroic. And I use “crazy” here as a comment on how someone like Arthur who has struggled with his mental health neurologically and emotionally, and comes from a poor and abusive background, is unjustly portrayed as “crazy” (a common theme in all media representations of “mentally ill” individuals that are automatically villainized based on socio-economic status). If we didn’t shut out and isolate the individuals who need the most resources and support, then our society could be more united as a whole, but this isn’t currently and hasn’t been the case for America. Instead, we see a rise in people suffering from depression and anxiety across all social and economic classes, dwindling funding for social services and support unless it’s a part of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex, and resorting to violence whether through cyber-bullying or mass shootings.
Archita: In the end, we are left with Lawrence Sher’s gritty cinematography and Phoenix’s spectacular acting in a cinematic landscape of death, decay and social apathy, that despite trying to, doesn’t mirror the horrors of the real world, as faced by countless real people. It isn’t a revelation that a broken society is responsible for creating the likes of the Joker, nor that compassion and empathy are what we precisely need to counter it, and in that regard, the film has nothing new to add to the discourse, because it doesn’t have anything new to say.
Kaylee: The way you brought in race and gender into this discussion as well is beyond significant. While I analyzed the film from the point of view of someone who struggles with mental illness herself and limited myself to seeing the film through that lens, I failed to take into account the other missing aspects of this film that only continue to silence communities that couldn’t possibly relate to such a film.
While Joker gave us the space to recognize what was not being said or critiqued about our own society, because films and other cultural mediums are undeniably a product of their timing, the space given was too open in such a way that there are far too many questions for the audience without guidance towards answers. I think more than anything, what Joker did bring into the spotlight was the growing problem of gun violence and unrest that we can no longer ignore. The fact that military personnel and other law enforcement were warned about attending screenings of this film, and security was increased during opening week, shows that not only are incels still active (and represented in this film) but gun violence, in general, is an epidemic that is not being addressed as much as it should be. We are living in a time where there is a constant fear or terror that another shooting could occur anywhere at any time, and yet the current administration that is meant to uphold its duty of protecting citizens, is finding it too irrelevant to do so. This is nothing new, but this film just solidifies that in the most depressing way possible.
Archita: Yes, I absolutely agree. I think when Hollywood is investing so much money and effort to making a film like Joker that can easily be misconstrued as an incel film or one that tries to justify gun violence, especially with the anxiety over heightened security during screenings, it should have done so with more nuance and sensitivity. As you rightly said, the film ends with far too many questions without providing any guidance towards answers, which makes it almost flippant and irrelevant.
Of course, some might argue, that films, like any other art, doesn’t owe its audience anything, but given our current political environment, I’m sure we’d all agree that we desperately need narratives that accurately reflect the world we live in and show how the citizens of Gotham and the audience, both inhabiting a broken system, can learn from our mistakes and do so much better.
And choosing to be apolitical is still a political stance that can only come from a position of privilege and entitlement. Joker deliberately plays it safe and director Todd Phillips has confirmed how the film is supposed to be vague and open-ended, so that the audience can derive whatever interpretation they prefer, from it. Such a stance automatically distorts or even nullifies any subversive potential of the film, particularly when Philips already feels that “woke culture” has ruined comedy.