A recurring criticism that’s been levelled against the new film “Joker” is the perceived emptiness of its ideals. The film seems to engage, or attempts to engage, with politics, mental health and our obsession with fame and power. But for many its engagement is more superficial than anything. So hollow is its engagement that – for many – the film comes across as empty posturing, leaving us with the spectre of a dancing Joaquin Phoenix, gyrating in distress. But what if that unwillingness to interrogate is not a narrative limitation but part of the film’s aesthetic intention? What if the perception of “Joker” and its emptiness as lazy avoidance of engaging with its themes is actually part of the film’s own aesthetic and narrative identity? What if the hollowness that “Joker” evokes is exactly in keeping with how this tale of bloodshed and chaos is meant to land?
“Joker” is billed as a psychological thriller but is perhaps best described as a kind of schematic character study of its protagonist. Arthur Fleck is a party clown who lives in dismal Gotham City in 1981. Arthur has a neurological disorder that comes with a handy explanatory card – ‘Forgive my laughter, I have a condition’. He lives an isolated life with his mother and they share a rapport that seems companionable on the surface but is clearly tense. His life is marked by absence more than presence – little human connection, few emotional or creative outlets, and little to strive for. In an early scene, he imagines himself making an appearance on late-night talk-show host Murray Franklin’s show. It’s the happiest we’ll see him for much of the film. Even his moments of vague happiness are all projections.
Director Todd Phillips, who has co-written the script with Scott Silver, intimates this from the first scene where we watch Arthur before a mirror hooking his finger in the corner of his mouth, feigning a smile and then a grimace. As if trying them on for size. Even his emotions come from a space of affectation than true earnestness.
We later see Arthur, in clown-costuming, aimlessly twirling a sign for a store that’s going out of business – “Everything must go,” it declares. Arthur is soon intercepted by a group of teenagers of colour, who steal his sign and then pummels him. The image of the hapless Arthur in despair is mirrored 30 minutes later when a trio of white men threaten to pummel him, but by this point in the film – a scene that’s been part of “Joker’s” ad-campaign – Arthur has had enough and has turned his back on society. Decked out in full clown-makeup, he murders them. It’s the critical action that marks the Joker’s origin, and it’s the critical action that sends an already restless Gotham into political chaos as the lines between the haves and the have-nots (casually called “jokers” by Thomas Wayne, a mayoral candidate).
Phillips does not reveal a clear political ideology in representing the political uprising at work here. The film nods to the complicity of the rich in the degradation of the city, but the city’s perspective of the poor and isolated is not particularly warm. With a few exceptions, the world of Gotham is one of nihilistic darkness and empty sadness. Arthur attempts to entertain a child on a crowded bus and his mother snaps at him. The action is mirrored later on when he tries to entertain a rich child on his lawn, this time it’s the butler who snaps at him. Rich or poor, the people of Gotham are exhausted and on-edge. And Arthur is isolated from both halves – resentful of the richness of the upper-class but also the dismissiveness of his economic peers. His life is almost aggressively marked by absence of anything to the point that the film, which follows him for all of its runtime seems peculiarly unaware of who exactly he is.
The film owes a great deal to Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Arthur. Phoenix uses his body as a weapon, even before the transformation into the Joker. Arthur carries himself with an unrelenting tension that is released in moments where his body seems both terrifying and pathetic. And although Phillips and Silver sometimes appear too reticent in moments where the screenplay holds back, Lawrence Sher’s cinematography and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score are reliable pillars. The film looks like a realistic tale, except Sher suggests early on that something just isn’t quite right here, so the film’s grainy darkness and odd mix of colour key us into moments of unease. Guðnadóttir’s music, chilling or atonal or absurd depending on the scene, offers us a perspective into Arthur’s headspace that the film does not always seem willing to.
I’ve been mulling on Arthur’s central unknowability since I saw the film. Phillips brings us uncomfortably close to Arthur in all his peculiarities, but even at the film’s end it’s hard to discern just who exactly this man is. There’s no satisfying coda that explicates his most nuanced desires, even the journal he carries around with him doesn’t do much in the way of solving. The journal is part of his court-mandated therapy but he uses it as a joke book. “I hope my death makes more cents than my life,” he has scribbled inside. It’s hardly riveting comedy, but it seems like a key. Arthur is, by all indications, a nobody – he travels through life unseen. In a morbidly funny moment, he walks into a glass door that he thinks should automatically open. It turns out the door was an exit, not an entrance but the idea holds strong. No one really sees him. Or that’s what he thinks.
In an early scene, Arthur makes a second visit to his court-appointed therapist. She, distracted, has some bad news to tell him and isn’t quite keyed in to his own rambling monologue. The programme has been cut because of budgetary reasons and both the therapy, and the medication he needs, will be ended. Empathetic, but also realist, she attempts to give him some harsh truths: “They don’t give a shit about people like you Arthur. And they don’t give a shit about people like me either.” It’s an essential line in the film’s ideology. Here she’s rejecting Arthur’s loner stance and drawing a clear line of solidarity between him and those around him. It’s crucial that this therapist is a black woman. She may be in the chair of authority in this room but she recognises that Gotham sees her as incidental as much as they see isolated Arthur as the same. But by this point in the film, Arthur is too far gone. He can’t hear her. Or won’t hear her. He can only see his own pain, his own struggle. But discerning audiences would recognise that Arthur isn’t the only one suffering.
It’s that idea—a film to represent those loner men who think they alone are suffering—that has seen the film come under scrutiny and criticism as an unnecessary ode to incels. But the incel moniker seems ill-fitted for “Joker”, a film that rejects carnality and erotic desire. The incel portmanteau (“involuntarily celibate”), used since the nineties, came to public notice a recently coinciding with a series of mass murders by men who blame women for their lack of sex. But the hullabaloo over Joker’s place as material ripe for alt-right incel solidarity seems incredibly misplaced. If there’s anything truly surprising about “Joker” it’s the way that it eschews romantic interest as a spring-board for violence.
It says something that in this nihilistic world of Gotham, where everyone seems unhappy, the four characters that offer anything resembling warmth are three women of colour, and a little person. The one given most focus is Zazie Beetz, offering a tender turn as Arthur’s neighbour, and the object of his affection. But the quasi-romantic arc of the film is more perfunctory than earnest. It represents a necessary arc in proving Arthur’s own mental unreliability but neither Philips nor Silver is that invested in romance as a springboard of pain. Arthur’s interest in romance is transient; what he really wants is attention. From his mother, from Thomas Wayne, from his idol Murray Franklin. Although the film hems and haws about whether his desire is legitimate, the deluge of obfuscation the film uses does not hide Arthur’s clearly-coded hypocrisy.
Arthur insists that he is alone, but he isn’t really. Late in the film, when he’s asked whether his ideology is political, he insists it’s not; the groundswell of support for him is accidental, if anything. But Arthur’s own rejection of community seems the film’s central indictment of him. Phillips is fascinated by him – his increasingly malevolent antics, his disregard for social norms but by the time the film’s bloody end, with a final murder that’s suggested rather than explicated, the fascination seems more perverse than in earnest. If Arthur’s Joker is the end result of a life of trauma the film is cautious enough to suggest that it’s not the only way. There’s no sense of satisfaction to cap this off, instead the hollow emptiness that comes with the coda makes sense in context. This is the life of an empty man and the films aesthetic aggressively mirrors his psychosis. If you feel empty at the film’s end, it’s because you’ve gotten a window into Arthur’s own emptiness.
“Joker” is currently playing at local theatres.
