JOKER: Nihilism With a Purpose

How fascinating was Todd Phillips' Joker? I didn’t even realize until it was over that the movie was in 1.85:1, traditional spherical widescreen. We’re in an era where almost every theatrical film, tiny indie or major studio release, is in 2.39 ‘scope. It was presented in the period-correct aspect ratio, and the period-correct film washed over me so thoroughly I didn’t even see the frame— and I ALWAYS see the frame.

Controversy swirls around Joker like the cloud of delusions that define Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the movie’s antihero. we’ll get to that later, but first an appreciation of the film’s star. Phoenix was given a lot to work with here and he delivers. In truth, he over-delivers: his character is mentally ill and unknowable and his performance never deviates from this condition. This lends his story and the larger story of Joker a disjointed, alienated feel.

Arthur is a clown-for-hire who aspires to be a stand-up comedian, except his illness leaves him basically without a sense of humor. Inappropriate laughter is his illness’s major symptom: we see him in a comedy club, trying very hard to understand how comedy works, writing notes and laughing at the set-ups, not the punchlines. And his laugh is not a chilling villain’s cackle: it’s a strangled, involuntary reflex he cannot control.

Joker is set in a realistic version of a fictional past: Gotham, the East Coast city from the Batman franchise, in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It has the look and feel of the gritty “New Hollywood” films shot in New York or Philadelphia at the time: trash in the streets, tagged up subway cars, theaters downtown devoted to pornography, and there is not a computer or cellphone in sight. You will think Todd Phillips is emulating Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) to an extreme degree, and you‘d be right. But I’ll argue it’s worth it: the art direction, locations, sets and costumes are worth the price of admission by themselves. The attention to detail is remarkable and thorough. Joker only betrays its 21st-Century origins in the beauty of the images (Shot on an Arri Alexa 65) and the smoothness of camera movement (they have all sorts of magical tech gizmos to facilitate that). Back in the bad old days filmmakers like Scorsese and Melvin Van Peebles and Joseph Sargent and Gordon Parks had to make do with Arriflex IIc cameras loaded with grainy, pushed 35mm film, wooden sticks and Lowell incandescent lights.

Gordon parks, making do with an Arri IIc.

In my opinion Joker could have dispensed entirely with the entire DC Batman mythology. The film did not need it, and it added nothing to the core of what is essentially a psychological thriller. In fact, the baggage of the Joker mythology creates an ethical issue: we know that Joker will become a master criminal and an unrepentant, cold-blooded murderer: this aspect is part and parcel of Joker’s DC persona. But remove Arthur Fleck’s known fate to be a villain, and it becomes the story of one man’s mental disintegration during an era where isolation and alienation were practically the norm.

Martin Scorsese, behind a soundproofed Mitchell NCR.

It’s not a perfect film and it is not that easy to watch: Arthur Fleck is set up as a victim for most of it, and we see him on the ground getting his ass kicked twice. The first half of the film is set-up, and we see things in Arthur’s life, which started out bad, just get worse. The very conditions of urban life in the late 1970s are the antagonist here: Budget cut-backs eliminate Arthur’s weekly visits to a social worker and access to medication to keep his illness in check. He lives in a hideous apartment with his declining mother (Frances Conroy) in a neighborhood overflowing with trash. Adding humiliation to alienation, Arthur’s attempt at stand-up comedy is mocked by a late-night talk-show host (Robert De Niro, playing Jerry Lewis from The King of Comedy). His character is clearly being pushed towards a break with normality, and when it comes the only thing surprising about it is how gory it is.

Joaquin Phoenix, before an Arri Alexa 65.

It also makes Arthur Fleck’s eventual transformation into the Joker problematic. The film explains him away: he is the product of bad genes, a terrible childhood, an even more terrible environment, and horribly complete social isolation. This was the thrust of most of his comic-book origin stories as well: in the famous graphic novel “The Killing Joke,” The Joker is the result of one normal man after one very bad day.

At the point in the story where Arthur Fleck eventually snaps, everything in the film has been placed to make his move to villainy sympathetic. This makes Joker an exercise in pure cinematic nihilism: it’s a director deciding make a murderous villain his movie’s hero. And this is where the film goes from compelling but flawed to brilliant, because Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is the counterbalance to Todd Phillips’ nihilism. He portrays Arthur Fleck as disjointed and mercurial: his moods change from scene to scene, from somewhat sympathetic to completely alien. He leaves the audience with nothing to grab on to, which is the point. As much as the film tries to set up the origins of Joker as pitiable, Joaquin Phoenix pushes back, making sure you don’t feel shit for the guy. It is rare these days to see the an actor-versus-director dynamic play out onscreen, but that’s what we get here.

The “tell” of Joker— the element Todd Phillips and co-writer Steve Silver steered away from DC canon to stake out new narrative territory– is the portrayal of Bruce Wayne’s father, industrialist Thomas Wayne (an almost unrecognizable Brett Cullen). In the comics he is the just, benign father-figure of young Bruce, whose strong ethical sense set Bruce on the path to be a superhero. But in Joker he is a grasping, bloated capitalist who literally sneers at the poor: “Those of us who have accomplished something with our lives will always look down on those who have not as clowns.” Thomas Wayne's statement sparks deep resentment among Gotham’s beaten-down residents, and starts a clown-themed anti-establishment movement— not too far off from the Guy Fawkes thing from V for Vendetta— to topple the rich of the city.

And that is what makes Joker timely. Set in the 1970s, it nonetheless completely understands the cruelty of inequality in our time, and the fact that a society without empathy breeds monsters.