For so many tragic reasons, the American imagination has of late been preoccupied with the motivations of disaffected white men who’ve turned violent—a nation (or part of one) trying to diagnose and explain them, one mass killing after another. Whether that violence is born of mental illness, isolation, the culminated rage of masculine identity, or all those bound together in some hideous knot, we seem certain that there is some salvable cause.
That’s a complexity of causality that many Americans don’t extend to non-white men who commit heinous crimes; there, the thinking seems to be, the evil is far more easily identifiable. But those angry loners—the ones who shoot up schools and concerts and churches, who gun down the women and men they covet and envy, who let loose some spirit of anarchic animus upon the world—there’s almost a woebegone mythos placed on them in the search for answers.
I thought a lot about that while watching Joker, the new origin story from director Todd Phillips, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on Saturday. In the film, written by Phillips and Scott Silver, we watch the terrible burgeoning of just such a man and are, in some grim way, asked to sympathize with him. Because that man, called Arthur for much of the film, is to become perhaps the most famous of all comic book villains (certainly Batman’s main bedeviling nemesis), that sense of willing understanding is more easily conjured up. Phillips knows this, smuggling a heap of dark social commentary inside the gritty comic book reboot package.
The problem of the film for me is that this technique both works and maybe really doesn’t. There is undeniable style and propulsive charge to Joker, a film that looms and leers with nasty inexorability. It’s exhilarating in the most prurient of ways, a snuff film about the death of order, about the rot of a governing ethos. But from a step back, outside in the baking Venetian heat, it also may be irresponsible propaganda for the very men it pathologizes. Is Joker celebratory or horrified? Or is there simply no difference, the way there wasn’t in Natural Born Killers or myriad other “America, man” movies about the freeing allure of depravity?
The honest answer is, I don’t know. Not after one viewing, anyway. What I can tell you is that the reaction to the film from my packed audience of Italians and other international filmgoers sounded like roaring acclaim. Perhaps it’s a bit easier to accept and digest all this horror in a country where such men seem rarer—or I’m being an over-worried pill, and it’s just a bold, startling movie.
At the center of all this creeping ruin is Joaquin Phoenix, hunched and emaciated, laughing and laughing and laughing (and dancing) away. Phoenix puts a pained spin on the famed Joker howl, the film explaining that it’s some kind of Tourettic reaction to stress that he can’t control. An interesting alteration, but also one of the many elements of the movie that could be seen as stigmatizing neuroatypicality, coding it as a symbol of off-ness and malevolence.
Still, we are meant to feel for Phoenix’s Arthur, a low-rent professional clown and pathetically aspiring comedian who lives with his ailing mother (Frances Conroy) in a weary corner of Gotham City. Arthur is so screamingly lonely, so hungry for some sense of purpose and belonging; who can’t relate to that in some way? Outside Arthur’s addled interior world, the city is crumbling, wealth inequality creating a roiling underclass desperate to reclaim the pride and dignity of being. Again, relatable.
But as Arthur descends into the fury of his mind (government austerity has cut off his supply of medication), murder becomes his only release, a gun his only friend and sense of agency—of assertive strength, really. Because lurking behind Arthur’s longing for attention and approval is, of course, a more consuming wish; with great love comes great power. It’s unclear exactly what Phillips wants us to draw from all this. Maybe it’s a warning about something we already know all too well. But maybe, with all the arch period music (the movie seems located somewhere in the 1970s) and Phoenix theatrics, a small part of us is supposed to agree. Which should scare us, I think. But then again, my audience’s enthusiastic reaction also suggested something like catharsis.
None of these questions would be as urgent and unsettling were it not for Phoenix’s wholly committed performance. I’ve not always gotten along with Phoenix’s mannered, muscle-strained approach to his craft, but here he makes a compelling case for going full-tilt. He somehow doesn’t condescend to Arthur’s condition, even if the movie around him sometimes does. There’s a softness cutting through the affect, a sorrow of soul that gives Joker a pale, tragic glow.
The movie is, for a good stretch, a troubling and arresting character study, one done with nervy conviction. Eventually, though, Phillips has to more tightly attach this downward spiral to the larger Gotham mythology, which is where the provocative ambivalence of the film gives way to veneration. The climax is a gnarly triumph for the man who has now turned into the Joker, a baptism of blood and fire which brings to mind the political protests that have swept the world this decade, and the far more discrete, unknowable incident of Christine Chubbuck’s death. (There’s some Bernie Goetz in there, too.)
The Joker claims to have no personal politics, but he certainly is political. Phillips may be making a point here about the perils of revolutionary populism, about the risk of courting anarchy. Then again, it’s Gotham’s most famous family, the richest and most omnipotent of the bunch, who are also painted as villains. (One of them, anyway.) So isn’t the Joker, then, a hero of the people? Mad and menacing, but also righteous? Seek Joker out so you can answer that question for yourself. Do let me know what you come up with. In the meantime, I’m left wondering just how serious this film is meant to be.
