![]() ![]() When wealthy Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) calls Gotham’s impoverished masses “clowns”, his words echo around endless TV screens, providing a V for Vendetta-style mask to rioting protesters carrying “Kill the Rich” placards. The ghost of Pupkin hangs like a putrid spectre over Joker, from Arthur’s fantastical dreams of stardom to the narrative’s queasy themes of the media making heroes of villains in uncertain times. He dreams of becoming a standup comic but has no idea what other people find “funny” – a lethal combination. ![]() Bullied, abused and increasingly enraged, Arthur lives with his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), in Gotham, a city befouled by garbage strikes and overrun by mutant rats. Reduced to a skeletal state (think Christian Bale in The Machinist, but worse) by a diet of nicotine and pain, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a tragicomic nightmare, a beleaguered, sign-twirling clown who suffers from a medical condition that turns his internal screams into cackling laughter. Like Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn in The Dark Knight, Joker has an ace card in the form of Joaquin Phoenix’s mesmerisingly physical portrayal of a man who would be king. ![]() The difference is, this time no one’s laughing. Joker, which seems to draw in equal measure on Martin Scorsese’s scabrous media satire The King of Comedy and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, has a similarly dyspeptic worldview, full of characters drunk on a destructive cocktail of enraged self-pity and self-gratification, the latter indulged with an obliterating disregard for consequences. Phillips has previously struck gold by appealing to his audience’s basest urges with the kind of nastily nihilistic gross-out comedies that he recently complained have been killed by “woke culture”. That such terms should be applied to a populist studio picture from the director of the Hangover movies is perhaps unsurprising. Joker, then, is an "incel" (involuntary celibate), and his issues aren’t the issues that are the focus of real-life protests and civil unrest happening across the globe.Ĭonflating his story with, for example, a people wanting to protect themselves from a potentially dangerous extradition bill, would be to misunderstand both the protests and the film.Since opening to an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival in August, where it scooped the top prize, Todd Phillips’s origins picture about the birth of Batman’s cackling nemesis has become the focus of a moral backlash, with critics using words such as “toxic”, “cynical” and “irresponsible” to describe its relentlessly embittered (and allegedly glorified) tone. Violence born of his deep grief for a life of social exclusion, a poor relationship with his mother, and a deep-rooted misogyny that makes the woman responsible by proxy. The Joker, or his alter ego Arthur Fleck (played by an impressive Joaquin Phoenix), doesn’t kill three Wall Streeters because they're rich, or even to defend a woman being harassed in the subway. The Joker is happy to become their leader, not for the "cause" or to defend the oppressed, but because he is visible and appreciated for the first time in his life. The movie depicts protesters as full-of-rage, blind followers of a murderer. But Joker is an extreme, and extremely simplistic, example of that. We have known of many leaders, over the centuries, whose fitness to lead has been questionable. ![]()
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