"Joker" and the Missing Punchline
by Nathan Robertson
There are three paths to take when talking about Joker. There’s talking about Jaoquin Phoenix, there’s talking about the technical, and there’s talking about the movie itself. My focus will be on the movie itself, however, I will make note that Phoenix is a force here. Adding to his already stellar collection of characters battling loneliness and a longing for human connection in movies such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Spike Jonze’s Her, Phoenix takes the role to a place few actors could achieve while maintaining their sanity. The music is also a wonderful addition to the portfolio of Hildur Guðnadóttir, who already wowed this year with her work on Chernobyl.
Unfortunately, a movie is more than the sum of its performances, and for me, Joker just didn’t add up. The movie is not a well-meaning commentary on the dangers of poorly treating the mentally ill, it is a misanthropic smorgasbord of heavy-handed attempts to provoke any type of response it can get to feed its self-created mythos.
There seems to be a movement in our culture to support and empathize with the villain, which while not wholly bad, does present dangers. Let’s look at two examples of superhero movie villains that perfectly played the line between pure evil and human struggle.
Doc-Ock (Spider-Man 2)
Quite possibly the best superhero movie to date in my opinion. Not because of Tobey Maguire's impeccable feat of bringing Peter Parker to life, but because of its villain. Here we have a villain who begins as a scientist seeking to better the world until something goes wrong. In one fell swoop, he loses his wife, his project, and his sanity. After a series of classic battles between hero and villain (including the all-time great train scene), the villain finds himself in a unique place among superhero movies, a place of redemption. Spider-Man 2 successfully subverted our ideas of what a villain could be, human.
Erik Killmonger (Black Panther)
Black Panther followed the formula that Spider-Man 2 created, make the villain human. Erik Killmonger is first shown to us as a thief, but slowly we learn his tragic past, we’re shown a conversation with his father that brought audiences to tears, and we begin to wonder if his motivations are truly unfounded. Killmonger makes us question the heroism of Black Panther himself, which allows the audience to find the humanity in everyone and ultimately care more for the villain than the hero.
Then there is Joker, DC’s attempt at a solo villain movie. Drawing from the past success of movies like Deadpool, Joker was set up to succeed from the beginning. However, I left the theater asking myself one question, “Why does this exist?” At the end of the day, Joker adds nothing to the conversation. What conversation you may ask? Any conversation. It is so fully wrapped up in its cynicism that it forgets to have a purpose. There is no real moment of humanity, no opportunity for redemption, simply an unsubstantiated plea for sympathy towards a psychopath.
It’s difficult to see Joker without comparing it to the Joker present in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger’s Joker was truer to what the character is: chaos incarnate. Phoenix’s Joker tries to put sense to that, which ultimately is untrue to the character, and dangerous for the pattern that creates when we think about evil characters.
Dark Night: A True Batman Story is a 2016 memoir of Paul Dini, co-creator of Batman: The Animated Series and a large influence in the greater DC Animated Universe. In his memoir, Dini is seen talking to various fictional characters to process his thoughts, particularly a violent mugging he went through. At the end of the book, he has a conversation with Joker. This conversation reveals the dangers of writing a character like Joker and warns about how he should be used.
For a more in-depth look at this point, check out this article by Polygon: https://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/10/4/20897641/batman-joker-actors-paul-dini-dc-comics
The Joker is a place where artists are given the freedom to go to their darkest places, and Joker seems overly willing to swim in that darkness and never peer above the water to see the light.