Joker Was Fine
Note: I call him The Joker, not Joker throughout. It makes more sense to me this way.
Though less of a household name than the likes of Joe Rogan, Jim Jeffries, or Sexual Predator Louis CK, Doug Stanhope has been just as influential in cultivating the Edgelord Bukowski Philosopher brand of comedy so widespread within the stand-up scene today. No other comedian fits into this space as well as Stanhope does. Listening to his gravelly voice ramble on and on about how shitty everything society has to offer in the crassest way possible is experiencing this abrasive comedic style in its most authentic form.
One of Stanhope’s calling cards has been providing his Sick and Twisted musings on to mental health. For instance, in his second most recent special, No Place Like Home (executive produced by Johnny Depp), one of its first bits, has him shaking his fist at ISIS for recruiting “disilusioned, angry youths,” a demographic that he claims to be his corner. Later on, he dives into the 2011 Tuscon Shooting, which included Senator Gabby Giffords as one of the tragedy’s 19 victims. Once in custody, two medical evaluations determined that the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia; a discovery that Stanhope astutely links to Arizona ranking 49th in the country for mental healthcare. He then went on to argue that Giffords’ ensuing brain damage wasn’t tragic, but instead, “instant karma.”
That 3-minute is basically the Sparksnote version of Joker; an ambitious, intriguing, but ultimately uneven effort co-written and directed by Todd Phillips.
The choice to make The Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) an aspiring comedian seems all too fittingly Stanhopian here. By doing so, Phillips essentially allows Loughner to perform the bit himself without any of the polish or detachment from the issue that an actual comedian would give the issue. Ironically, instead of an hole-in-the-wall venue in Bisbee, Arizona, The Joker gets to do his act on the glamorous stage of a late-night talk show in what’s arguably the film’s most memorable sequence.
The scene is tense from the start. Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), a phony little Johnny Carson stand-in, drops his showbizzy facade with The Joker pretty quickly, and tries to give him a stern talking to. The Joker is unbothered by this, though. All he really cares about is being able to do his closer: “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash,” asks The Joker. “I’ll tell you what you get! You get what you fuckin’ deserve!” And with that, The Joker shoots Robert De Niro right in the face on live television.
If you rolled your eyes at this moment, I wouldn’t blame you. Heavy-handed messaging is an issue throughout Joker, and this is its most blatant example. A lot of this comes with the territory of origin stories, which are designed to have the audience go “so that’s how that happened,” in the most slack-jawed way imaginable. It’s tacky, it’s inevitable, Uncle Ben deserves to die. And to Joker’s credit, up until that scene, those moments didn’t make the movie particularly unenjoyable to watch.
Joker was actually a pretty enjoyable watch, all things considered. There’s a lot to either appreciate or, at the very least, wrestle with. Even the film’s harshest critics would eagerly admit to the cinematography, set design, and acting being exceptional. There are, however, plenty of issues regarding tone, as well as the film’s point of view.
These issues are on full display when looking at the dynamic between The Joker and his mother (Frances Conroy), which, up until the conclusion to their relationship, provides the most melancholic and genuinely tender moments Joker has to offer. Sure, it’s a crutch, but having a character like The Joker interact with his mother is a no-brainer way to get him over as a sympathetic figure. It’s a well-executed crutch at the very least.
Both Phoenix and Conroy perfectly capture how lost both of these characters are, and how tragic it is that they have to rely on one another for help when they’re both in dire need of actual care. This is not lost on them, which is why they’ve both resigned themselves to their respective long-shot dreams as a way to get out of their squalor. The Joker has his stand-up comedy career, and his mother is still holding out hope that billionaire Thomas Wayne, the man who she once worked for and still loves, is as benevolent and good as he is in her mind.
While they’re both delusional to believe in their own hair-brained scheme, they’re also grounded enough to know that the other’s will never actually happen in a million years. The two have an unspoken agreement to never say that to the other person, though, since it would be too devastating for them to hear.
I would have loved it if this relationship was made more prominent than it was and told in a less twisty-turny manner. But instead, a good chunk of screen time gets dedicated to Sophie (Zazie Beetz), a love interest for The Joker whose arc ends with an unearned variation of the “it was all in your mind” reveal which relies on a Deus Ex Mental Illness that bad filmmakers have been using since one of them realized that mirrors can be used as a device to foreshadow a character having a dichotomous spirit.
These ridiculous twists are even more plentiful with his mother toward the end, all of which come off as counterproductive. It starts off with her being in love with Wayne, and then it turns out that The Joker is his kid. But wait, actually, he isn’t! She made it all up because, guess what? She’s fucking crazy! And also, he’s adopted. So then The Joker just smothers her to death with a pillow.
None of this makes her story any better or more compelling. Phillips goes down an unnecessarily cryptic path for nothing more than shock value and cliffhanger fodder for message board theorizers to go wild with for a couple of years.
This is a real squandered opportunity, especially considering how the rest of Joker was calling for a more straightforward villainous depiction of Thomas Wayne. We saw glimmers of that, for sure. There was that time he referred to jealous poor people as ‘clowns’ on television, his holier-than-thou announcement to run for Mayor, and the most effective example: his attendance at that black-tie event, completely unbothered by the thousands of protesters outside.
Still, he never had that a truly defining villainous moment that could have made this movie much more compelling. Wayne admitting to the affair with The Joker’s mother wasn’t even necessary for this to happen, either. He’s a billionaire living in a city with abject poverty all around him. The dots are pretty easy to connect, but they never truly were in this film. Phillips could have done so by having Wayne describe what his policies would look like as Mayor. He could have spoken out against inefficient, ineffective social programs, the evils of taxation, and of course, a greater respect for law and order, all of which tie in to the plot perfectly. But instead, all Joker does is show the existence of both abject poverty and superfluous richness flapping in the wind, occasionally grazing one another, but ultimately kept separate, like a pair of inflatable tubes at a used car lot.
This is why calling Joker a meditation on neoliberal austerity gives the guy who brought us Road Trip way too much credit. Because, similar to Stanhope — a once enthusiastic Libertarian who’s admitted to not really understanding the economic platform behind Libertarianism (a little hint: mental healthcare would be even more fucked as a result) — Phillips is probably more cynical than knowledgeable on the subjects that he’s tackling here.
It does goes to show, however, that by simply pointing out pretty rudimentary facts about this country — like its lack of well-funded social programs, unjust income inequality, and incompetent leadership — you’ll be at least a little thought-provoking. Phillips proves throughout Joker that he doesn’t have that strong a grasp on these issues, most notably in his failure to explicitly tie all of them together. In a film that revels in audibly shouting its messages for all to hear, this is telling.
With this in mind, making The Joker the galvanizing figure behind a movement that has very legitimate gripes is a deliberately farcical decision on Phillips’ part. The Joker didn’t care about making any political statements, he just had his own selfish scores to settle. From this angle, it’s hard not to think about Phillips’ real-life gripes about “woke culture” being the reason why he can’t make the dick-joke-centric projects he wants to anymore, and how this movie itself might be nothing more than a vanity project masquerading as a mirror being held up to, for lack of a better word, society.
Joker is not a Marxist call to arms, in case anyone was wondering. Class warfare is prominent throughout the film, but by putting a self-described politically agnostic agent of chaos like The Joker at the center of this working-class rebellion, it makes for some inherently absurd optics, which can easily leave the viewer thinking that the very concept of revolution itself is a joke.
All this, and I still found myself wanting to give this movie at least some credit for doing the bare minimum. I think after fifty straight MCU movies where I had to do non-stop mental gymnastics in order to not seethe at the mouth over the fact that I was watching a US-backed weapons dealer save humanity, it was nice to see a comic book movie that least wanted to take a step back and ask the always important “are we the baddies” question about their heroes.
If you don’t think about it too much, Joker’s “rich people suck!” and “fuck the system!” themes are a refreshing change of pace for a genre that never shies away from bowing down to our benevolent hegemonic overlords. Whether this will play as large a role in the upcoming Batman reboot remains to be seen, but I won’t be getting my hopes up. In an interview with ReelBlend Podcast, Phillips alludes to Batman inevitably having to “clean up” this iteration of Gotham several times, so at the end of the day, yeah, it’s still a comic book franchise. The billionaire good guy will be inflicting vigilante Broken Windows justice on low-level criminals whether you assholes like it or not. But for now, we dance. The dance of freedom. The death bells. The rising of The Joker.