Sunday, October 27, 2019

Why I Am NOT Going to See the Joker Movie

Featuring a full post.

It starts here.
Let me preface by saying that this post is not about the new, 2019 movie, Joker.  I have not seen the Joker movie and I don't know anything about the film.  This post is specifically about the character the Joker, that has been with us for some time, and which was transformed specifically from an ordinary criminal clown into something darker by Alan Moore's story, The Killing Joke.

Let me also preface by saying that I am a white male, and that I was, once, a young white male.

Of late, I've been harried on twitter and elsewhere for my decision not to see the new movie, usually with the argument that I cannot "have an opinion without giving it a chance."  My position is that almost certainly, nothing about the basic character of the Joker is changed in the new film ~ and this, in my opinion, is borne out of the excitement and anticipation I heard from fans prior to the film's release, and the excitement and satisfaction of those exact same fans who saw the film.  Clearly, these fans, prior to seeing the film, wanted to see more of the character they already knew, and clearly, they came away from the film having seen more of the character they already knew.  I do not need to see a hammer fall to know that it will when I let go.  Therefore, I do not need to see the Joker film to decide how I feel about the character, the Joker.

Unlike those who are most vocal about the character, I was alive and well and 25 years old when Tim Burton's version of Batman came out with Jack Nicholson playing the part.  I experienced the fan-boy gushing about the "new darkness" of the character then, with all the hype and tribalism that created, in which my generation happily ditched the campy Cesare Romero character in favor of this exciting, bold, vicious, madcap insane version.  It was blatantly clear in 1989 that this love-affair was pursued by a particular kind of white male, who gushed exhaustively about the character's free use of violence as a form of expression.

I did see the film and I considered it a vapid mess.  It drove the coffin nail in the lid with regards to Tim Burton and me, beginning a long, unpleasant series of multiple experiences being in rooms with white males expounding the genius of a character that randomly and "cleverly" kills people for no particular reason except as a form of personal expression.  It doesn't matter if they die, it doesn't matter who dies, all that matters is that they die in a way that's interesting.  This baton was thereafter taken up by a host of serial killer movies that spawned throughout the 1990s, including Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Natural Born Killers, Citizen X, Kiss the Girls and Copycat.  The genre began to falter after 2000, as the plots grew weaker and more esoteric, culminating in 2007's Zodiac, a serial killer film that hardly shows any serial killing.

With the passing years, Nicholson's version of the character grew less and less popular with the new generation, so that these conversations about the brilliant, wonderous magnificence of the Joker diminished ... and I might have been happy except that Christopher Nolan picked a very capable actor to play his Joker in The Dark Knight, where again the character was darkened with a sharpie sufficiently enough to inspire a whole new generation of specifically oriented young white men to again take up the Joker's cause celebre.  Once again, I was told the new film would be "terrifying" and "brooding," just as I had been told about Burton's vision ... and once again, seeing the film, I found it a ghastly mess of plot holes, irrelevant philosophy, prattling bullshit and insipid dialogue and writing.  None of that mattered, however, because the Joker was alive and well and deeply beloved again.

So, again, I found myself in the same round of endless crappy discussions in rooms with white males about how murder and irrational behaviour is really an exciting art form of a sort, or at least transformatively a form of release and structured anger against the establishment.  I hadn't realized it at the time, but there were certain comparisons to be made with those white men who did not realize that Fight Club was a morality play against fighting, and not an invitation to stupidly fight in small darkly lit basements.  I did not make that comparison in 2008.  I had not yet been woke.  I remember my principle thought at the time was that if we could simply castrate all the dumbfuck white men who loved the Joker's character, we could fix many problems of the world within a generation.

It was clear after 2008 that the Joker's popularity was gathering speed.  Unlike Burton's introduction, Nolan's version had the benefit of youtube and social media.  Nicholson was rebranded "camp," reducing that depiction to the level of Cesare Romero, and I did get some satisfaction from the world deciding, at last, that the 1989 film was actually shit, along with the three films that followed.  I had said so from the beginning, and mostly using the exact same phrases that are often used today.  Apparently, I was ahead of my time.  Sadly, I'll have to wait until 2038 before the social version of today's media turns on Nolan and acknowledges that that movie was shit, too.

Is the reader, no doubt in love with the Joker, good and ramped up now?  Well good.  Buckle up.  This is just the beginning.

Further clarity about the Joker's character was made possible by 2016's Suicide Squad, in which Jared Leto's character is presented with such bold, pornographic delight as to spectactularly outline with crystal clarity the innate fascination with the character of young white males.  In particular, the flame war that ensued surrounding that character.  I won't go into it.  We were all there.  Most importantly, the flame war demonstrated that the Joker was not merely a character, and not merely a series of artistic versions spawning back to the 1940s (literally, April 25th, 1940).  The original was a psychopath with a warped sense of humor, who became Romero's goofy prankster as the comics industry was "cleaned up" post-war.  By 2016, the Joker had grown into a form of political identification ... and one that could easily inspire direct violence and irrational stupidity on a deepened scale.  Not only did Holmes want to be the joker; there were thousands of voices on the internet ready to defend Holmes' right to want that.  We were through the looking glass.

So I began to pick the matter apart from this new perspective, not having any real answers to provide.  I already did not like the character ~ so anything I was going to say would undoubtedly be biased ~ as surely, the Joker-loving reader considers me to be now.  And yet, what is a Joker-lover except biased?

I am not being bombarded with demands that I see the new film, Western Stars, despite my not liking Bruce Springsteen, either (who is also hallowed by a particular kind of white male).

True enlightenment came about a year ago, when I was working at a retail store as a writer and client manager.  One of the co-workers there learned of Todd Phillips' coming film and at once proceeded to orgasm all over himself about the choice of Joaquin Phoenix as the character.  Phoenix has a peculiar reputation and it was assumed that he, in particular, would really be able to relate to the Joker character.  This was encouraged by this teaser trailer released in 2018, that my co-worker played repeatedly on his desktop without headphones.  The English version seems to have been scoured from the net, but it was alive and well last year.

Nothing about this teaser suggested I had any interest in watching the film.

Because my co-worker was willing to argue, and being a young white male, we had about a dozen back and forths about the Joker, what the Joker stood for, who liked him, why, what the best sort of movie about the Joker would be and so on.  My co-worker was, yes, a white male, 33 years old, but somewhat less than grown-up because of his age, having spent his life mostly in jobs that enabled him to play at being an I.T. guy.  He had most of the characteristics of this sort of person.

I began to organize a theory.  The Joker, I reasoned, appeals to white men because, as a whole, white men feel dissatisfied by the present political state of the world.  They are told day and night that they have a certain "entitlement" on account of being white, which they don't personally feel as they look around at their minimum-wage, heavy labor jobs in which they have no actual power and for which they receive no appreciation or attention.  They do not realize that their expectation of power and attention is, itself, a function of the entitlement they feel.  If they weren't white, they wouldn't expect these things, or get mad when they don't manifest.  But they cannot understand this.  They just know they're unhappy and that they hate what they see as a constant, rancorous persecution of their innocent existence.

And, in fact, it is innocent.  They did not choose to be white and they did not choose to be entitled.  It was foistered on them without their complicit approval.  But innocence in birth and status does not translate to social responsibility and educated awareness.  Their innocence is not the crime, but their insistence of being innocent, their declarative shouting that they have a right to be innocent, the facile resistance they have towards having anything but innocence, determines ultimately that they really aren't any more and that they're using this bullshit innocence as a shield, protecting them from waking the fuck up and realizing they are still responsible for the sins of their parents.

In the Joker, these white men see something they can identify with: a character who resists the system, but not for political reasons, not for class reasons, not for the sake of money or authoritative power ... but purely for the priviledged right to resist, in part because that resistance doesn't have to be justified or explained or defended.  White men want to be angry and to fight back, but they don't want to talk about it, because talking only leads to arguments they cannot produce logic against.  The Joker doesn't argue.  He doesn't explain.  He doesn't have "reasons."  He is pure rebellion, in the can.  He is the angry white man's poster boy.

For non-white men and for women, the Joker is way, way too close to the toxic, randomly encountered white male asshole who decides today is the day to gang together to mock a woman, push a black man down a hill, paint 'slut' across a woman's doorway, torch a Semite's car or pour a milkshake over an Oriental's girlfriend, while grinning and strutting like a cock on the walk ... much like the post Burtonesque Joker tries to look in every fucking scene of every movie I've seen.  When combined with cruelty and violence, laughter and fun-times are cruel faces stuck on top of cruel intentions.  This was made more than clear decades ago by Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

In the short run, white men can really warm themselves to the character ~ but in the long run, the Joker is a really lousy poster boy.  There's no real pay-off to emulating or behaving along the Joker's example.  As much as white men might identify with him, most are smart enough to know they can't randomly and creatively kill strangers.  Most white men aren't really this character.  They know where the line is.  They go and see the Joker and gush about him vicariously.  Not realistically.

Still, that installs an awareness of how impotent white men who bow to the system are.  That's fine for a guy like me, who finds other reasons to feel empowered, but for a lone white male who can't find a better icon that the fucking Joker, this is a bleak, scrubby, salt-sown field.  Not one damn thing is going to grow here except an inability to take effective action and a pervasive sense of being unfairly judged.

Sooner or later, that's going to result in violence: violence against others or violence against self.  And this is not good for anyone's soul.

But I am not going to take a political stand on this issue, or promote censorship or tell anyone else to see the newest film.  At the same time, however, I am not going to be told that I cannot make up my mind about something toxic just because I haven't swallowed this shit.  I've swallowed enough already, to know what the fuck it is.

9 comments:

  1. I was mostly a Batman: The Animated Series fan growing up, but I did watch the Tim Burton movie and liked it well enough at the time. Looking back on it, it's obviously more style than substance, especially compared to The Killing Joke. Tim Burton's entire career has been spent essentially badly imitating German expressionists, and Batman is no exception. That being said, here is one aspect of Burton's Joker that I'd be curious to get your views on.

    I agree with you that the Christopher Nolan Joker is expressly about violence. Nolan, in a foggy, not very well thought out way, presents the Joker as sort of a champion of chaos? Violence as a legitmate means of mirroring the chaos of our world? I don't get it. Haven't seen the new film, but the trailer seems to espouse the same philosophy, this time doing a bad impression of Scorsese.

    With Burton's Batman, the film explicitly details how the Joker created Batman and Batman created the Joker. The Joker is meant not to be seen as Batman's antogist so much as an extension of Batman himself. In the same way, Gotham city is an extension of Bruce Wayne. Batman confronts his shadow self in the Joker, but never truly succeeds. This is a struggle with which, I believe, most viewers can relate. Tim Burton's film depicts the Joker not as a twisted anti-hero championing violence, but a horrific manifestation of guilt.

    In any case, thank you so much for the blog! A lovely, well written post.

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  2. Thank you Phill,

    Burton's Batman clearly TRIES to create the themes you speak of; however, the clumsiness of pushing the Joker over the edge using the foil of Carl Grissom spoils the "Joker is made by Batman" theory, as it can be said Grissom made the Joker. Keaton's grim and wooden depiction of Batman, desperately employed to counteract the decade-long career of the actor as a notoriously dopey goofball, grossly diminishes any sense of true emotion, so that all we're left with is that the Joker made Batman by killing Batman's parents. The script hardly addresses this end of the conflict any further, except that the Joker is a pain in Batman's side.

    The Joker, to address your other point, IS depicted as a twisted anti-hero championing the desecration of things and people for the purpose of "artistic expression," which is carried forward in several scenes, including a willingness to randomly poisoning the city of Gotham. The crimes may be less "hands on" but I don't find them any less expressive of a hatred that certain types of people hold for the general welfare of society.

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  3. My knowledge of the previous movies' version of the Joker is extremely limited as I have not seen those. But from what you describe I think Todd Philips' version might be different after all.

    It might be because this movie depicts the event leading up to the character Arthur Fleck becoming Joker, but from seeing the movie I would strongly argue that this Joker does try to argue, he does explain, he has reasons and is even far from rebellion most of the time. Although people are killed in the movie, none of the murders are on random people.

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  4. I do not have the words to describe how good and insightful this post is. Thanks for writing it.
    : )

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  5. "Phoenix has a peculiar reputation and it was assumed that he, in particular, would really be able to relate to the Joker character."

    I was struggling up until this point . . . because I've always liked the idea of the Joker . . . and I think I understand a little better why that is.

    I don't know that I agree with everything you've said . . . no, scratch that, I can see the sense in most of it . . . but I've learned to trust your assessment on a great many topics, so there must be something I'm missing when it comes to . . . see, I love the Joker. Or rather, I love certain depictions of him. That is to say, I love the idea that I've built up in my head, influenced by my own experiences and how I read the character, and I have to admit I've never done a very close reading of the Joker in any media because, when I do, I find a lot of problems with how he's written, portrayed, acted, etc.

    I want to love the idea of the Joker . . . but that one line has me thinking, "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

    Because anyone who can "relate to the Joker character" is not even close to being a stable person.

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  6. Caeser Romero Joker I can appreciate. Louche, goofy and silly - in a film/TV portrayal of Batman that is fundamentally a farce and satire. Perhaps Wears Batman in genre is still an indictment of American Society, but it's an absurdist indictment, mocking the weirdo criminals in many ways less then it does the law and order batman. It's point seems to be that Batman's obsessions are no less absurd then the Jokers ... but It's camp without the menace of either modern Batman's fascistic violence or the Joker's.

    That's the difference for me Batman is tolerable when it's flanneur drollery about the absurd pathology of both cop and criminal. He and his world become intolerable when tied to menace and cruelty, when absurdity become nihilism, when the choice presented as the same is between fascism and sadism and depending on the scene which character is which changes (as it must, the two being intwined).

    From the goody 60's maxim that every pig is a crook, the disordered present only takes the message that society is a sham and the individual has as much right to fulfill his (you are right, it's always a privledge he) desires for unearned power and control as the state has to exercise power and control in the name of social cohesion.

    Only in America.

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  7. We have this same breed in Canada, Gus.

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  8. Extremely interesting post. I have recently watched Joker, and it wasn't what I expected. I expected an "origins" story that fit within the broader world of the DC comics; I expected something "light" or, let's say, a divertissement. What I got is instead the description of a slow descent into a mental illness Hell, with an apparently serendipitous alignment of the mental illness with a world and society that are effectively sick. It was a gruesome, nihilistic spectacle.
    I only liked the Joker as a character as the other side of the Batman, the fact that they complement each other. And seeing a movie with only the Joker has reminded me that it doesn't make much sense; much like a Batman movie without a villain wouldn't make sense; and any villain other than the Joker doesn't really complement the Batman.

    In fact, I don't understand how or why anyone would identify with the Joker; I am white and male, but I am Italian, so my cultural references must be so badly misaligned to even try to comprehend the possibility of such identification.

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  9. Excellent analysis. I was never much of a Batman fan and while I thought Nicholson's Joker was memorable I skipped the rest of the Batman films.
    I did watch the new Joker film because my gf wanted to see it and we'd heard there was some controversy. It was pretty terrible. In the moment I enjoyed the Scorsese references and Joaquin's performance, but the movie has no depth at all and treats mental illness very poorly. It tries to make the Joker an antihero, or even a protagonist for much of the film, and panders to exactly the entitled disgruntlement over of the feeling of lost privilege you describe. I think you nailed it.
    BTW I've been away from the blogosphere for a good five years, ever since the Gamergate really, and it's good to see you're still writing and still worth reading.

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