Adam felt it in his ribs in Genesis. George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway felt it as they put pen to paper and sauntered through the streets of Paris. The feeling is a tipping point between the natural, evolutionarily robotic and the passionate, soulful man. The feeling comes in a moment to men who sought to be resolute as they fell into destitution with a void they knew existed, but knew not with what to fill it — the profound loneliness of man.
Enter Arthur Fleck, the lead character in the new movie Joker.
Joker tells the story of a mentally ill man who performs as a clown to get by. With his father out of the picture and a mother that can’t take care of herself, Fleck finds himself with a desire to perform stand-up comedy. He seeks to be loved and to be desired for his work, as he seems to be aware of his mental shortcomings. The story is intimately tied to the origin tale of Batman, Bruce Wayne, and withholds no subtext as to the relationship and cause of his rise.
But the film makes an interesting commentary on the Wayne family. Rather than the more obvious “Occupy Wall Street” type of anti-rich commentary from the Christopher Nolan Batman series, Joker suggests that the entitled are not just a product of greed and theft from the less fortunate. Rather, it implies that rich tycoons like Batman’s father, Thomas Wayne, lack remorse and responsibility, as if they can wriggle their way out of culpability for the way the world is.
The film doesn’t disguise the fact that men in economic bereavement react with hostility. In gaps of perceived perfection, men fill that void with hubris. When that pride is shattered, they resort to violence as the only mechanism with which to cope.
It’s almost as if the shadows behind Joaquin Phoenix while he is performing stand up tell an even more compelling tale: the lies we tell ourselves as we mask pain and sorrow and illness with medicine and smiles and makeup.
The film is well crafted and wonderfully executed. Phoenix performs masterfully, almost as if playing a Walk the Line 2 where Johnny Cash goes insane. An Inception-like score keeps hearts in four-four time. The camera work adds suspense and delusion through prolonged, shimmering shots as if the audience is falling under the influence of prescription medication, and numerous shots pay homage to the work of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Several moments capture Phoenix’s balletic and ballistic Joker in ways that will assuredly become iconic.
Which is another way of saying that the Joker dances alone. The desire to love and be loved is as necessary in 1981 as it is in 2019. The film’s brief comment on a world wildly disconnected by income disparity cedes to a larger cinematic discussion on a Gotham spinning wildly, turbulently around, but the world, like madness, finds itself alone, confined in your head. For even as cell phones, the internet, social media have brought us within a fingertip of one another, many still don’t experience the touch, love, or admiration.
And on that last point, when touch never comes and love yields, being admired even for a moment matters most. So it’s fitting, in the penultimate scene when the Joker stands atop the stage of a police car hood and looks out over his admirers — men in clown masks — he sees himself looking back.
Joker is tremendously sad and jarring. Phoenix should get award season recognition, and the film sets a different tone in the DC cinematic universe. But, as both the anticipation of and reaction to the film suggests, this movie is more than a bad guy origin story. It’s an insight into how men look into themselves and find a void they desperately desire to fill.
Tyler Grant (@TyGregoryGrant) is a Young Voices contributor, who completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan. He writes movie reviews for the Washington Examiner.
