SPOILERS AHEAD!
I’ve been meaning to rewatch Joker for months now to write a little critique though I haven’t had the time. I did enjoy the film quite a bit though. It was a brilliant, tragic and necessarily disturbing critique of modern society from the perspective of the 80s and the mask of the Joker. Framing Thomas Wayne as a villain representing society’s cruelty, and Batman’s most famous enemy the Joker as an unintentional anti-hero, Joker subverts the iconography against itself as a revealer of truth.
The excellent performances of the cast properly help enthrall viewers into a familiar universe, often to the point of discomfort. We could read a number of potential messages into the story. I’d be careful to read too strong a political message in the Joker character himself, or the chaotic finale. I’ve seen the film’s message described as a call for a stronger police state, and perhaps if we follow the logic of Nolan’s Dark Night series, particularly the final film of the trilogy, it isn’t a big jump. I do see a strong relationship between the Joker of The Dark Knight and this Joker film though with a significant thematic reversal in the changing of perspective from the hero in Batman, to his most infamous villain. Tradition says there are three overarching Joker archetypes, and the one portrayed in Joker by Joaquin Phoenix could easily have been the same as the one formerly portrayed by Heath Ledger. This means, at least from a symbolic perspective, Joker could serve as an origin story for the Joker of the Dark Knight (The Killing Joke). The change in perspective from hero to villain however makes for a considerable subtextual shift. Where as the Dark Knight focuses on repairing the symptomatic chaos of society, justifying its way of restoring order, Joker forces the critique back on the society that produced the chaos. Ultimately this marked shift allows Joker to utilize social mailese to reveal a masked truth.
Author Fleck doesn’t claim a political stance, frankly informing viewers he doesn’t believe in anything only shortly before the climax. His views seem more or less nihilistic. His rage, like the nihilistic outbursts of mob violence he inspires, call to mind the desperate times we live in. Arthur Fleck is one seeking recognition as many have pointed out. In this sense of being ignored, “walked over” in the streets, “invisible”, Fleck’s subjectivity is at loss of reality to psychosis. This is until his full transformation. By identifying with the symptom in becoming the Joker, Arthur Fleck effectively forces society to recognize their symptom. As a result, and ironically so, the Joker is in a sense the supreme symbol of hope for transformation.
Batman, the classical hero as presented in The Dark Night, is representative of palliative care. He deals with the symptoms as they arise, smoothing them back down to a seamless flattened level. Likewise he patches society up with a “noble lie.” In effect he hides his own trauma and pain by disguising the trauma and pain of society. This is represented visually through the image of the Batsuit which hides the true identity of Bruce Wayne. The logic of refusal of the symptom follows that if one keeps fighting symptoms the diseases will go away. Their reappearance however suggests this logic is false. The Joker on the other hand, rather than acting as a preserver of “social harmony”, must remain the symptomatic presence of radical critique. His entire cinematic return in yet another Joker film ultimately reflects the very symptomatic repetition he is a necessity of. This is why in The Dark Knight he doesn’t care if Batman kills him. As long as sickness survives, the symptom will return. If you numb yourself to it, you risk dying prematurely, chaotically, and suddenly. The symptom is there to convey the message that the disease has not been dealt with, and fighting the symptom doesn’t cure its underlying cause. Society as is, seeks to classify individuals in categories which essentially neutralizes them, preventing the exposure to society’s potentially irrational aspects; these are the aspects which expose the limitations of society’s rationale. Therefore, in order for things to continue business as usual, the Joker must be portrayed as a depraved freak and social oddity, to be institutionalized and forgotten.
It’s easy to describe Joker’s violence as “insanity”, though I find it is precisely when he commits his murder of the three men in the subway where he gains his sanity. It brings up Fanon‘s unprecedented idea on the social creation of mental illness as an instrument of the ruling class. As Fanon Brilliantly explicates in Wretched of the Earth, it’s not that a certain group of people are just mentally ill pathological criminals, but rather they are made ill under specific social conditions; village raids, rapes, incarceration, torture and violence. They are characterized as “mad” to perpetually disqualify their voice and existence. In this context violence becomes therapeutic as it redirects the aggression away from the self and toward the source of that internalized self hatred, a hatred that circulates in the circuit of dialectics of recognition between subject and Other. The Hegelian master slave dialectic begins as a “struggle to the death” after all. Fanon explains that the Algerian had to affirm his existence, otherwise to continue to suffer both pathologically and in a state of existential ontological negation, symbolic death prior to the actual. Algerian violence toward their colonizer is therefore self affirmative, a statement that they exist. As Arthur explains, his whole life he doubted whether he existed until he killed those Wall Street guys. One can read that as the psychotics reentry into the symbolic order, into recognition in the field of the Other. One can go further and read it the way he seems to have interpreted it himself, that he finally identified with his symptom and was cured. If the symbolic is a split in the Real, here the Real is the collapse of the symbolic.
Ultimately the Joker’s logic is not a solution to the illnesses of society, as he only remedies his own illness. As Batman correctly acknowledges in the Dark Knight, Joker’s stance leaves him utterly alone. He can never be a solution to that which he was created as a response to or as a product of. Some have went as far as identifying the Joker as a “toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels,” a perspective which I found to be unfounded as the targets of his violence are primarily those in positions of social power. I agree with Leslie Lee’s suggestion that the true villain of the film is the prevailing order itself. The Joker is the illegitimate child of neoliberalism, that is wether Thomas Wayne is his biological father or not. Joker was a tale for the excluded.
As I describe in more detail in my grad school writing sample, the prevailing ideology taken to its fullest extent says we are each individually responsible for our place within society. If you are unsuccessful in the free-market system, you are viewed as insufficient in some way. You’re either not intelligent enough, or you don’t work hard enough, but ultimately the responsibility is placed completely on you individually. The unpredictable nature of the system and life in general are ignored. Your place of birth, your perceived race, gender etcetera are insignificant. It is a system presenting itself as “universal”, and open to all equally, and freely. A character like Arthur Fleck (Joker) exposes one of the many limits of its suggested inclusion.
Arthur was born poor into a broken home, to abuse, struggling with mental illness, to be raised by a mother who suffers from mental illness herself. Finally the society he’s been thrusted into cuts all support, by ending the social programs he relied on to remain “in order”. Unable to find council, or medication his life is revealed to be a tragedy, as is the film. From the perspective of the system Arthur is one of the losers, a tragedy hidden by a mask of ideology embodied by Thomas Wayne. As an antagonist Wayne reproduces the social order in support of the system that helps maintain his privilege. The “moralism” he uses against the Joker in light of the murders and his proclaimed desire to lift the poor “clowns” out of poverty is hypocrisy. Society easily points the finger back at the individual in order to avoid acknowledging the mark of its own social illness. Wayne is but another symptom, much like the Joker, of an incredibly cruel and flawed system.
With so many excluded from the (abstract) universal system of capitalism, there is little more available to them to express than a frenzied riot of drive. An expression which does nothing to transform the existing system. That is within the framework of the existing ideology of course. Notably the film concludes with an ambiguous dream-like “comedy routine” where the Joker manages to escape a therapist (by murder), then we watch as he runs about the hallways of the mental institution chased by the orderlies and a path of bloody footprints. This routine could go on forever; a drive without aim or completion. We’re forced to either give up and give into the ultimately self-destructive nihilism, things remaining as they are in repetition until death, or, we can think radically beyond the prevailing ideological superstructure, and work toward emancipation.
Slavoj Zizek’s take:
(special thanks to my brother Lu for the helpful and enlightening discussion on the film’s themes, having contributed considerably to this critique)
