We live in an age when the Culture War, the most avoidable conflict in human history, continues to drag on. Despite the fact that it turned out to contain practically nothing we haven’t seen before in half a dozen genres of film aside from some inconsequential shading, the moment Todd Phillips announced his Joker movie, the Extremely Online began having the vapors about it; apparently it was an ode to friendless white sociopaths and was going to trigger a wave of incel mass murders. (My personal theory is that all the shooters are afraid to be so predictable à la the guy who wears the band t-shirt to the concert, and are waiting for the next big blockbuster.) This led to an equally ridiculous backlash, and by the time the movie actually opened, the Army had gotten involved, practically ensuring that it would make a billion dollars.
When I went to see it, the atmosphere was pretty tense, with bag checks and a general mood of paranoia generated entirely by the Discourse. To hear the talking heads discuss it, it sounded like a 21st-century version of The Eternal Jew; I was fully expecting it to follow the pattern of a dozen other movies that were the focus of some moral panic or another: perfectly ordinary, neither good nor bad but just sort of there, an otherwise unremarkable film that was only elevated by the controversy surrounding it. Alas, I was wrong: Joker is…well, it’s not that it’s terrible. It’s technically accomplished, with a couple of memorable scenes, and there’s nothing incompetent or even offensive about it. It sets its mise-en-scène well enough, and its Old Ugly New York setting is nicely portrayed. And it’s all held together by a performance by Joaquin Phoenix that’s certainly fascinating, though we’ll deal more with that later.
What it is, though, is completely ridiculous.
It’s not just that Joker is full of plot holes, inconsistencies, and nonsensical connections; nobody really cares about that stuff anyway, and the movie has given itself a cheap automatic out by slapping the “but it was all just a DREAM” gimmick right in the middle of it. It’s not even that Joker depends entirely on our identification with, or at least interest in, a single character who is constantly on screen and who just isn’t very compelling; while Phoenix’s performance is certainly accomplished, he is also Acting with a Capital A, and even if he wasn’t, the script requires him to do some stuff that’s so over the top that the top is no longer visible. Because the format of constant comic-book movie remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings demands it, we can’t help but compare him to other Jokers, and all of them have had some kind of idea, some variant on the basic conception of criminal/clown (which already isn’t that complicated): Cesar Romero camped it up as a whoopsie showbiz villain, sort of a Rip Taylor with hired goons. Jack Nicholson leaned heavily on the crime boss and chose a murderous surrealism, while Heath Ledger famously went the grimy, mysterious agent-of-chaos route. Phillips (and his co-writer, Scott Silver) bewilderingly drop half the equation and choose to present us with the question “What if Joker was just mentally ill?”, and the answer is “pretty boring”.
Since it would bum everyone out to invest so much meaning into a film that turned out to be such a dud, people on every point of the political spectrum are falling all over themselves to imbue Joker with some kind, any kind of ideological position. They share this quality with the movie itself, which 100% believes its own shit; the problem is, it’s pretty impossible to determine what that shit actually is. It’s not the ode to murderous incels that everyone thought it would be before they actually saw it, and the idea that it’s meant to be a defense of edgy comedy — the direction Phillips seems to be going to sell a few extra tickets to the aggrieved free speech crowd — falls apart because it isn’t even remotely funny. But those trying to make the case that it’s some grand leftist statement, that it’s about austerity or working-class revolt or the decline of social services, are giving it way more credit than it makes an effort to earn. We’ve been suckered into an expectation of grand political statements, but American blockbuster cinema doesn’t do politics, grand or otherwise, and there certainly isn’t any moral positioning being made in Joker, which is morally incoherent at best.
Beyond that, there are just so many moments in Joker that are…just…so…ridiculous! I don’t know who needs to be told this, but you can’t take a movie seriously (and let’s remember, it’s not a comedy either) when there is a prominent newspaper headline in one of the world’s major cities that reads “KILL THE RICH: A NEW MOVEMENT?”. You can’t take a movie seriously when it portrays benevolent city father Thomas Wayne as a belligerent mook who literally calls the poor of Gotham “a bunch of clowns”. You can’t take a movie seriously when an entire social movement with no demands grows up around a murder that nobody saw! There’s so many problems with Joker on a structural level — the stakes are basically non-existent, the character is flat as a pancake, none of the supporting players are given anything at all to work with (resulting in the waste of a handful of decent actors), it’s padded and overlong and surprisingly dull, and it puts all its dramatic eggs in a basket that isn’t nearly as interesting as the movie thinks it is. The narrative is extremely lazy and hopes we won’t notice because of all the window dressing, and its lack of a real dramatic arc is matched by a total non-ending.
We’ve painted ourselves into a corner by demanding so little out of our entertainment and expecting so much out of studio functionaries who have neither the desire nor the capacity to give it to us. With so little in the actual content to talk about, we doom ourselves to repeating culture-war arguments over phantoms that aren’t really there. Joker should have come and gone with as little attention as it deserves, but instead it’s on track to become a huge commercial success, and we’ve further poisoned what little remains of our brains talking about the moral and political heft of a movie that doesn’t exist on screen. The joke’s on us.