Everyman
When ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.
On TV, Adam West played Batman. He was camp and silly. When DC comics wanted the character to revert to his pulp noir roots, they insisted we call him The Batman.
Batman's main villain was The Joker, played by Cesar Romero. He was manic and whacky. When a film maker wanted to present the character as a realistic, mentally damaged man, he insisted we start calling him simply Joker.
He's Winnie ther Pooh. Don't you know what ther means?
Characters change: their essence remains the same. Superman is an alien who hides among us; purer and more moral than we are; doing everything on a larger scale. Spider-Man is a high school science geek who gets powers in a freak accident and tries to use them responsibly. The Batman is a scared child who turned himself into a creature of the night in order to terrify the people who hurt him.
The Joker is...
The one thing that connects all the incarnations of the Joker, from Laughing Fish to Killing Joke, from Jack Nicholson to Heath Ledger is...
What the tragic, psychotic murderer in this grim, adult drama has in common with the Joker who imprinted his face on all the fish in Gotham city (and then tried to sue for copyright infringement) is...
Is...
Green hair. The essence of Joker is his green hair.
I am not quite sure why Folie a Deux garnered such a hostile response, nor, indeed, why it lost the studio quite so much money. But then I am not sure that the first film deserved all the praise that was heaped on it.
Joker (the first film) wasn't quite what I was expecting. I keep seeing trailers for a musical riff on the Wizard of Oz which purports to show how the Wicked Witch of the West became wicked. And a witch. And possibly why she moved to the west. I am not sure if fairy tale villains and comic book monsters need origins and explanations: maybe sometimes it's more fun for them to just be bad. But there's clearly a fashion for it. So, show us a real man with real mental difficulties and then show us how he turned into the iconic killer-clown from the funny papers.
But this is very much what Joker does not do. It borrows a little from Alan Moore's wildly over-rated Killing Joke, positioning Joker as a failed stand up comedian. It borrows a little from the Tim Burton movie, insinuating that The Batman is, directly or indirectly, Joker's creation. It very much does not borrow the idea that his hair turned green because The Batman pushed him into a vat of chemicals (movie) or a vat of playing card ink (comic books).
This Joker, Arthur Fleck, was systematically abused by his parents. This Joker has a neurological condition which makes him laugh hysterically for no reason. But this Joker never does become The Joker. The film is about the coming into being of a character who will never come into being. Joker inhabits a world where The Joker, that Joker, the prankster-gangster can't exist.
Alan Moore's Joker turned bad because he had one bad day: a very unsubtle parallel with Bruce Wayne himself. This Joker has suffered from a bad lifetime. We see the incremental stages that push him over the edge, and to some extent, we sympathise with them. We don't condone his shooting people for being assholes, but we kind of enjoy the idea of assholes being shot. We don't condone vigilantism either, even by vigilantes dressed as flying mammals. But we do enjoy it when naughty people get thumped.
Mental illness is a real thing. Madness is a theatrical convention. Clowning is a social role. But we tend to conflate the three. Alan Moore's Rorschach is clearly mentally ill; but he's also, according to his own lights, highly moral, applying principles in the face of Armageddon. The Joker seems to draw on the movie version of V for Vendetta. A revolutionary mob all put on Clown masks in imitation of Fleck. But where V and Rorschach have method, Joker has only madness.
In Tim Burton's movie, Jack Napier kills Bruce's mummy and daddy, and subsequently takes on the identity of The Joker. The Batman is the creation of his greatest nemesis. In the comic book, the killer was a faceless mugger: not one particular criminal, but Crime in the abstract. In Joker the Waynes are shot by a man dressed as Joker in a riot that Joker inspired. (The film makes no sense if we don't know the iconography: Zorro, alley, pearls...) Fleck is a hero to some because the first people he killed were rich kids. Thomas Wayne is a callous plutocrat.
The film has misunderstood the concept of "anarchy" and "carnival". Are we celebrating madness and destruction as resistance against capitalism? Or is the message that political protest is only ever mad and destructive?
I've maybe seen one too many lonely psychotics living in grim tenements. After a disastrous open mic gig at a comedy club goes viral, Arthur he ends up appearing on a live talk show with his comedy idol (played by DeNiro, in a nod to pretty much everything). It makes you think of Harvey Pekar's appearances on the Letterman show. There's something of Pekar in Fleck, but Pekar channelled his frustrations into art, not murder. Joachim Phoenix sells the character to me, in all his unfunny pathos.
What does any of this have to do with the DC Comics character called The Joker? Or put another way, why does this compelling if somewhat derivative study of multiple murder need the DC branding? Did some weird copyright breach necessitate a Joker-without-Batman movie, in the same way that we are about to be subjected to Kraven sans Spider-Man? Maybe someone at DC just thought "we should do an art-house movie just because no-one ever has."
Perhaps the film is, after all, a very oblique reboot. "What if Batman, only parents killed by forces of anarchy released by Joker?" Joker could be the set up for a movie in which the clown-faced forces of riot confront the bat faced forces of capitalist oppression. Good or bad, that would be a new idea. Perhaps the backlash against Folie a Deux derives from its not being that film. If Joker was a very, very indirect riff on certain aspects of Batman mythos, Folie a Deux connects with the DC Universe hardly at all.
Arthur is imprisoned in a mental institution called Arkham -- depicted, not in terms of padded cells and men in white coats, but as a particularly brutal American prison. The city is referred to as Gotham. The DA who conducts Arthur's trial is called Harvey Dent. And there is a love interest named Harley Quinn -- referred to as Lee through most of the movie.
Harley is an odd one. She started out in a cartoon, as simply one of the Joker's hench-persons. The character was popular, made many reappearances, and eventually migrated into comic book continuity. Like Catwoman, she progressively transitioned from villain to anti-hero to slightly naughty heroine. She's been sufficiently mainstreamed to be a character in DC Superhero Girls: "a wacky, humorous and lively tomboy", apparently.
So the film is about Arthur and Lee's shared madness; a madness in which they imagine themselves to be Harley Quinn and Joker. That's what folie a deux means: madness for two. But an animated prologue introduces the possibility of a second Joker, a shadow joker, controlling or acting on behalf of Arthur. And Arthur's courtroom defence is that he suffers from multiple personality disorder: that he and Joker are two distinct minds sharing a single body. Comic book readers spot an extra irony: the lawyer prosecuting him will become the schizophrenic villain called Two Face.
A film about madness is necessarily a mad film: Folie a Deux itself has a split-personality. A sequel to Joker should be an easy sell. God forgive us, we like Arthur and want to know what happens to him next. But under the circumstances, the only things which can happen are incarceration, whether an asylum or a prison, or execution, none of which make for a jolly movie. Folie a Deux honours the character of Arthur and weirdly he's the kind of psychopath we're happy to spend a couple more hours with. The movie gives us what we expect: jail, trial, social workers, a TV interview. Arthur's attorney tries to prove him insane, but evidently the US legal system doesn't accept "of course he's insane you only have to look at him for god's sake" as an argument. He takes over his own defence and prances around the courtroom in a clown suit. I found this all quite gripping and compelling. (The man sitting next to me dissented from this judgement and snored loudly throughout the trial scene.) But it's also ever-so-slightly redundant. The ending of the first film,"Joker dragged off to Arkham" is logically where the story stops. And you do wonder how many scenes of guards brutalising inmates; inmates banging their mugs in the mess hall; or prison washrooms looking insalubrious we really needed to sit through.
But embedded in "Joker II" is a secondary movie. Arthur develops a romantic fixation on Harley Quinn, an inmate of the low security wing of the establishment, who has herself become obsessed with Arthur's story. The obvious artistic choice would have been for Lee and Arthur to develop a joint delusion that they were the Joker and Harley from the comic books or the cartoon -- heck, you could have imagined an Into The Jokerverse film in which Arthur imagines himself as various iterations of the comic book villain. But in the event, Harley is played by Lady Gaga [who that? - ed] and the romance is largely played out through musical set pieces. We get interludes of Joker and Harley cavorting around stages in their sparkly clown get ups and arty pinups of Joker in spotlights and silhouettes. I am not sure if we are supposed to read the song-and-dance routines as "dream sequences" or "fantasies" or "delusions" or simply non-diegetic comments on the action. (Snorey man woke up in the middle of one of them and asked "What the fuck is going on?")
Clearly, the film can't end with Joker being put to death. Equally obviously it can't end with him getting away with murder. The obvious solution would have been for Harley and Joker to go on the run after a crepitus ex machina reduces the courtroom to rubble. There could even have been an implication that they would eventually become the clown-faced Bonnie and Clyde of the comic books. But this isn't how the film ends. //SPOILERS//.
What actually happens is that. Arthur is found guilty, escapes, more or less gives himself up, is sent back to Arkham....and is then stabbed by another inmate.
How are we to understand this?
a: This is a Joker movie set in a universe where The Joker doesn't exist
b: The young lad who stabs Joker is going to become The Joker. (He is seen cutting a smile on his face with the murder weapon, so maybe.)
c: The man in the Joker-suit who drove the get-away car after the bomb is going to become The Joker.
I think the third choice is probably correct. I think we are supposed to think that the mass of Jokers who rose up in support of Jokerism produced one particular looky-likey Joker who will become The Batman's antagonist.
Or perhaps it really is like V for Vendetta. Joker doesn't need to exist because everyone can be Joker. Maybe the sequel to Joker should simply have been called Jokers?
But green hair. Definitely green hair. And for god sake stop rattling your pop corn.
4 comments:
New takes on characters must keep some sense of continuity or else they're not really using the character. But they also need to reflect current times, or else there isn't much point at all. Moore said himself the weakness of 'Killing Joke 'was that it was *just* a take on the Joker. This film leans much more into the second than the first, so is probably better seen from that angle than "how Jokerish is this". It's obviously a sour look at celebrity culture where fame is the ill-gotten gain everybody's after. The "who's there, Arthur" gag maybe sums it up best, you're either notorious or a nobody. I'm not sure it says anything particularly coherent about any of that, but it gets you thinking about it all. I seem to have liked this more than you, or quite possibly everybody else.
Not having this seen this thing — or particularly intended to — I heard plenty about the one who cuts his face, and nothing about the one who drives the van; the prevailing assumption seems indeed to be that it's the killer who's being purported as the "true" Joker.
I liked it quite a lot, actually; I think it helped that I watched the first movie almost immediately before the second and could keep track of the minor characters. But I was rather puzzled by it.
Andrew, sorry if I was reading your review too negatively. I think part of the oddness of the film is that it adheres to much from the first (as you say, minor characters) while ignoring other elements - such as the whole set-up thing with Wayne Manor. Puzzled is the right reaction, I think. Engaged and puzzled at the same time.
Achille, I think much of the point is there isn't a "true" Joker, even with quote marks. He's more an urban myth which people want to be real, for varying reasons. People can pretend to be the "true" Joker for a while, but that won't end well.
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