Joker Thoughts
I've watched Joker twice now and I think I've started to work out just why it leaves me so cold. It's actually pretty durned racist, but it does it in a pretty sly way. It's subtle. At a gut-check level I think I knew something was wrong, but it was really hard to connect to at a surface level.
Let's start at the personal. Arthur Fleck/Joker is mentally ill with a history of institutionalization. We aren't told why, exactly, but later events makes me think it's self-harm rather than other-harm that placed him there. Clearly he's a man in need of support, but who's not really integrated into a social network. He encounters a series of African-American women and they're all cast in a variety of support roles - social worker, the mother of a small boy he tries to entertain, his next door neighbor who has the misfortune to become an object of his fantasy.
Most of them aren't actually hurt by him. (Poor Sophie's fate is a bit more enigmatic.) But they all eventually step out of the role of Arthur-helper, and when they do they give him a further kick down the road toward villainy. There's this implication that when they exercise a bit of agency, have a litle bit of a life outside him and cease functioning as his personal supporting cast, they're betraying him (and somehow at fault for what he does).
That's pretty racist, but it's a deeper racism than you usually see in film. Enough to set you off-kilter, though.
At a political level, it's even more profound, but somehow also harder to lay your finger on. In the course of the movie, Arthur kills these three drunk rich men. It sparks off a bit of a social movement with equally white, lowerclass men donning clown masks protesting and rioting. Keep in mind this is all set in an urban environment in an American urban environment (essentially New York City). It all had such an air of the race riots of the 70s and 80s, or in a more contemporary concept something akin to Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter.
But the grievances were all economic ones, and the protesters were overwhelmingly white men. I don't remember seeing a single non-white face, and certainly not a woman, in any of the crowd scenes. Combine that with the way the American alt-right taps into the Joker character, and this can seem ... awfully convenient. You have this movement that expresses outrage over real problems experienced by inner-city, mostly majority people, and you telegraph that on to all-white crowds whose big concerns are that they aren't "special" enough. That things shouldn't be as hard as they currently are.
I'd probably feel a bit differently here if the protesters were portrayed as more mixed-race, or even if Arthur and those around him seemed to be struggling. He's working-class, no question, and his neighborhood is grimy, the elevator in his apartment building tends to stall, etc. But the flat itself is actually really nice. I would give my right foot for that place! And Arthur, with a history of mental institutionalization manages to land a steady, if seemingly low-paying job.
Arthur's defining gripe seems to be that he's not recognized as special. The protesters' anger is a bit more understandable, that they're called "jokers" and "clowns" for not having made something of themselves, but that's still a frustration growing out of this idea that their current status as clowns is a departure for how things ought to be. It's conflating the post-modern loss of factory jobs and the death of the white America Dream with all the factors that feed into movements like Black Lives Matter. That first class of frustrations is actually something worth protesting over -- Thomas Wayne is a self-entitled bastard who reminds me of no one so much as Mitt Romney and his talk of the 47% -- but acting like those indignities is somehow a change from How Things Ought to Be is still racially fraught.
None of this is really acknowledged, though, and it adds up to a bit of a constipated movie-going experience. I feel like I'm being asked to buy into a set of assumptions that I'm not convinced are true, but it's all so deeply woven into the backdrop, it's not the kind of thing you can challenge or reject and still buy into the story being told. In the end it's really too much disbelief for me to readily will away, I guess.
Let's start at the personal. Arthur Fleck/Joker is mentally ill with a history of institutionalization. We aren't told why, exactly, but later events makes me think it's self-harm rather than other-harm that placed him there. Clearly he's a man in need of support, but who's not really integrated into a social network. He encounters a series of African-American women and they're all cast in a variety of support roles - social worker, the mother of a small boy he tries to entertain, his next door neighbor who has the misfortune to become an object of his fantasy.
Most of them aren't actually hurt by him. (Poor Sophie's fate is a bit more enigmatic.) But they all eventually step out of the role of Arthur-helper, and when they do they give him a further kick down the road toward villainy. There's this implication that when they exercise a bit of agency, have a litle bit of a life outside him and cease functioning as his personal supporting cast, they're betraying him (and somehow at fault for what he does).
That's pretty racist, but it's a deeper racism than you usually see in film. Enough to set you off-kilter, though.
At a political level, it's even more profound, but somehow also harder to lay your finger on. In the course of the movie, Arthur kills these three drunk rich men. It sparks off a bit of a social movement with equally white, lowerclass men donning clown masks protesting and rioting. Keep in mind this is all set in an urban environment in an American urban environment (essentially New York City). It all had such an air of the race riots of the 70s and 80s, or in a more contemporary concept something akin to Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter.
But the grievances were all economic ones, and the protesters were overwhelmingly white men. I don't remember seeing a single non-white face, and certainly not a woman, in any of the crowd scenes. Combine that with the way the American alt-right taps into the Joker character, and this can seem ... awfully convenient. You have this movement that expresses outrage over real problems experienced by inner-city, mostly majority people, and you telegraph that on to all-white crowds whose big concerns are that they aren't "special" enough. That things shouldn't be as hard as they currently are.
I'd probably feel a bit differently here if the protesters were portrayed as more mixed-race, or even if Arthur and those around him seemed to be struggling. He's working-class, no question, and his neighborhood is grimy, the elevator in his apartment building tends to stall, etc. But the flat itself is actually really nice. I would give my right foot for that place! And Arthur, with a history of mental institutionalization manages to land a steady, if seemingly low-paying job.
Arthur's defining gripe seems to be that he's not recognized as special. The protesters' anger is a bit more understandable, that they're called "jokers" and "clowns" for not having made something of themselves, but that's still a frustration growing out of this idea that their current status as clowns is a departure for how things ought to be. It's conflating the post-modern loss of factory jobs and the death of the white America Dream with all the factors that feed into movements like Black Lives Matter. That first class of frustrations is actually something worth protesting over -- Thomas Wayne is a self-entitled bastard who reminds me of no one so much as Mitt Romney and his talk of the 47% -- but acting like those indignities is somehow a change from How Things Ought to Be is still racially fraught.
None of this is really acknowledged, though, and it adds up to a bit of a constipated movie-going experience. I feel like I'm being asked to buy into a set of assumptions that I'm not convinced are true, but it's all so deeply woven into the backdrop, it's not the kind of thing you can challenge or reject and still buy into the story being told. In the end it's really too much disbelief for me to readily will away, I guess.