The Cowardice of Joker
(Spoilers ahead!)
My concerns going into Joker were the same as everyone else who was troubled after the first trailer dropped: that it would ask me to sympathize with the kind of miserable white man that eventually turns to indiscriminate violence and use “mental illness” as a scapegoat to rationalize it. We immediately made the connection to the larger trend of media that attempts to humanize violent white men, which is what fueled the major controversy leading up to its release.
After having seen the movie, however, my concern has shifted a bit. Don’t get me wrong, it most definitely asked us to sympathize with a murderer just because he has a tragic backstory, but it went even further by framing him as an anti-hero who becomes the face of a class-based revolution!
Joker is convinced that it’s about mental illness. In reality, while the term “mental illness” is prominent throughout the film, what it’s really confronting is ableism, a system of oppression that favors able-bodied people at the expense of disabled and neurodivergent people, and severe trauma. That, of course, includes mental illness, but the narrative focuses more on the systemic barriers Arthur faces because of his unconventional behavior, which go beyond just people being mean to him because he’s different; on top of the severe abuse he experiences, he also has very limited access to employment and treatment for both himself and his disabled mother, for whom he is a caretaker. It’s more concerned with those external experiences that could drive him to become the maniacal, mass-murdering villain that is Joker and less concerned about exploring the internal landscape of a man navigating mental illness(es), which would require specificity, since different conditions call for different coping/management strategies, etc. Which is totally fine! It’s a fictional drama, after all, not a medical documentary. The use of “mental illness” throughout the film is just misguided.
However, if the movie wants to explore the intersection of poverty and disability as a factor in Arthur’s transformation, it also misses a crucial aspect to that analysis: race. That is not to say it forgets about race, or that people who aren’t white don’t exist in Gotham; other than the white men (and his mother) who become his primary targets, all the surrounding people framed as antagonizing factors for him are Black. He accuses his first therapist of not listening to him, the man at Arkham refuses to give him his mother’s file, the woman on the bus shouts at him for bothering her child, his case worker in Arkham asks him the wrong question, his love interest gets scared when he breaks into her home and she asks him to leave rather than be enamored by his neurotic behavior as she does in his fantasy. If Black people exist in Gotham, and Joker aims to examine structural factors, it fails to ask or answer important questions about Gotham’s Black population. What’s keeping any of them from succumbing to the same kind of violence that Arthur does? If he cries about being invisible, how do Black Gothamites deal with hypervisibility? Does heightened surveillance, scrutiny, policing, etc., just magically not happen to Black people in Gotham?
Even if you narrow it down to his individual, erratic behavior, the reality is that as a white man, Arthur merely makes other people uncomfortable, but as a Black man, he likely would just not have survived long enough to become Joker. He’d more likely be lost to the slow death of extreme poverty or extrajudicial murder at the hands of the State long before he’d get the chance to become a supervillain. Even without any explicit white supremacist rhetoric, the safety of whiteness itself gives him the time and space he needs to fully transform, but the movie fails to acknowledge that.
What I feel is the film’s most egregious misstep, however, is the cowardly way it handles Gotham’s growing economic unrest.
At the onset of the movie, audible news reports playing in the background tell of a strike among the city’s sanitation workers that has left the city riddled with uncollected trash and an infestation of “super rats”. Tensions are high, and crime is high, which sets the foundation for a city that has little patience or empathy for people like Arthur. This thread simmers in the background for the first half of the movie as the narrative focuses on developing Arthur’s character arc; it is not until his first taste of murder that the two threads connect.
The businessmen he kills on the train are Wayne Enterprise employees, and the public interprets their murder as a politically motivated attack against the wealthy. We, of course, know that it was Arthur who murdered them, not because of their employer or profession, but simply because they were “awful people” (which, to be fair, they were). But that is irrelevant because the fire is sparked; protesters are now taking clown masks as their symbol and beginning to organize, and by the time it next connects to Arthur’s arc, they have organized a major protest the same day that he‘s to appear on the Murray Franklin show.
He runs into a group of protesters on the train while he’s running from police, and by stealing a mask right off one of their faces, starts a huge brawl that spills onto the cops themselves, and they kill one of the protesters, the rest of whom retaliate by beating them nearly to death. This gives Joker time to get to his show unscathed, where he explicitly declares himself “not political”, thereby dissociating himself, ideologically, from the movement (even if he’s been inadvertently stoking the fires of protest that has since exploded outside of the studio). And yet, after everything that follows, he is lifted out of a battered cop car and raised by that very same crowd in messianic imagery and hailed as their leader. And therein lies my issue with it.
Television reports and several characters refer to it as “riots”, which is a politically charged term that goes unchallenged by the narrative in any way, and by the end, the movement is framed as unorganized madness: aimless rioters cheering a deranged murderer on as their leader as the city burns around them. A murderer who isn’t even invested in their cause. He’s just enjoying the attention.
But it’s more of an uprising against wealth inequality in the city, with obvious organizing efforts behind it that go ignored by the movie. Again, the film fails to ask or answer vital questions. Who organized the protest? How did they mobilize? Do they have an established platform? Is it an organization that existed prior to the train murders with a network it’s able to tap into? Without addressing any organizing efforts in Gotham (which it can do as easily in the diagetic background noise as it did the garbage strike that implied there’s a union presence in the city), but filling the frame with sensationalized newspaper headlines of “Kill the Rich,” the narrative does not genuinely address class frustration as much as it does reduce it to spectacle. And by pairing it structurally with Joker’s descent into violence, even positioning him as the face of the movement, it functions to delegitimize efforts to combat the very systemic poverty it seems to want to address. A sort of cautionary “we understand that you’re upset, but don’t get too crazy now.”
Joker wants to address heavy subject matter that it doesn’t have the range to carry, nor the bravery to address with the honesty and rigor it deserves, and I honestly wish Joaquin Phoenix’s brilliant take on my favorite villain would’ve been reserved for a regular Batman movie that positions the character where he’s meant to be: the chaotic foil to a hero’s strict adherence to order and restraint.
