Apologia Pro Vita Joker
“Did I seem like a different person,” asks Arthur Fleck at his murder trial, “or was I the same old Joker?”
This line from Joker: Folie à Deux (or FaD as I shall henceforth refer to it in a way that may be self-referential, ironic, both, or neither) is one of many that isn’t exactly breaking the fourth wall but might as well be. FaD is hardly the first movie to have critics defend or trash it with claims that it is a thinly veiled response to the audience’s reception of an auteur’s previous work. “This isn’t a comedy club,” the trial judge admonishes Fleck. “You are not on stage.” Cut to an image of Joker in the view screen of a television camera and cue the umpteenth reprise of “That’s Entertainment!”
Frank Miller’s four-part series, The Dark Knight Returns, published in 1986, was probably the first pop-culture or literary game changer that I recognized as such on its arrival. Presented as a flash-forward work of speculative canonicity, it climaxed with an aging and waning Batman eschewing a lifelong commitment to avoid killing by finally snapping the neck of his archnemesis, rationalizing that he himself is responsible for the death of countless others because he chose time and again to let Joker live.
I have written elsewhere about how Miller’s masterpiece fundamentally altered my understanding of and relationship to Batman. As a reader who lost a family member to murder at roughly the same age as Bruce Wayne, I had nothing invested in the camp television Batman of the late 60s. But I loved the principled detective who vowed to try to spare others some of the pain he had experienced. Batman’s rejection of vengeance felt to my teenage self as less of a seasonal personality trait and more of a core principle. The jettisoning of that principle, no matter the build-up, was felt as a psychological and spiritual loss. Scoff, if you must, but The Dark Knight Returns made me feel something that no other word can better describe than mourning.
I gave less thought to how the saga would change the Joker, though it’s ripples are not hard to trace in retrospect. Within two years of The Dark Knight Returns, comic readers got the (in)famous “Death in the Family” story arc where the Joker teamed with Ayatollah Khomeini (before there was Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden…) and killed Robin 2.0, Jason Todd. The same year brought us The Killing Joke, Alan Moore’s celebrated one-shot graphic novel where the Joker cripples (and most likely rapes) Barbara Gordon, forcing her father to watch pictures of the aftermath in an attempt to break him psychologically.
The evolution of the Joker is explained then, not just by the fact that comics and comic book movies pushed the genre in a more adult direction. A change so radical in Batman’s moral philosophy demanded that the catalyst for that change not be a colorful rogue but an epitome of evil. Joker had to be a rapist, a terrorist, a sadist, a torturer — a composite of all that society deemed to be irredeemable.
In one sense, Joker takes his place alongside an array of charismatic postmodern serial killers — Anton Chigurgh, Patrick Bateman, Dexter — who are magically indestructible even though psychosis is not and has never been a superpower. (Aside: that conceptualization of mental illness is why I could never abide the Harley Quinn character. No sane person could fall in love with Joker, and sane people who undergo psychotic breaks do not instantly transform into elite fighters and criminal masterminds.) But to label someone as mentally ill is to conceptualize, however remotely, the possibility of a cure.
The competing narrative needs that Joker serves — that he be irredeemable and mentally ill — are in tension and never resolved, at least not in Todd Phillips’s movies. One might argue that the Nolan trilogy of movies sidesteps this fundamental problem by leaving Joker’s origin a mystery. By not saying where he came from, those films don’t have to explain how he came to be. The Nolan brand of metacommentary may be that Joker himself promotes this mystery, but it is worth noting that none of the origin stories he offers are sufficient to explain his abilities, even if they might theoretically explain his nihilism.
I pretty much hated Joker because I thought it wanted to have its cake and eat it too. It wanted to present Arthur Fleck as the product of systemic abuse and mental illness (in order to induce sympathy?) but also wanted him to have some sort of continuity with the character who was established within the Batman universe. Or else, why call it Joker? I think Joker and FaD work marginally better as stand-alone movies divorced from a Batverse, but that’s a bit like saying The Da Vinci Code is more successful if it is postulated to take place in a world where Christianity and its institutions aren’t invested within any pre-existent history.
The best defenses of FaD that I have read and heard insist that the second film is in some way scolding the fans of the first, suggesting that they deliberately or tragically misunderstood it. Phillips, like Fleck, should not be blamed for giving the people what they want, especially when those same people repeatedly beat the shit, literally and figuratively, out of those who try to do or be anything different. If Phillips was pulling a Jane Austen (deliberately inducing a reaction so that he can scold us for having it), I didn’t see it, even on a rewatch of Joker when I was actively looking for it.
Is it possible that FaD was in some measure a disavowal of the first film? That something in the audience’s reaction altered the thinking of the auteur? Maybe, though the one interview I have read had Phillips, at least publicly, claiming he thought the two films were more alike than different. I think that it is far more likely that the two films are morally incoherent, either individually or in tandem. I don’t mean incoherent on a plot level — discontinuity in narratives of this sort can always be waved away through claims that the parts that cohere are real and the parts that don’t are psychosis-induced imaginations. The film itself trots out this get-out-of-jail-free-card through a scene in which Arthur wakes up in prison to find Harley with him and asks if she is “real” or “really here.” If I have learned anything from years of rereading “Young Goodman Brown,” it’s that narrative claims that it doesn’t matter if something is real or imagined only work when the narrative shows that either interpretation gets you to the same conclusion. Otherwise, it matters a great deal. But any attempts to try to construct a coherent narrative out of the parts of Joker and FaD that cohere while explaining away the parts that don’t would require more effort (in the form of careful, repeated viewings) than I honestly think either film warrants.
The two films that FaD most remind me of are The Talented Mr. Ripley and A Complete Unknown. Both of those films are about constructed identities and the very real danger of losing one’s true self in the role that one has chosen to play. An important difference, though, is that both Ripley and Dylan (or the Dylan character of the film) choose to adopt and promote their constructed identities, whereas FaD wants to suggest with a straight face that Arthur has the Joker mantle thrust upon him by guards, girlfriends, and admirers who need him to be whatever they need him to be, even if being so extinguishes the final flickers of his true self.
As much as people love The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke, my nominee for the best telling of the Joker story in my life is … The Sopranos. It lived and breathed in the narrow space between illness and agency, painstakingly interrogating the notion that any soul, however evil, was irredeemable. Tony’s evil exterior, his criminal persona, was, much like Arthur’s an amalgam of venal desires, laziness, and survival armor forged in the fires of abuse and circumstances. It’s not surprising (at least to me) that its least popular phase was its conclusion. We want our Jokers to be both ill and irredeemable, both pathetic and glamorous, both powerful and victims. But trying to embody contrary states of being is at best impossible, at worst, soul-destroying. Tony himself read Hawthorne succinctly summing up this theme: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
My corollary is that no writer or director, however skilled, can for any considerable period offer up contradictory explanations of his character without finally getting bewildered as to which is true. Perhaps in the postmodern world of multiverse narratives, we are becoming more and more comfortable with Tony Stark being Dr. Doom and Wolverine being good and bad and Deities being both Tash and Aslan and everyone simply shrugging along with Walt Whitman and saying, “Very well then, I contradict myself.”
But saying a character is contradictory things is ultimately saying the character isn’t anything, which leads, inevitably to stories that don’t really land or matter because they are about worlds that don’t operate like ours, populated with people who aren’t human in any recognizable way, and thus aren’t embedded with any stakes that extend beyond the final credits.
