Thoughts on Joker

Well, holy crap. Just saw Joker yesterday, and it was basically all I could hope for. Spoilers below the jump, and then I'll share some thoughts.


So the trailers promised a psychologically heavy, grimy, Taxi Driver-style movie, filled with urban decay and madness. And the movie delivered, in spades - the opening titles, including the Warners logo, are all lifted straight from the 80s, and the film traffics in the kind of apocalyptic cityscapes that were all over movies about New York in the 70s and early 80s. or to put it another way, the Gotham City of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan's Batman movies is Disneyland in comparison to the one depicted in Joker.

Luckily, it's also a bit more than just an homage to early Scorsese, even if it lifts scenes like the famous "You talkin' to me?" scene from Taxi Driver. It does a nice job of playing with our understanding of what's actually happening onscreen - the romantic subplot between Joaquin Phoenix and Zazie Beetz is clearly overdone, and it's no surprise to discover at the end that it's all been in his head.

But it also prepares the audience to question everything that happens. Just a couple of scenes after their "date", Phoenix is sitting on the subway, getting hassled by three Wall Street douchebags, and when he shoots them, you immediately question whether or not it's actually happened. This feeling of unreality continues as he chases the third one off the train and shoots him on the platform; through his escape through the streets; and up until you see news of the murders on the news.

This feeling of unreality continues until the final scene, where you see him walk out of an interview with a criminal psychologist trailing bloody footsteps. My girlfriend suggested this represented the trail of blood the character leaves throughout his career, which makes a lot of sense, though as I pointed out, the fact that you then see him getting chased by orderlies also shows that the psychologist really did come to a bad end.

If there's a part of the movie I'm not sure about, it's the connection to Batman through his parents. One of the things that contributes to Joker's descent into madness is the revelation that Thomas Wayne, who's running for mayor of Gotham with a patrician disdain for the vast majority of the citizenry, might be his father. This theory is undercut by the suggestion that Joker's mother is delusional, and on top of that abusive and that he himself was adopted.

This push and pull of which story is true saves it, because I'm always suspicious of stories that try to link the Joker and Batman together. The Tim Burton movie revealed that the killer of Batman's parents was a young Jack Napier, before he became the Joker. So the idea that the Joker might be Batman's long-lost half-brother is not my favorite.

I tend to prefer versions of the Joker that have him as an agent of chaos, without any real backstory. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that I still think the best Joker of all is Heath Ledger's version, who makes up his origin every time he relates it, to the point that the reason for his scars (and behavior) becomes irrelevant.

Of course, that shouldn't imply that I think Joaquin Phoenix does a bad job. On the contrary, he's mesmerizing, because you're never sure whether to trust what you're seeing on the screen. You're so far into his head that you don't know if the person he's just killed really is dead, if he really let the little person ex-coworker go, or if he killed Zazie Beetz or just scared her by pitching up in her apartment.

In any case, the question of whether he's related to Batman is irrelevant, because like any good Joker origin, this movie is completely separated from ideas of shared universes. It exists in and of itself, as his own story, and shouldn't be taken as the true origin of the character that we may or may not see again in subsequent Batman movies. This is what makes it a success, especially after years of DC duds.