‘Joker’ is Wild

A “comic book movie” that has struck a nerve and will linger…

Warning: If you have not yet seen the movie Joker do not read this post. There be spoilers. Read it after you see it.

Joker is not for everyone. My wife, for example, walked out. I would argue it’s not even for most people, box office results aside. It’s a difficult movie to watch. It is decidedly not a comic book movie. Or at least not one in the way we’ve thought of the genre up until now. It’s a gritty, 70s-esque piece of violent realism, with a comic book villain that just so happens to be the central character. It’s not enjoyable, but it is fascinating.

Unlike my wife, I stayed for the entire film. And I’m glad I did even though I can’t imagine that I’ll ever want to watch this movie again — well… more on that in a bit. And again, that’s why it’s pretty wild that it’s doing so well at the box office. I’m not sure what that speaks to, other than the fact that audiences might be ready for a change, or at least an alternative to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.¹ DC has tried to fight the Avengers head-on, and failed pretty miserably (save for one Wonder Woman movie). Interestingly enough, perhaps such failure freed them up to make Joker.

Yet before Kevin Feige was doing his thing with the Marvel characters, DC set a high watermark for comic book movies thanks to, yes, the Joker. Aided in large part by Heath Ledger’s (posthumously) Oscar-winning performance, The Dark Knight remains the standard for DC. And on some level it takes guts not only to revisit that character,² but to do so with this approach. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance isn’t just excellent, it’s almost the opposite of Ledger’s performance.³ It’s the human backstory (much of it possibly and probably hallucinated), whereas Ledger’s Joker had basically no humanity or backstory (save for an anecdote or two, which were possibly and probably made up).

I also loved that there were more ties to the Batman canon than I would have thought going in. Not only do we get Bruce Wayne, and presumably Alfred,⁴ but Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father, previously only seen on film in flashbacks (and mostly just shots of him getting… shot), is a critical figure.⁵ And a decidedly more complicated one. One that may — or may not have — set the entire story in motion.⁶

And in the end, we still get that iconic burglary/murder, which Bruce witnesses, and sets him on a path. All of this would seem to imply we’re going to get the flip side to this story — the gritty, ultra-violent Batman. Director Todd Phillips says it’s not happening, that they would “never” do that. We’ll see. Such pronouncements have a funny way of morphing over time. And I find it hard to believe they would spend so much time on the Bruce Wayne bits to not take that low-hanging fruit, eventually. If they make that movie, that’s the only time I could see myself watching Joker again, to prepare for it.⁷

And while it may now seem too vainglorious given the box office success — money wins, and all that — I think a Batman movie set in this universe would make the Joker movie 100x better as a result. You need a movie to show that Bruce Wayne suffers from some of the same mental afflictions as his foil, and is demented in his own way, but takes an opposite road. For the most part, anyway. It isn’t so black-and-white, of course. This needs to happen.

Anyway, Joker is a new standard for how you do a compelling backstory movie in the era of IP.⁸ In our current filmmaking world where we get the entirely unnecessary Solo, this is a path forward. And it’s a reset of an entire genre that works, opening up a whole new range of possibilities.⁹ Yes, both Deadpool and Logan pushed the envelope here first. But Joker feels different. A filmmaking extreme. A comic book movie that not only will people not enjoy, but that they’ll walk out of. And amazingly, that’s a good thing.

¹ I actually think it’s bigger than that. Joker feels like one of those cultural touchstones that people are going to see because everyone is talking about it. Which again, is wild because it’s so hard to watch!

² Though it also took guts to revisit the role after Jack Nicholson played the villain so iconically in 1989’s Batman. And it probably helped that Jared Leto’s take in 2016’s awful Suicide Squad provided some buffer to revisit and rethink the character again.

³ And the head-resting-against-the-window in the backseat of the cop car may or may not have been an explicit homage to Ledger’s performance, but it’s where my head immediately went. And I know I’m not alone there.

⁴ A bit gruff of an Alfred, mind you.

⁵ As an aside, how strange is it that they cast an actor to play Thomas Wayne who was also in The Dark Knight Rises (not playing Wayne)? To be fair, the guy is good at playing an asshole, but maybe just… pick someone else?

⁶ Was Arthur Fleck’s mother really crazy? Was she really his mother? Was he actually adopted? Was that backstory all written to ease her exit from Wayne Enterprises? Was Thomas Wayne the father? Did she mean for Arthur to open one of the letters? None of it is explicitly spelled out, but the passing inscription on the back of the photo is the most tantalizing evidence of… at least not everything being a delusion of grandeur. Unless that was in Arthur’s mind as well! Which is quite possible!

⁷ And I buy that it won’t be a Robert Pattinson Batman cross-over. I think they’d have to do it differently, from scratch. Maybe in a decade when Bruce Wayne will have aged in this universe, as will have Phoenix to reprise the role of a slightly older Joker.

⁸ Well, okay, maybe Godfather II set that standard.

⁹ Part of me still wishes that Joker was actually set in the same cinematic universe of Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy. After the initial trailer, people thought the latter might be true. And I think that’s a fascinating concept. Take some old, great IP and mix it with some other IP, and see what happens…