The brilliance of Joker and the deliberate misreadings on both sides

Rating: 8/10 (7 October 2019)

This movie freaked a lot of people out, didn't it? Alan Zilberman once wrote: "A film where you're supposed to sympathize with a mediocre white man radicalized into deranged violence will no doubt be appealing to the wrong audience for the worst reasons." This was a first impression on the first proper trailer, and the fear of violence surrounding Joker has only worsened since. I'll examine whether his reading - that we're "supposed" to sympathize with this villain protagonist, and that that's the political sphere he's meant for - holds up later in this post.
So much superhero material is being barfed out that it's becoming maddening to keep track of. We know Joaquin Phoenix's new iteration of The Joker cannot be from the DC Extended Universe, where Joker is a walking piece of edgelady fan-art. Is he from the universe of the Gotham TV series? No, they had ANOTHER Joker (sort of) and it's neither Phoenix nor Leto. Is Phoenix from the Arrowverse? His own canon? That embarrassing Titans show?
These are the questions we were made to ask, but Joker does indeed seem to be the start of something new. Perhaps a series of "DC villain" adventures, not unlike what Sony is doing with the less impressive Marvel villains in their Venom universe (depending on what Disney lets them do with Spidey)? Maybe this is the universe where Batman looks like Edward Cullen? For now, we have only this film and much to my surprise, it's pretty good! And no, not just "for a comic-book movie".
It is directed by Todd Phillips, who opts for a Scorsese-type look (no offense, Marty) into Gotham City and the crime and insanity that take place there, complete with a large role for Robert De Niro (amusing in the role, to boot), making this godforsaken city a character in its own sense. Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is an aspiring stand-up, part-time party clown, and full-time outcast with peculiar laughing tics; we see him cackle, yet we can discern he is far from happy. Frances Conroy plays his infirm mother and Zazie Beetz (what a name) plays his love interest.
There is no Batman this time, but the father of Bruce Wayne, mayoral candidate Thomas, is played by Brett Cullen and less than loveable. This may be a problem, and one it shares with another villain movie, namely the aforementioned Venom. The Joker, a colorful agent of chaos, exists as the antithesis of The Dark Knight. Similarly, Venom is usually a dark mirror of Spider-Man. Joker and Venom have both been robbed of the nemeses that made them work but fear not: Joker succeeds at being its own film.
As I was saying, there's been some worry about this picture and which facet of nerds it will most surely appeal to. Critics say we're meant to side with the Joker, empathize with his descent into violence, and admire how cool he is for understanding how bad everyone is and how we live in a society.
The journos insist he's tailor-made for those incel MRA gamers who blame their own social failings on society and express it via edgy memes about Heath Ledger's Joker, having completely misjudged what we were supposed to take from The Dark Knight (Armond White, who naturally believes this film is way worse than Justice League, even dug up his old article attributing the 2012 Aurora theater shooting to Nolan's Batman trilogy when people started freaking out similarly about Joker, ignoring my riposte that film-inspired shootings seem extraordinarily rare compared to how many people consume the content and so must logically be affected). I'll certainly take their fourth-rate image macros over seeing a DC movie inspire them to punish the world Elliot Rodger-style.
But I don't think the film is making Arthur Fleck out to be excusable in his actions - he is one of the more disturbing takes on the character - although they do make him understandable on some level, getting us to root for his recovery rather than a full transformation into Joker (one misses the mystery of previous versions, of course, where his backstory kept changing and he was thus able to represent the "worst side" of virtually anyone watching, but this is a worthy origin story). The issue doesn't seem to be with Phillips' portrayal as much as the fact that audiences can simply be a little dumb sometimes.
After all, the film itself is impressive, in its art direction as well as its dialogue and world-building, which is disappointing since all the buzz made me expect an MRA manifesto that out-cringes Suicide Squad. Some will read it that way, no doubt; those who admire it just as probably as those who loathe it (even the U.S. Military has issued warnings of the former group, so either jaded virgins are a very credible threat, despite the movie not being in favor of them, or the government is in on Warner Bros.' use of fear-mongering for the sake of marketing and PR). That is, except for the detractors who are just as certain that the movie is AntiFa propaganda (correctly identifying the allusions without remembering that Joker is decidedly portrayed as a failed lifeform and his eventual idolizers as thugs) as the other side is certain that it's an entitled-white-male edgelord battlecry. Someone else might propose, then: perhaps the film's ultimate punchline is at the expense of something larger in this world than any one political side? Perhaps the film is neither black-and-white nor white-and-black, thus confusing ideologues?
All the same, the actual film is a powerful but disconcerting observation on a crumbling community, made even better by the production design, camera work, and a central performance that is as convincing emotionally as it is convincing physically; a subtle, yet total, transition from broken human into Clown Prince of Crime. Other than monetary reasons, it hardly even needs to be in the Batman universe. That being said: was this so hard, DC?