‘There is no punchline’: The Joker Within Our Underbelly
By: Subhrojyoti Mukherjee
Tags: Film Reviews, Mental Illness, Mental Health, Critical Thinking, Joker

Joaquin Phoenix as Joker in the opening scene of the film.

At the heart of both Joker, the film and Joker, the character, is a deep conflict. On the one hand is a man who would appear to be on the lowest of the lows of an unforgiving, unjust, grossly self-interested society (much like the one we live in), trying to make a living out of a dying vocation that he does not seem to be too good at but seems to enjoy and aspire to, pushed to his limits, both physically and mentally, bereft of support but not completely alone. On the other, it is difficult to ignore the somewhat careless way in which race and mental illness have been dealt with in this tale. And a tale it is, more than a cinema. Personally, I did not as such find any cinema to appreciate in what was shown since what was shown was one man, Arthur Fleck, and his becoming of Joker — I use becoming consciously here; Fleck becomes Joker every moment of grief, disdain, hurt, pomposity, failure, anger, revenge stitched together — in which Joaquin Pheonix is a god with a celestial sway

Arthur Fleck dances alone after his first crime.

that will hold you in it, beguile you, shock, suffer and, at times, scare you of its greatness, such is the effortlessness of his gestures, the rise and fall of his limbs, the finesse with which he opens and closes himself to that slight footstool of turmoil upon which he balances the character as long as we see him. But there are moments in the film where I strongly felt the story failing him. One can neither discount a comparison with the single black mother (Zazie Beetz) who lives down the hall who is likelier to be at the bottom of the economical pit than the Fleck household nor the suggestion that Fleck becomes Joker, because he was a mentally ill man, not quite reducing his psychosis to his condition but rather discounting the poverty, maltreatment, alienation and economic corporatism that leads to it in the first place. Watching some parts of the film, such as the scene where Fleck is told by his psychiatrist that all medical security was going to be scrapped because they — meaning those at the uppermost echelons — did not ‘give a shit’ about them feels like the writer had just watched a video of Bernie advocating for his campaign before penning it down, such was its resonance to the world we live in. However, having said that, especially detestable is the idea that it all so reductively comes down to the cost of crossing ‘a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like garbage’, equating mental illness with lunacy and violence. This clubbing of the two might be an old trope, but it is not only questionable but also dangerous.

Fleck after having completely given to Joker.

And it is disappointing to say the least when such an insinuation comes after a line as powerful as: “The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t.” But Joker does successfully reach out into the underbelly of our psyche and that of our society and asks us a very important question: Why is it that we, as individuals as well as a society, are not as enraged by the powerless—be it a jobless and homeless person, racial/religious minorities or tribal and non-hetero communities — being walked all over, exploited and abused as much as we are when seemingly well-meaning, educated and upright individuals of our society making money off of them are under fire? When Murray (Robert De Niro) calls Fleck on his show, it was indeed because he’d hoped to make big bucks off of him by catering his audience to a few more laughs at his expense. But as I said at the outset, this tale and its protagonist carry a deep conflict at their heart and notwithstanding their shortcomings, it is in the transpiring of that conflict to that of the viewers that, in a way, they win, because we will come back to detest, disagree with and debate them in the time to come and then some.