WE ARE ALL CLOWNS - Response to the response to Joker

Love it or hate it - or, as the prevailing sentiment ironically seems to be, think it was 'pretty good but not amazing' - Todd Philips' Joker seems like the most divisive film of the year. Obviously culturally so (and I'll examine this in more detail later) but also, bizarrely, politically.

Before we get into all the stuff surrounding it, I do want to give my thoughts on the film itself. Its biggest strength by far is Joaquin Phoenix' performance. Arthur's high, childlike voice when he fantasises about being on Murray, the slow, deliberate, even beautiful movements of his post-murder dance, and of course the pained, choking laugh: all snippets of what may be the performance of a lifetime for Phoenix. The cinematography is pretty good, no complaints about shot composition, though there is some annoying shakycam in the fridge scene and a few other places. There are some nice parallels, like Arthur trudging up the stairs to his building at the beginning, then descending (into madness) with zeal as Joker before the climax; there's also him frowning out of the train window as Arthur and grinning out of the police car window as Joker. What I really loved was the colour. It's dim and moody, even in sunlight - its green tinge reminds me somewhat of Fincher - but towards the end it seems to slide off, giving way to the glitz of Murray Franklin's show and peaking with the bright fire and lights of the ensuing riot, before coming crashing back to the dim grey-green in the final scene.

Other than that, I actually liked that the film left most things ambiguous. Whether or not Arthur is Thomas Wayne's son, his part in the earlier murders, if the adulation of the crowd after the ambulance crash is real...except when it handholds you through spelling out that his relationship was imagined. She's unsure of his name, and you get it, and it just...keeps...going.

Baseless shooting threats claimed by massive media outlets. Police checkpoints. Bag searches. No-singles policies. People claiming on one hand that it's incel and alt-right propaganda, on the other that it's an inspiration for a socialist uprising. Here's the rub: it isn't political at all. True, you could read into some comments about cutting social services, the attitude of the rich to the poor and the general state of Gotham, but it doesn't really amount to much. It doesn't amount to much because it's all in relation to Arthur, and even then only socially; his interaction with "the system" is through conversation with his therapist, with the Arkham clerk, with Thomas Wayne. It's all just flavour for the backdrop of Gotham. Arthur is not treated poorly by the rich because he is poor, he is treated poorly by everybody because he is different. He is beaten up by street thugs and Wayne Enterprises employees alike, mocked by both his coworkers and Murray Franklin, and abused by his own mother. He does not kill people to make some hackneyed political statement, he kills them because he feels they have wronged him; kills the Wall Street guys because they beat him up, kills his mother because she allowed him to be abused, kills Randall for getting him fired, and kills Murray Franklin for mocking him. The very end, killing a woman ostensibly because she wasn't in on his joke, is his true transformation into the Joker; he is against everybody, against the world. Chaos.

And that's the punchline of Joker. The mass media craze interpreting this movie as some vague propaganda is perfectly mirrored by the protesters pasting their ideologies onto the necessarily selfish Joker, using him as a catalyst to start a violent revolution, one in which they save Arthur from the police and cheer him, showering him with attention, the only thing he ever wanted. He did not orchestrate it, merely latched onto it. He does not care about their ideals. He is not political. It can hardly even be said that he is using them, more that his benefit is purely incidental. Truly, they are all clowns.

Joker is good. It's not mind-blowing by any stretch, and it's been made before, and better. But it came out at the perfect time. Joker arrives after the effective end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, being the first major comic book movie since Dark Phoenix (gag) back in June, and it blows everything preceding it out of the water. I genuinely consider it the perfect bookend to the 2010s, a decade which began with Iron Man 2 and which was filled with repetitive, soulless, lowest-common-denominator superhero schlock. In addition, this is a period where every piece of art has to carry a political message and Joker deliberately takes no stance. It simply lays the issues bare. It's very clever sleight-of-hand: while you can't excuse Arthur's actions, you also can't ignore the circumstances that moulded him. It puts your average viewer in a very uncomfortable position, and it's clear Todd Philips expected that some people 'wouldn't get it'.