There was a truly daring Joker movie out there to make, but it’s not this. Imagine, instead, it was a story set in our world, where DC Comics exists, where Batman comics exist, where the Joker exists fictionally as a comic book character.
Imagine it was the story of a sad, pathetic, mediocre white man, one who not only sees people unlike himself getting ahead, succeeding in a world to which he feels entitled, but sees even people like himself, other sad, pathetic, mediocre white men, nonetheless managing to fail upward. Every other person’s success, and every one of his own failures, is the world robbing him of his due, of his rightful place.
Imagine that he wasn’t mentally ill. Imagine that he was just sad, pathetic, and mediocre. Imagine instead that as part of his conscious choice to terrorize his city and seize his due through the infamy of evil, he pretended to be mentally ill, and as part of that stirring of society’s pot he chooses to make himself up like the comic book character, deliberately preying upon people’s existing ableist prejudices about mental illness and violence.
Imagine a film in part intended to make the audience feel uncomfortable, feel guilty, for likely having those selfsame prejudices.
There’s a bold Joker movie for you.
There’s a truly dangerous movie, one that puts its own audience in the spotlight, rather than simply reinforcing their existing biases and allowing any sad, pathetic, mediocre white man who might otherwise have recognized themselves in Arthur Fleck and his purported travails and imagined persecution to dismiss any such connections because, hey, he’s mentally ill, they’re not mentally ill.
Phillips might want you to believe, might even really believe himself, that movies merely reflect society rather than mold it. That’s a sad, pathetic, and mediocre view of art. It’s also dangerous to the vulnerable people he thinks he’s merely mirroring when what he’s really mirroring is people’s warped and mistaken view of mental illness and the causes of violence.
A movie that threatens to reinforce people’s fears of the mentally ill around them is nihilism in action. It’s a movie that just wants to watch the world burn.
Make it our world. Make him perfectly sane. Make him a fragile white man with a gun. Make him not what an audience wants to believe about violence, but what actually is true about violence.
But don’t make him a man who “gives in” to his mental illness and so “naturally” devolves into cruelty, into sadism, into murder. Or, at least, don’t do that and have the nerve to call it a mirror. Don’t do that and have the nerve to bask in the glow of people calling it brave.