Spoiler alert: I don’t know if I will, but it’s probably going to happen. Just not with Joker since I haven’t seen it yet.
No doubt there is reason for concern over the recently released Joker movie, starring Joaquin Phoenix. With national media attention on gun violence, and mass shootings, concerns over what influences the people that commit such atrocities are not unwarranted.
Part of this may be due to a comparison to a popular Martin Scorsese film, Taxi Driver. In the film, Travis Bickle, as portrayed by Robert De Niro, is a Vietnam Veteran who works as a taxi driver at night since he suffers from insomnia. In the film, he complains of all the “filth” in the streets; pimps, gangs, violent offenders, etc. His solution, when a 12-year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster) won’t leave the streets and return home to her parents, is to purchase weapons off the black market and act out violently.
Related Article: Review: ‘Joker’ is a Brilliant Throwback to ’70s Era Cinema
Through a matter of serendipity, Bickle is celebrated by the media as a hero. He rescued a 12-year-old from prostitution, but they never knew that moments before he tried to pull his gun on a politician. Instead of being heralded as a hero, he could have been viewed as a vile assassin. Because he was unable to unholster his gun at the right moment, Bickle became a champion of the people.
Looking at the character of Bickle, he and his story seem to reflect a bit of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. In the Stranger, the protagonist, Meursault, tells the reader his mother has passed. Within the last day or so, but he’s unsure. He smokes and drinks coffee at her wake, has little concern for returning to work, the few friends he has provide some benefit, and his girlfriend asks if he loves her (he doesn’t) and wants to get married (if she wants to).
Our protagonist ends up shooting an Arab man, killing him, and then unloads four more rounds into his corpse. He is truthful at trial, including his ambivalence towards relationships and how he shot the man.
Related Article: Top 5 Actors Who Almost Played Joker
While waiting to be executed, Meursault allows the chaplain he’d thrice rejected to talk with him. And in a moment of uncharacteristic excitement, Meursault lays into the chaplain about his moral superiority and why, even with the idea of a final judgement, none of it matters. Repentance, absolution, it is all absurd and meaningless, Meursault argues.
Camus, Francis J. Ambrosio argues in his lecture series Philosophy, Religion, and the Meaning of Life, does not believe in a universe that is literally absurd. Instead, it is human perspective. Camus has Meursault reject relationships, romances, even employment as his story progresses. In Camus’ following work, the Myth of Sisyphus, he explains more succinctly that the modern working-man performs his tasks in perpetuity while looking for meaning. As Sisyphus rolled the boulder up the mountain, only to be doomed to have it roll back down for him to repeat ad nauseam.
So what separates us from Sisyphus? He was conscious of his repetitive task; he knew what he did offered no finality. That, however, did not define him. As we must realize our employment, our friendships, romantic or otherwise, do not provide our meaning.
Likewise, in Taxi Driver, the protagonist steps outside of his role as a cab driver to try and protect people he feels are underprivileged and at risk. He holds no real relationships; in fact, he takes a woman on a date who only rejects him when he tries to bring her to an adult theater.
Related Article: 10 Essential ‘Batman’ Comic Books You Have To Read
But the problem, people warn, is that the movies promote violence. The Stranger, one might argue (albeit superficially), promotes violence, rejection of faith, and welcoming hatred towards your actions. Taxi Driver did, indeed, inspire an act of violence. When an assassination attempt was made against Ronald Reagan in 1981, the assassin, John Hinckley Jr., noted that the reason for the attempted assassination was to get actress Jodie Foster’s attention.
Hinckley was diagnosed with erotomania, a rare mental illness that makes the individual believe other people are obsessed with them. He lacked access to mental health treatment or medication (an interesting parallel to Bickle, and perhaps explaining Hinckley’s obsession with the film).
Bringing it all back in to the Joker issue, people are focused on low-hanging fruit. A comic book character as old as the franchise itself (Joker appeared in the very first issue of Batman), infamous for lacking empathy, portrayed as a nihilist with no concern for money, only allegiance.
The Joker portrayed by Phoenix is one in 1980’s Gotham where he suffers from a mental illness that causes him to laugh spontaneously. While that symptom (PBA) is characterized by other outbursts (more commonly ones linking it to depression), it’s still mental illness. And it’s one that goes untreated in the film.
Movies typically are reflections of the environments in which they’re produced. It is absolutely wrong to associate the mental illness with violence, as they are more often the victims of violence than the aggressors. However, I am of the belief that the two are separate issues coalesced into the figure of Joker.
Related Article: Michael Keaton is still our ‘Batman’ 30 Years Later
The United States is facing a substance abuse issue with opioids, addiction being a sign of mental illness, and we fill our jails with the mentally ill. Historically, America has done poorly with the treatment of mental illness. Aside from large incarceration rates, making up roughly 56% of state inmate populations, it is estimated that 25% of the homeless population in the US is mentally ill.
With modern movements like ANTIFA, and the violent outbursts from white nationalists over the last few years, the idea of violent rebellion is unsurprising in this story. In fact, that they included a scene where an officer shoots a protestor with a violent response from the protest group seems all the more fitting.
There is nothing glorious about Arthur Fleck’s situation. He lives in poverty, something symptomatic of mental illness, works as a walking advertisement, and is a failure at stand up comedy. He holds no close relationships (unless you count his mother, whom he lives with), no support system, and no access to medicine he needs thanks to budget cuts to the social program he used for needed treatment.
Oh. And he’s assaulted a lot.
Art imitates life. The Joker’s life is portrayed as one that is traumatic; people are unemployed in droves, people are disenfranchised and apathetic to a system that has let them down continuously. It doesn’t seem too far removed from modern day reality.
Related Article: Review: ‘Brightburn’ is a Satisfying Evil Superman Origin Story
Our villains, and our conflicts, change over time. Stories, specifically horror, often reflect our woes of the day and depict a “fears-imagined” scenario. We see in our villains the worst case scenario. What happens if radical religious beliefs take over our land? Perhaps something like the Handmaid’s Tale. What would happen if AI got out of control and sentient? Maybe we’d face a future like the one in the Terminator series.
So what happens if we continue down the path we’re on? One where economic and health woes go untreated and become exacerbated? Maybe we face a dystopia like what Arthur Fleck experiences in the Joker.
P.S.: Superheroes should be under scrutiny too, since we historically have a problem with masked vigilantes.
The opinions expressed throughout this article are the opinions of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any other author or contributor.
Related Article: Can You Ace the Ultimate Batman Quiz?
