We Misunderstood Joker (2019)
When Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) was announced there was almost an immediate wave of backlash. Media outlets prepared everyone for potential shootings and the internet anticipated a movie which told the story of an angry cishet white man fighting back against a society he believed owed him something. I recently rewatched Joker since my first time seeing it in theaters last year and disagree with this theory. Joker, at its core, is a deeply empathetic movie which demonstrates the plight of the mentally ill, the endless cycle of poverty, and why gun control is crucial.
Protagonist Arthur Fleck is suffers from a cocktail of mental illnesses, including one which drives him to painful gag-inducing bouts of laughter when faced with stressful situations. He receives dirty looks from strangers and fumbles for an explanation for his condition, a situation which many disabled people can relate to. Often times the burden of explaining the right to exist is placed on the disabled in a world which judges them for daring to live in bodies that don't conform to what is "normal." When he shakily hands a woman a card explaining his condition her gaze doesn't soften, instead she appears repulsed by him and turns away.
Arthur lives in squalor and cares for an aging mother. He works at a dead-end job as a party clown and is berated by coworkers. The only other coworker who is kind to him is a man who has dwarfism - a fellow outcast of society who knows what it's like to have a body that's different. The strain of reality drives him further into his fantasies and he spends his free time filling a journal with jokes, random bits of thoughts that plague him throughout the day, and cut out pornographic photos. He's been a source of mockery for his entire life, so it's hard to determine what's sincerely dark and what's funny anymore.
In his journal Arthur writes "the worst part about having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don't." This is the thesis statement of the movie, the plight of the disabled and the mentally ill who struggle to present in ways which society might accept. It's not about a white man who feels he's owed something, and it's certainly not a rallying cry to ask white boys around the world to rise up and get what they deserve. Instead, it's about a man plagued with a body and brain that won't cooperate the way others do, and he's expected to suffer in silence as a lack of government funding strips him of his access to psychiatric help and even the medication he relies on to hold down a stable job.
Things go from bad to worse when a gun is brought into his life. Again, this goes against the assumption of what Joker truly is. A gun is given to him by a coworker after he's beaten by a group of teenagers. Initially Arthur flirts with the idea of suicide, but instead his anger turns outward at those who've wronged him. Society didn't turn an average white man into a villain, it put a gun in the hands of a disabled and mentally ill man who was struggling to find a way to be heard and seen.
The internet is plagued with young able-bodied white men who decided to place their identity in the Joker without taking note of the true story of the 2019 film. The same could be said about Fight Club, a surreal action movie based on a satirical novel written by gay man Chuck Palahniuk in an effort to demonstrate the extreme lengths men go to when toxic masculinity is left unchecked. In the case of both movies the true thesis of the film is lost as young men choose to idolize characters who were meant to be empathized with.
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