Joker (2019)

Joker (2019), written by Todd Philips and Scott Silver, based on the characters by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson, directed by Todd Philips, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Francis Conroy, Zazie Beetz and Robert De Niro

The question of how perhaps the most famous comic book villain was born has never gotten a definitive answer. A story that is commonly thought of as the closest being a sort of a definitive answer to the mysterious history of Joker is The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. In the story, Joker is shown recalling bits and pieces of history before his face was bleached, trying to get ahead as a comedian, but failing at it. The accident that bleaches him, tied to the death of his wife and unborn child finally drive him insane.

 Bits and pieces of this narrative found their way to Burton take in his Batman. The Joker played by Jack Nicholson is tied tighter to the history of Batman in the story, him being the one who killed the parents of young Bruce Wayne. But in both cases, one doesn't exist without the other. Batman and Joker need each other. 

Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight doesn't have a definitive answer. He has multiple choices of his past, but that doesn't matter, as in the movie he already is the insane clown prince of crimes, or chaos, as he prefers. What matters in that story is the fact, that Joker doesn't play the game of cops and robbers in the same rules as everyone else. He is a wild card, who does what he pleases, having to cause chaos as his only big picture. He plans more than what he claims during the story, but his motivations are still hard to understand for the police and the criminal underworld.

In Joker, the titular role is bestowed upon Joaquin Phoenix. This time around, he gets a name, Arthur Fleck, a down on his luck wannabe comedian, who suffers from mental health issues. He lives with his mother, Penny (Conroy), whom he has to take care of. She spends her days watching TV and writing letters to her former employer, Thomas Wayne, asking for aid which never comes.

Arthur never connects with people. People he works with find him odd. He doesn't know where to laugh at jokes. He studies people but doesn't really understand them. He even fantasies of being just like everyone else, or at least that people would notice him. That he would be someone, even a man, who gets sympathy during a late-night show filming. He wants to connect, or he believes he wants to because that is what is expected of people, but because of whatever mental issues he has, he cannot.

Then the shit finally hits the fan. Arthur ends up killing three drunken yuppies on a train. While he panics at first, he notices, that he doesn't feel bad about it. It makes him feel better. It makes him understand himself better. Makes him more confident. The press christens him as a clown killer as that is the only description the police has of him.

Because of the crumbling economy, angry masses adopt him as a symbol against the system run by the wealthy 1% of Gotham. Arthur doesn't care about the political stance of things, he cares more about the feeling of having been seen, of mattering despite no one knowing his name or that it was him who shot the three men. 

During all this, a video recording of his failed stand up attempt finds its way to a show of Murray Franklin (De Niro). They make fun of him and his awkward show, but end up contactin Arthur, asking him to perform. He agrees and comes to the studio in his full Joker clown make-up, the one plastered on all the posters. But it really isn't Arthur anymore, who enters the studio, he is long gone now. The quest that Franklin introduces is now Joker. He is a man, who sees all the misery of life as a comedy. A man, with nothing to lose, as he has snapped himself off from the morals of the general public. He has understood the insanity of the world he and everyone else lives in and by doing that, he has killed his old self and embraced his true identity. He is Joker, the man who laughs because he gets the joke. 

But, just like with many of the previous versions of the character, there is no certainty of how much of it actually takes place or takes place as it is shown to us. We very much see things like Arthur imagines them to be. Sure, some of the stuff really happens, but to what extent for example the climax of the story really takes place is an entirely different question. If you take it as face value fact, then you can explain it by thinking how different kind of a person Joker is from Arthur. Joker is confident, sure of himself and revels in his effect on the world whereas Arthur is the polar opposite of him.

Then again, we know Arthur had a tendency to fall into daydreams. We can, for a fact perhaps, state that he is a murderer or at least violent and dangerous to either himself or other people, but how much of the story really happened the way he imagined it. What bits and pieces are genuine history and what is a fabrication of a broken mind? 

In the end, while it makes an interesting movie, it doesn't matter that much, not with a kaleidoscope character like Joker is. He is a reflective surface of the times he pops up. In the '60s, he was a kooky clown criminal, in his first comic appearances, he was a dour, pulp crime boss. Christopher Nolan made him a harbinger of chaos, Jack Nicholson turned him into a more dangerous and sinister version of what Cesar Romero did in the '60s.

What really matters about Joker is, that he exists. His origins are shrouded in a mystery because of even him being unsure about who he really was before he became Joker. What or whoever he was, died on the day he finally shed the skin of his former self and became Joker. So in that sense, the story of Arthur Fleck's transformation is as good of a version as any.