*SPOILERS*
I thought the racial elements and real-life incidents the new Joker film alludes to (along with the class themes which is also surface level) haven't been picked up much in discussion of this film, so Richard Brody goes deeper into them in his review for the New Yorker. Worth reading in full.
Intensely racialised and white-washing
Racially incoherent
The comic book 'Green Book'
Parodies
I thought the racial elements and real-life incidents the new Joker film alludes to (along with the class themes which is also surface level) haven't been picked up much in discussion of this film, so Richard Brody goes deeper into them in his review for the New Yorker. Worth reading in full.
Intensely racialised and white-washing
A group of teen-agers of color hassle him and steal his sign. He chases them into a garbage-strewn alley (the city is in the midst of an apocalyptic garbage strike), where one kid hits Arthur in the face with the sign and knocks him down. Then the whole group swarms him, pummels him, kicks him, and leaves him bruised and bleeding and sobbing, alone, in the filthy alley. The crime alluded to is the attack wrongly attributed to five young men mislabelled as the Central Park Five—an attack on an isolated and vulnerable white person by a group of young people of color. The scene waves away history and says, in effect, that it may not have been those five, but there was another group out there wreaking havoc; they're not figments of a demagogue's hate-filled imagination—here they are, and they're the spark of all the gory action that follows.
...
When Arthur is assaulted on the subway by three young men (whites, in suits), he pulls out the gun and fires—and even pursues one of the men onto the platform in order to shoot him dead. It's an evocation of the shooting, in 1984, by Bernhard Goetz, of four teen-agers in a subway who, Goetz believed, were about to rob him. They were four black teen-agers, and Goetz, after his arrest, made racist remarks. In "Joker," the director, Todd Phillips (who wrote the script with Scott Silver), whitewashes Goetz's attack, eliminating any racial motive and turning it into an act of self-defense gone out of control.
...
In between these two events, Arthur is seated on a city bus that's crowded with passengers. A child seated in front of him turns around, and Arthur playfully makes funny faces at him—at which the child's mother sharply orders Arthur to stop bothering her son. Mother and child are both black. The next day, Arthur, returning home (he has lost his job entertaining children at a hospital, because his gun fell out of his pocket), meets a neighbor, a woman named Sophie (Zazie Beetz); she, too, has a young child with her. The woman and the child are black. Arthur, who chats with Sophie for a moment, becomes obsessed with her and fantasizes about a romantic relationship with her. The nonexistence of any such relationship is among the agonies that torment him.
One more: Arthur lives in a rundown building in an ill-tended neighborhood with his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), who is disabled and whom he cares for. He is up late at night while his mother sleeps, watching a classic movie on television, "Shall We Dance," starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The scene he's watching, a musical number, set to George and Ira Gershwin's "Slap That Bass," begins with a group of black men who are working in the (highly stylized) engine room of an ocean liner and singing and playing music while they work—they have a jazz band, and one man (Dudley Dickerson) sings the song (along with the riffing of co-workers as a chorus) before Astaire chimes in, with their accompaniment, and then starts dancing. While he's watching, Arthur begins to dance around the living room—gun in hand—when, in his careless enthusiasm, he pulls the trigger.
Racially incoherent
"Joker" is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering. What it seems to be saying is utterly incoherent, beyond the suggestion that Arthur, who is mentally ill, becomes violent after being assaulted by a group of people of color—and he suffers callous behavior from one black woman, and believes that he's being ignored by another, and reacts with jubilation at the idea of being a glamorous white star amid a supporting cast of cheerful black laborers. But, unlike the public discourse around the Central Park Five, and unlike the case of Bernhard Goetz, and unlike the world, the discourse in "Joker" and the thought processes of Arthur Fleck are utterly devoid of any racial or social specificity.
Yes, "Joker" takes place in a fictitious city, a comic-book world of fantasy—but it draws its incidents and its affect parasitically from real-world events that were both the product and the cause of racist discourse and attitudes and gave rise to real-world racist outcomes of enduring, even historic, gravity. The central events of "Joker" (and I'll try to allude to them sidelong, to avoid spoilers) are suggested by other real-world events, but here, too, Phillips voids them of their discourse and their substance. What results is more than the strenuous effort to contrive a story with resonant incidents and alluring details; "Joker" reflects political cowardice on the part of a filmmaker, and perhaps of a studio, in emptying out the specifics of the city's modern history and current American politics so that the movie can be released as mere entertainment to viewers who are exasperated with the idea of movies being discussed in political terms—i.e., to Republicans.
...The comic book 'Green Book'
Yet, for all the historical references in "Joker," it's a blatant and brazen distortion of the most substantial historical elements at which it winks. "Joker" is the comic-book "Green Book," twisting history for the sake of a yarn.
...Parodies
The movie's parodies of "Taxi Driver" and "The King of Comedy" are obvious; so are its pastiches of the designs and events of those movies' times. But the crucial parody, the crucial mockery, the work of which "Joker" comes off as a callously commercial imitation, is "Black Panther"—a comic-book-based movie that infuses its framework with rigorously conceived and boldly assertive political visions to go with its elaborate world-building. "Joker" is a wannabe movie that also wants to be all things to all viewers, that imitates the notion of adding substance while only subtracting it. "Joker" is a viewing experience of a rare, numbing emptiness.
Last edited:
