A 2019 Joke

A belated reaction to the DC Joker origin movie, The Joker (2019).

I saw the movie The Joker (2019) and called the movie processed poop. I was told and I admit that my judgment was off. I revise: The movie is a processed poop of a Joker film. My initial reaction was from my watching it as a Joker movie, blinding me to its other presumably stellar qualities. I didn't like it enough to rewatch it. Critical movie review for art sake is not my cup of tea (being more of a coffee person) and life's too short, says Psalm 90, so make it count.

The fundamental failing of the movie as a Joker movie is its catching a pox--the pox of the Relatable Character. Every now and then, a pox strikes the literary community and reaches epidemic proportions in no time. The pox never starts as a disease, however. It begins as a fine idea, proposed by a fine artist as a guide to other artists, skilled and hacks alike, they may apply to improve their art.  Here, a sample list: write characters who yell and cuss and use vernacular like the people the artist is trying to portray; show and don't tell; strike adverbs and adjectives; use the active voice; and (this one relevant to the point I'm trying to make) write relatable characters. These hints are shared by artists who try to demystify the creative process, to render into code the elusive element that makes their work work. And in this time of rampant workshops for art--the artisanship of creativity as of the creative process, where a prophecy-like, lunacy-opaque process is reduced to mere formulae--the door to excellence is thrown open to all who labor diligently enough at it.

The practical outcome to this universal accessibilty of the tools and processes of art is that we become all creators and critics, as well as consumers. Concordance in opinion and consonance in outlook become required, for all our values are equally valid, more or less, and forms the holy grail at their intersection. As a result, our canon becomes limited in scope.

Here is how it works: the erstwhile more or less solid barriers separating the three types that engage with art ensured the raw instinct (rather than the cultured taste) of the creator could roam and range; the critic would restrain himself in all but his checking for congruence with reality and coherence within itself of the creator's creation; and the consumer could, true to his name, fully immerse himself in his consumption.  The thinning or porosity of the barrier generates a centripetal force, in the middle of all three, that strongly restricts imaginative and creative range. The confidence the three having in having coralled Creative Inspiration, and only need to crowd it in, draws them closer and inward-facing. It is as if they say to themselves that all that can be imagined exists in their midst. That much variety in expression is apparent is a trick on eyes, befogging the smallness of what we can explore, are allowed to explore. After all, the span from zero to one is a million, a billion real numbers--or just one real number. The consumer-critic-creator complex develops a violent hypersensitivity to that which deviates from an accepted norm, while ironically holding that norms are shattered because of the million billion variations between zero and one. Interestingly, 0.9999999 times 0.9999999 never really makes it to 1.

Our age is the age of the death of the heroic, the age in which anything significantly above six feet with a human face is shorn at the knee that it may be brought to our eye level and we may understand it. In this age, a character who is not relatable suffers in our estimation. Even as our base powers of conception and comprehension are enhanced, our range of feeling dwindles to a pinpoint,  accommodating only that that closely resembles us. Therefore, the artist that thinks that character up must lack nuance, sophistication, or true artistic insight.

The heroic dies here, and in a bad way; not from blood loss from a wound sustained in battle, but in bed, from sleep apnea, as a result of overeating. Rather than an imposing or sublime character, we get characters of slight or fuzzy ambition, petty spirit, gift of gab, and blustery spectacle--a forgetable character. Stripped of his power, the movie of its snazzy plot and flashy setting, all you have is a budding stand-up comic. You could pluck him from his movie and deposit him in a sitcom complete with laugh scores and he'll fit right in with nary a miss in beat. He is presented with dramatic music and costume, deft cinematic maneuvers, and sleight of narrative agent hand. His moments of gravitas are contrived and flimsy. We are only spared a few moments to sketch out the outlines of the story and then comes spectacle--outrageous, blinding, bountiful. We can hardly peel off a clear thought in the sensory barrage.

All these to distract us for a depressing reality: that these heroes are robots, empty boxes filled with our mundane desires, glorified servants. Maybe it was a mistake, this experiment of minting the hero in the mould of the common man. It makes for moving and inspiring tales, yes. But it lost something in the process. It has not led to a greater ideal of the hero. We have an impressive development in the vehicles of the story, the formulaic aspects (CGI onion-skin close to lifelike, reality-warping cinematic gymnastics, and the almost masochistic devotion to method-acting excellence taken by the actors) of movie making--everything but the spirit and soul of the hero itself grows. In fact, the hero decays to the degree our presentation of him excels.

The vacuousness and easy palatability of character found in heroes is beginning to taint their villains, too. For we must find something to like in the villain and if we can't find a geniunely likeable trait, we make one up, graft it onto him as the final hammer blow to complete him, then wind him up, set him on stage, and applaud. I get the attempt to correct the earlier tendency towards cardboard villains with a single-facet personality, but this response is not much improved.

After this long detour, let's meet the Joker more to my taste. The Joker is an aberrant, a psychopath, a man within whom the social sense never developed. Our social norms, structures and niceties are a joke  to him and he laughs at those. All that humans have developed socially are for his amusement and he needs only (and often will) prise a rivet here, jolt a joist there, or strike a truss elsewhere to watch a section come crashing down. "Don't you see?" he says, and is only midly frustrated and shrugs resignedly that we don't, as you would at a dog's failure to understand a Shakespeare sonnet. He is archetypal evil, evil we see but shouldn't be able to identify with. His mind is a pit of scorpions and serpents, all of them poisonous and venomous, all of them capable of starting something bad and big--who would want to live in that? He trades in comedy, but one far beyond our sense of humor. Only person who could laugh at his jokes is one who would strike with a sledgehammer the central pillar of the tower he is in and be tickled.

The Joker is a kid in a large toyshop which society is and he does not understand the concept of toys as things to be played with without radically altering their nature or structure--let alone the idea of toys as collector items to be tenderly touched, polished and displayed. If he understands it, he finds that ridiculous. He would smash the toys and find fun and occupation in this. The Joker as a physician is not one for the Hippocratic oath; a finger on the pulse of his patient, he believes something is amiss until he feels the mad thumping of a terrified heart underneath, and only then declare, "That's life!"

This Joker we can't approach with reason as one can't approach high-tension cables with a wet branch--only instinct, of the most primal type. The most fitting reaction to him would be to mob him, worrying him with a motley of hefty objects, with blunt, mindless and indiscriminate attacks until he is reduced to unrecognizable matter. Then, in a daze from nervous exhaustion, induced by the heightened fear he inspired in us, dissolve from our mob. In the scale of urgency, addressing a Joker must take priority over a Godzilla, even a Thanos (another joke, but one for another day). Only an alien invasion trumps it.

As such, a hapless pre-Joker who tries to do good by society, expecting reciprocity, but is instead met at every turn with callous treatment and recreational violence, and snaps under this strain, is hard to swallow, even in the context of Gotham as formative environment. The story of this tortured soul Joker is grotesque, he lacks the charisma, power and impact of an intelligent, carefree and capricious Joker, conductor of chaos par excellence. This creature, as relatable in a soap opera way as he may be, is a joke of a Joker, ironically unfunny, and no bit as terrifying as he should be, only pathetic, and even the meager pathos he garners is thrown away at the end, leaving only a dirty picture. What divine comedy; this is a tragedy. In making the Joker relatable, we trapped and winged a great soaring bird of prey, set it aground, and now address it as "Fellow Biped".