Common people are irredeemable, and we react to oppression and injustice by turning into serial killers and inspiring riots. This is DC’s view of us. It is the dark, pessimistic perspective of elites, in this case cultural ones, used to justify the inequality they foster.
Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a severely mentally ill man who, nevertheless, manages to scrape by until he’s arbitrarily fired from his job and his healthcare is taken away by austerity. The movie is set in a 1970s Gotham on the verge of collapse. As the movie starts, we learn that the city is under a super-rat infestation. Gotham's urban infrastructure is characterized by graffiti, dilapidated subways, and dirty streets.
Arthur Fleck shares important traits with the common American, or more generally, the Westerner. He is on meds, he has a shitty job, and as is increasingly true with millennials, he can't afford to live on his own.
Of course, in Gotham not everyone lives paycheck to paycheck. There is a mega rich, ostentatious, paternalistic elite incarnate in the figure of Thomas Wayne. Wayne is a magnate with aspirations to become the mayor of Gotham. His leadership style is one of personal responsibility and law and order.
His worldview is shared by many of Gotham's common citizens, including one inside of Arthur's circle. In one of Joker's first scenes, Arthur is working on the streets when he is assaulted by a posse of teenagers who happen to all be people of color. While Arthur understands that the kids are just wayward and is ready to move on, Randall calls them "animals" and gives Arthur a gun to "protect" himself.
Instead, Arthur uses the gun on the well-to-do. In a scene that captures much of what is wrong with American society, Arthur is on the subway when three young white yuppies begin harassing an unaccompanied young woman. The woman, feeling cornered and helpless looks down the aisle at Arthur who sits on the opposite side. Perplexed about what to do, he is overtaken by the core symptom of his mental illness, an uncontrollable laughter. The posse of yuppies takes offense with Arthur, turning their attention towards him and allowing the woman to escape. Before long, all the men are kicking Arthur as he lays on the floor and Arthur defends himself with his new gun. He kills the first two men with his first shots and wounds the third, only to finish him in cold blood as he tries to escape up the stairs of a station.
This scene is the movie’s turning point. Before the incident, Arthur is just a nobody with decent instincts. Afterward, he is a psychopathic serial killer. And this is where I have my beef with Joker, DC Comics, and in a larger sense, Hollywood and establishment entertainment. Joker is about personal transformation, but its storytellers are telling us that an Everyman’s response to injustice, inequality, and humiliation is psychopathic violence, shutting out all other possibilities, including transformation into a woke citizen who works for social justice, which is what Joker, and all of us, really need. We need living wages and universal healthcare so we can lead dignified lives.
Apologists will argue that I’m too serious, that it’s “only” a movie to which I would answer, ‘What is so “only” about a cultural product that captures the imagination of a significant portion of Americans?” To date, Joker has sold nearly 300 million worldwide. That’s a lot of consumers whose imagination is colonized by a narrative that casts humanity as irredeemable.
Arthur’s murders, widely covered in Gotham’s media, start a political movement in Gotham. A populace fed up with Gotham’s 1 percent sees the murders as righteous vengeance on their oppressors. The movement is characterized by rioting, looting, and general chaos. And here is my second beef. Our culture elites portray popular movements negatively. The fact is that modern political movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and, MeToo are characterized by nonviolence. It is only when these movements are infiltrated by police that they appear to instigate violence. Yet it’s always the state which starts the violence, and a corporate media only shows what is in its best interest.
First Joker tells us that humanity is irredeemable and helpless before injustice. Second, it tells us that political movements can only be cults of personality motivated by destruction. Is that enough propaganda for you? Or do you need more?
The movement that Arthur starts is rooted in righteousness, but Gotham never learns the whole story. The whole story begins with the harassment of the young woman, a metaphor for the treatment of women in our society. It follows with Arthur’s clumsy but ultimately effective heroics, proceeded by his act of self-defense. It may have been illegal for him to possess that gun but not to defend himself. In a court of law, Arthur would have been found of second-degree murder, because he killed the third man in cold blood, but the other two murders would have been forgiven in the court of public opinion. Yet that is why Joker’s storytellers have Arthur kill that third man, to cut him off from any possibility of redemption and transformation. In one moment, he goes from unwitting hero to cold-blooded killer. Americans also seldom learn the whole story of our history.
After the subway incident, Arthur is in session with his state-appointed therapist. He confesses to her that he finally feels that he exists. The therapist, on the other hand, is only bracing to give him the bad news that the government has cut social services and he will no longer be receiving counseling nor his medication. Towards the end of their encounter, the therapist tells Arthur, “They don’t give a shit about people like you. They don’t give a shit about people like me!”
The cutting of social services in Gotham is the equivalent of austerity economic policies in our own society. These policies that, in the name of fiscal responsibility, throw people out into the street with no semblance of compassion, as both Arthur and the therapist who finds herself out of a job.
In creating scenes like this, the writers of Joker show that they have their finger on the problems of Gotham, stand-in for American society, but they’re incapable of writing a story that confronts these problems in a progressive way. The movie wouldn’t have to become a documentary or propaganda—although it is propaganda for the right wing—it would simply have to become a different story, one where Arthur does not become a serial killer and the citizens of Gotham do not self-destruct. Yet, this is what Hollywood shoves down our throats and what most of us consume uncritically, indeed do so gleefully.