The first thing that strikes you about Todd Phillip’s “Joker” is its open homage to two of Martin Scorsese’s films: “Taxi Driver” and “King of Comedy”. From “Taxi Driver”, it borrows the main character’s borderline personality and the portrayal of New York City as hell on earth. Travis Bickle, the Vietnam vet evidently suffering from PTSD, puts it this way: “All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take ’em to Harlem. I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.”
While “King of Comedy” is not considered vintage Scorsese, it was made to order for Todd Phillip’s main character Arthur Fleck, whose last name even evokes De Niro’s character in “Taxi Driver”. In “King of Comedy”, De Niro plays an aspiring stand-up comedian who idolizes Jerry Langford, the Johnny Carson-like late night host played by Jerry Lewis. To connect with Scorsese’s film, De Niro is cast as late night host Murray Benjamin in “Joker” but with much more of a mean streak—think of David Letterman waking up on the wrong side of bed. Now about the same age as Jerry Lewis in “King of Comedy” and endowed with the same kind of geezer cockiness, De Niro is the best thing about “Joker”.
Unlike the muscular and fearless Travis Bickle, Arthur Fleck is a downtrodden sad sack who has been picked on his whole life. We meet him working as a clown on the streets of New York in 1981. He holds an advertising sign above his head meant to draw customers into the shop he dances about in front of. Within a few seconds, a gang of teens (mostly Latino, it appears) grabs the sign from him and runs down the street with him in hot pursuit. When he catches up with them in an alley, they beat the living daylights out of him. One cannot be sure of director Todd Phillip’s intention, but this evokes the “wilding” episodes of the 1990s that gained notoriety through the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five. Or perhaps Phillips simply wanted to indicate that the city was infested with sadistic teens.
More directly related to the period, Fleck is riding the subway home late at night in his clown costume when a trio of drunken “Wall Street” guys (employees of the future Batman’s father Thomas Wayne, as it happens) begin to harass a young woman seated opposite them. Afflicted with a mental illness that turns out to be sui generis, Fleck begins to laugh uncontrollably and inappropriately. This draws the trio’s attention away from the woman and toward Fleck who is carrying a pistol that a fellow clown gave him for protection (and to make a few bucks through the sale.) When they begin to beat and kick him, he shoots two to death on the subway car and pursues the third in the station, who becomes his last victim. This incident will remind any New Yorker of the Bernhard Goetz attack on four black teenagers in a subway car in 1984. Goetz, a white technician, fired bullets from an unlicensed pistol into all four because he felt that they were trying to rob him.
This scene is simply unbelievable. Anybody who works on Wall Street in an obviously well-paying job, drunk or not, is the last person who will harass a total stranger on a subway train. Most New Yorkers, especially those dressed in business suits, simply want to be left alone. To advance his plot, Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver, tried to connect the dots between Thomas Wayne and the future Joker by having him kill the three white-collar workers in his employ. If I had been in a writing session with the two, I would have warned them against such an unlikely act of aggression by people who work in cubicles. Then again, they probably calculated that this would make no difference to a theater audience that cared so little about logic. This is 2019, after all.
Phillips’s problem is that he wanted to capture the malaise of New York City in the early 80s, but blend it with the Batman story. In previous films drawn from the comic book, Gotham (i.e., New York) was much more mythical. In Tim Burton’s hands, there was no attempt to draw analogies with the real city. Most of the action occurred indoors with Jack Nicholson as the Joker stealing every scene. In Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight”, we see more of Gotham’s street life but it is even more disconnected from New York (it was filmed in Chicago.)
Unlike Nicholson and Ledger’s Joker, Joaquin Phoenix is no master criminal. He is a pathetic figure who makes Walter Mitty look like a hard-nosed realist. Each night he watches De Niro’s Murray Benjamin and fantasizes about making an appearance on his show. He does make an appearance one night but not in the fashion he hoped for. One of Benjamin’s assistants gets his hands on a video recording of Fleck bombing at a comedy club. Nobody laughs at his jokes and when he himself begins to have one of his psychotic laughing bouts, he is shown the door. When Fleck sees himself being humiliated on national TV, he begins to plot his revenge.
At this point, he is beginning to resemble Travis Bickle who was humiliated by election campaign aide Cybill Shepherd, who was so aghast at his taking her to a 42nd Street porn movie for a date that she told him never to contact her again. In retaliation, he decides to assassinate the liberal politician she is working for.
What makes Todd Phillips a second-rate director/screenwriter compared to Martin Scorsese, who he obviously reveres, is character development. In “Taxi Driver”, we get to know Travis Bickle intimately. Throughout his haunting voice-over monologues that we hear as he drives across city streets late at night, we understand his pain and alienation. We also learn more about his motivation in his conversations with fellow workers and even the campaign worker who found him physically attractive, if clearly “off”. But most of all, the scenes between De Niro and Jodie Foster, playing a 12-year old streetwalker, are some of the most poignant in any film made in the 1970s. Showing a paternal care for her that makes his ultimate violent explosion logical, we see a consistency that is utterly lacking in “Joker”. Throughout the entire film, there is almost no dialog between Fleck and other characters except his mother who is as disturbed as him. In one particularly grotesque scene, he is shown scrubbing her back when she is taking a bath. The only time he expresses himself is when he begins to laugh uncontrollably, like someone with Tourette’s Syndrome shouting four-letter words out of the blue in public.
About that laughing disorder, I checked on it the day after seeing “Joker”. People magazine claims that while the movie never identifies the specific illness, such fits of controllable laughter are based on an actual disorder called the Pseudobulbar Affect, or PBA. When you check Wikipedia on the Pseudobulbar Affect, however, you learn that it has nothing to do with schizophrenia or any other psychosis. Instead, it is connected to a neurological disorder or brain injury. Some researchers look to the role of the corticobulbar pathways. When there are lesions, you can see a failure of voluntary control of emotions.
Obviously, Phillips is not interested in lesions. For him, the laughing goes hand in hand with Fleck’s mental illness that is obviously schizophrenia. Proof of that is his hallucinations of having a romance with a woman who lives down the hall from him. On the day of his appearance on the Murray Benjamin show, he walks into her apartment unannounced (the door was unlocked—another touch of illogic in this script) expecting to enjoy some intimacies. When she walks in, she says, “Aren’t you the guy who lives down the hall? What do you want”. When he acts as if she was his girlfriend, she tells him to leave or else she will call the cops.
Obviously this rejection primes him to fire a bullet into Murray Benjamin that evening on national TV. His psychosis has finally matured into the condition that will identify him as the Joker from that moment on. This is not the first time that a connection has been made between mental illness and the Joker. In a November 4, 2007 interview with the NY Times, Ledger described his character as a “psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy”.
Schizophrenic? In film today, there are very few nationalities that can still be demonized routinely without pushback. Arab terrorists obviously remain the number one favorite of Hollywood hacks, but “crazy people” come in second with hardly anybody taking up their cause. The reality is that schizophrenics never carry out attacks for revenge, such as was the case with Fleck’s killing of Murray Benjamin. By and large, they carry out acts of violence against total strangers who voices in their head direct them to push in the path of an oncoming subway train, etc. Another typical victim is the schizophrenic himself who the voices condemn as not worth living.
The best way to prevent such tragedies that are becoming more and more common as hospitals were emptied of the mentally ill years ago after psychotropic drugs like Thorazine were developed is to develop a support network. If they are taken under supervision in group homes, medicated properly, and have social workers looking after them, the violence decreases. There is an allusion to that in “Joker” in a scene between Fleck and a psychotherapist but that hardly makes up for the utterly backward portrayal of someone suffering from a mental illness.
My advice is to wait for this movie to show up on Amazon Prime. It is certainly not worth the $15 you’d have to pay for it at your local Cineplex. Why it has garnered such raves, including from those on the left who would have you believe it is the second coming of “Battle of Algiers”, is simply beyond me.