Hollywood Art Flick: Joker as Social Commentary, an Origin Story

Joker is the “underman” we get when God and Superman have been killed and we still don’t know how to navigate our lives without them. He’s our secular Antichrist – insane but far from powerless. As such he is a projection of our worst fears and, more troubling yet, the mirror and vessel of our darkest hopes, too. In a word, Joker is vengeance, a figure of chaos and destruction for the end of the world at the end of capitalism.

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Todd Phillips’s Joker is social commentary disguised as a genre movie disguised as a period movie. In truth it’s a Hollywood art flick – the last thing audiences could have expected from the director of the Hangover trilogy or from the genre requirements of the DC comic book universe. That, in any case, is the kind of thesis you get when you marry retrospection to anticipation as we all ponder the wisdom of a sequel scheduled for late 2024. In the meantime, let’s explore what this social commentary cum art film tells us about the complex intersection of cinema, economic recession, mental illness, class warfare, and violent resistance across the social landscapes of our ever-changing modern times. But to these ends let’s start at the beginning, as naively as possible, with the time and place of Joker.

1. Joker as Period Flick

Joker is and isn’t a period picture. True, it takes place in a gritty alternate-reality version of New York City in the 1970s – a “Gotham City” before gentrification began in the late 1980s. But the mise-en-scène of the film really isn’t a time or place at all. It’s the imaginary terrain of other movies, in particular Martin Scorsese’s cinematic universe of 1973 to 1982. Among those movies, Taxi Driver (1976) holds obvious pride of place.

Scorsese’s New York City is a source of contempt for Taxi Driver’s confused loner, Travis Bickle. “All the animals come out at night,” Bickle records in his notebook, “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”1 As the movie critic and screenwriter Paul Schrader likes to say, this is European existentialism transplanted to America. Or, more precisely yet, this is Dostoevsky’s “underground man” from Saint Petersburg, a place described as “the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe,” only transplanted to New York.2

In all the ways that matter, Phillips’s Gotham City is the same theoretical and intentional town as Scorsese’s New York City and Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg. Consequently, Bickle’s assessment from the underground automatically doubles as Joker’s assessment. But the cities are more similar yet. Both Taxi Driver and Joker are informed by the film noir movies of Scorsese’s youth (1950s), which echo in turn the German expressionist movies loved by this avid cinephile.3 So if Joker is and isn’t a period picture, that’s because its origin story is set less in a time than an aesthetic, and less in a place than an atmosphere. But above all, thanks to the first-person perspective lifted from Dostoevsky, it’s set less on the streets than in the minds of Bickle and Joker – proxies, one supposes, for the minds of Schrader, Scorsese, and Phillips.

Just as the time and place of Gotham are set on the set of Scorsese’s New York City, so too are Joker’s main character’s taken from Scorsese’s movies. Joker’s Arthur Fleck is informed by Bickle and The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin, while Joker’s Murray Franklin is informed by The King of Comedy’s talk show host Jerry Langford played by actor-comedian Jerry Lewis. It’s not for nothing that both Scorsese protagonists are played by Robert De Niro. De Niro’s Pupkin is “the joker” character in The King of Comedy; in fact, he is literally depicted as such on the movie poster. In a way, then, De Niro’s appearance in Joker as the Jerry Lewis character from The King of Comedy is “stunt casting” for cinephiles or postmodernists, or for both. As for De Niro’s Bickle, he’s left for Joaquin Phoenix to reprise in Joker – and to mash up with De Niro’s Pupkin.

Since the characters of Bickle, Pupkin, and Joker overlap, their thoughts and actions reflect one another across the passage of four decades. In 1976, Bickle looks into the mirror, a classic analog for the cinematic gaze, and asks an imaginary interlocutor: “Are you talking to me?” And in 1981, Fleck stares into the television screen and answers Langford-Pupkin-Franklin with a resounding “Yes.” In 1976, Bickle aims an imaginary gun at his own head and pulls the trigger, and in 1981, Fleck does the same – repeatedly. It’s this same collapse of time, place, character, minds, and movies that has Fleck consider shooting himself as the punchline to a knock-knock joke on Franklin’s talk show. But that’s the masochist’s solution; Arthur Fleck’s solution. The sadist’s solution, Joker’s solution, is to follow an Oedipal script and kill the father – and, to that end, ensure the succession of madness. The King of Comedy is dead; long live the Joker.

Phillips telegraphs the same fate for Joker’s other would-be father, the millionaire Thomas Wayne; a fate that ensnares his son, Bruce Wayne, in an epic tale of sibling rivalry. For this Joker origin story reimagines Arthur and Bruce as half-brothers, the opposing products of the same “intentional town” that ruined their lives. In short, Phillips sets up the orphaned half-brothers, Batman and Joker, as representations of good and evil, masochism and sadism, life and death drives.

And that, quickly put, is the basic meta-level analysis of Joker as a period flick with tentacles leading back to the late romanticism of Dostoevsky in 1864 and, some six decades later, to Sigmund Freud’s metapsychology of 1920 to 1939. On a meta-meta-level, of course, the real joker here is Todd Phillips – the writer-director who risks a similar act of patricide with the great Martin Scorsese. For it’s very obviously the case that Joker is a love letter to a cinematic father figure; one comedy director’s elaborate attempt, risky at its core, to win the attention of the great man.

2. Times Squared: Or Joker as Social Commentary

The ego is Arthur; the ego is the thing that is trying to control this wild force that is Joker. But Joker is pure id.4 – Todd Phillips

There’s no doubt at all: Phillips self-consciously echoes the time and place of Scorsese’s “sick, venal” New York City. His Gotham City takes place on the mean streets of Scorsese’s cinematic universe of 1976 – only updated to 1981, the better to depict a garbage strike that plagued the real city for 17 days that year. The garbage-strewn city is fleck written large; garbage as set design, mirror, and supporting character. Art fleck as art flick.

In the first instance, this Hollywood art flick is a study in late romanticism as rendered in Scorsese’s cinematic universe. In Joker, the repressed underground – Dostoevsky’s metaphor for the dark, twisted desires of the unconscious – is conjured in the light of day, or better, under studio lights and cameras. In this way, Freud’s late theorizing about the “pure culture of the death drive” is dramatized in Joker as the psychopathic sadism of the traumatized clown. To wit, the silent death drive is personified, rendered conscious, for all of Gotham to see and hear.

However, the aggressive mapping of Joker onto the unconscious minds of Bickle and Pupkin by way of Notes from Underground does not exhaust the movie’s meaning. For in Joker, Phillips includes a second origin story separate from, and independent of, the Saint Petersburg of Dostoevsky’s dark imaginings; separate from and independent of the time and place of early European existentialism. That’s because Phillips imports social commentary from another time and place altogether – and from another director. I mean the Great Depression as depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s classic movie of 1936, Modern Times. It is this surprising mash-up of Scorsese’s noir sensibilities, lifted from European cinema, and Chaplin’s bright social commentary of Fordist America that captures the essence, audacity, and grandeur of Phillips’s ambitions.

The Tramp functions in Joker not as the unconscious of the movie but as its hidden conscience. For it is Chaplin, in his last silent movie, who gives voice to the voiceless everyman of America’s underclass; and who gives expression to the social commentary that elevates Joker beyond Scorsese’s flirtation with nihilism, and beyond the masturbatory self-reflexivity of postmodernism. Joker expresses the quite different territory of guilt and morality; territory that Freud, the great thinker of the unconscious, addressed only begrudgingly after 1923 with the fundamentally unFreudian, non-European, even American idea of the Über-Ich, the over-I or superego. At stake in this alternate inheritance is not suffering but perseverance; not existential despair but can-do pragmatism; not European doom but American religion.

Consider in these respects five ways that Joker pays homage to Chaplin’s Modern Times – starting from most explicit to least. First, Gotham’s wealthy art patrons attend a black-tie event and screening of Modern Times. It’s in the bathroom at this event, held at “Wayne Hall,” that Arthur confronts Thomas Wayne about his paternity; and it’s from this event that Joker, framed as a modern day Tramp, is ejected. Second, both Joker and the Tramp battle mental illness at the crossroads of capitalism and economic depression. The Tramp, depicted as a cog in the machine of factory production, has a “nervous breakdown.” Joker experiences a similar breakdown, bit by bit, after being beaten on the streets of Gotham while working as a promotional clown (“Everything Must Go!!”) for a music store bankruptcy sale. Third, both the Tramp and Joker become accidental revolutionaries on the streets of their respective cities. The Tramp attempts to return a flag that’s fallen from a delivery truck but ends up waving it at the front of a union march – and is arrested as a “communist leader.” Later on he accidentally levers a brick into the head of a policeman at the start of another strike, and is once again arrested. Joker is similarly disinterested in politics and street-level protest, telling Franklin that “I don’t believe in any of that. I don’t believe in anything.” Later he clarifies: “C’mon, Murray, do I look like the kind of clown who could start a movement? I killed those guys because they were awful.”5 Nonetheless, Joker is transformed by the media into a symbol of Gotham’s angry masses – not unlike the fate that meets Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Fourth, Joker repeatedly invokes the concluding scene of Modern Times, namely where the Tramp enjoins his lover, the “gamin,” to smile before they walk down the highway at dawn to the Chaplin instrumental “Smile.”6 This is the “Buck up – never say die!” sentimentality of Chaplin’s closing pragmatism, American to its core. Or rather it is mythically “American,” since the movie was filmed on the streets of Hollywood and San Pedro, California. Joker invokes this idealized scene by aggressively, with fingers in his mouth and tears in his eyes, alternating a rictus grin and grimace in a mirror. And he does it in the first minutes of the movie. Then he does it again toward the end, this time triumphantly before the rioting mob that lovingly, and reassuringly, reflects his horrible smile back. The one time Joker enjoins another individual human being to smile, more closely echoing Modern Times, is when he meets a young, compliant, and similarly isolated Bruce Wayne. And finally, fifth, the inevitable inference: Joker functions thematically and structurally as the tragic flip-side of the comedic masterpiece Modern Times. First the lovable clown, then the nasty one. First the farce, then the tragedy – a sly reversal of Marx’s famous remark that history repeats first as tragedy, then as farce.

“I used to think my life was nothing but a tragedy,” Fleck quips. “But now, now I realize it’s all just a fucking comedy.” Then he suffocates his mother in a hospital bed. Of course, no one believes this ironic self-commentary. Fleck’s life is obviously a tragedy. In fact, it’s the same tragedy we find depicted in Chaplin’s Depression-era America and in Scorsese’s New York City of the 1970s. It’s the tragedy of oppression, alienation, and exploitation; the tragedy of capitalism in 1936, 1976, 1981 – and also in 2019. Why 2019? Because behind Joker’s appearance in 2019 is yet another Little Tramp at work, a vulgarized Thomas Wayne for our era of incivility, white supremacy, rampant inequality, the rollback of human rights, and serial climate catastrophe. I mean, of course, Little Trump, the Gotham City billionaire, orange clown, and nihilist villain of comic book proportions; a man of “pure id” intent on bringing the whole show down around him. By the same token, Joker also highlights the confused masses – on one side the proletariat, updated as the “precariat,” and on the other side the right-wing populists – all of whom want the same. Destruction.

“Is it just me,” Fleck asks his social worker, “or is it getting crazier out there?” Today’s audience knows the answer: Yes, it is. But in 1936, neither Chaplin nor the American worker could quite comprehend the existential angst of Dostoevsky’s underground man, even as tamed by Freudian psychoanalysis. The brooding late romanticism was still too alien, too European, too nonsensical for American audiences. But the bummer philosophy began to make more sense after the Second World War; and more sense again after the Korean and Vietnam wars, political assassinations, the OPEC crisis, Watergate, and the shocking decline of New York City in the 1970s; and more sense again after every crisis of capitalism, none more so than after the subprime mortgage crisis and global recession of 2007-2008; and more sense again after the improbable election of Little Trump as President of the United States in 2017. In effect, the myriad crises of the 20th and 21st centuries have finally made late romantics, if not absurdists, out of Americans.

But while Europeans go high, Americans go low. Hence the mash-up of dark and light, evil and good, Dostoevsky and Chaplin, unconscious demons and redemptive conscience in a DC comic book movie of 2019. A nothingburger movie event reimagined by Phillips – POW! –as quite possibly the most impressive art flick ever released by Hollywood: a high-minded masterpiece about a funny, insane, white-faced, green-haired super-villain of little consequence to anyone – at least beyond a niche comic book fanbase.

Phillips, moreover, manages to have his cake and eat it, too. For here’s a comic book movie framed, after the fact, as “an anti-comic book movie.”7 Amusingly, the director-writer dons the Joker mask to upset the very criticism Scorsese levels at Hollywood comic book movies: the charge that they aren’t real cinema at all. They are theme park attractions and marketing extravaganzas purpose-built to generate profits for rich people and corporations. But Joker, imbued with the gravitas of Scorsese’s own movies, is the exception that proves the rule. It’s also the exception that sets Phillips apart from everyone else.

3. Underman, Everyman, Overman

Unsurprisingly, not every critic got the memo. The movie was excoriated as nihilism, as an irresponsible depiction of mental illness, and as a celebration of incel violence.

Yet the messaging of Phillips’s Joker doesn’t support these complaints. The meaning of the movie is perfectly captured by a non-joke that Joker tells to an agitated Murray Franklin: “What do you get,” he yells, “when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?” The answer: “You get what you fucking deserve!” Then Joker shoots Franklin in the face. The punchline, like the movie, threads a needle through Joker’s nihilism to hit the target of Phillips’s social commentary.

As for Joker’s mental illness, it isn’t presented as the “cause” of his descent into criminality. The cause of his criminality is austerity economics – including cuts to the social workers, therapists, and pharmaceuticals Fleck requires. What’s more, the movie takes pains to depict Fleck’s mental illness as the tragic and totally predictable consequence of social and parental neglect punctuated by extreme childhood abuse. So no, Joker doesn’t blame Fleck’s mental illness for his eventual criminality. It blames you and me. We are the ones who allowed, willy-nilly, the wealthy to grab the reins of power and destroy civil society; and to destroy, in turn, our souls. As for Joker’s soul, it lies in ruins from systemic carelessness just like the city around him. If, then, there’s a death drive at work in Joker, it’s the system of capitalism that powers the unjust city of Gotham. For Joker is clearly a victim of capitalism – but so, too, frankly, are those critics who can’t tell the forest from the trees.

Still, it is true that Arthur Fleck becomes a murderous psychopath. Joker is, after all, an origin story of this cartoon nihilist. Fleck emerges as Joker proper when his fans pull him unconscious from a smashed police car – after which time he performs his signature dance on its hood and debuts his rictus grin directly for the adoring masses. In that moment he is reborn as the volatile “leader” of the voiceless masses; the leader you get when you marry Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin to the Tramp and sprinkle in some Napoleon with a pinch of the devil. So this is not an origin story of a disaffected but privileged middle-class white male loser – an incel. It’s an origin story of a “world historical figure,” a symbol of our present moment, our zeitgeist. In this regard, it doesn’t matter what Joker wants or thinks – just that he is and that he does. The masses do the rest. Hence the banner waved by Gotham City protesters, “we are all clowns,” and the catchy headline that spurs them to action, “Kill the Rich: A New Movement?”

Once upon a time America imagined a very different future for itself; imagined that it deserved a very particular, very neutered Übermensch in the form of another DC legend, Superman. But this is not Nietzsche’s overman. Superman is an alien, literally from another planet, who represents the best of justice and goodness that America has to offer: the “melting pot” as golly-gee-shucks origin story of a nation. By 2019, Americans understood, not only that we don’t live in Metropolis but that we don’t deserve it, either. We don’t deserve Superman. We deserve the mean streets of New York City ca. 1981. We deserve Travis Bickle, a sad, delusional, loner taxi driver who goes on a murder spree and is nonsensically mistaken for a hero (in the first instance, by its writer and director). Worse still, we deserve his spiritual offspring, Joker.

Joker is the “underman” we get when God and Superman have been killed and we still don’t know how to navigate our lives without them. He’s our secular Antichrist – insane but far from powerless. As such he is a projection of our worst fears and, more troubling yet, the mirror and vessel of our darkest hopes, too. In a word, Joker is vengeance, a figure of chaos and destruction for the end of the world at the end of capitalism.

So there you have it. We used to think that capitalism made for good comedy. But history has taught us that capitalism is really made for tragedy. Joker is the Hollywood art flick that reminds us that nihilism operates below the surface of easy and uneasy laughter – not to wallow in the underground but to depict it and, perhaps, exorcize it. Consequently Joker is not just the movie we deserve but the one we need: a cautionary tale lifted from the 19th century, dressed in film noir but carrying a walking stick, and repositioned perfectly for unsuspecting audiences of the 21st. Fingers crossed that Phillips’s sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, doesn’t fuck it up. Either way I’m fascinated to find out.

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.