I know you’ve already answered that you didn’t like Joker lol, but I’d love to read your critique/analysis of the film. But if you don’t feel like writing all that or really wanna spend the time on something you hate, I totally understand! :)
the movie doesn’t know what it’s saying. joker is a movie that wants to play with big topics but is absolutely terrified to say anything of note, to the point that interpretations of the movie vary so wildly that i’m not sure i actually watched the same film as other moviegoers. it is horrifically confused on every level except visual, and i will give the movie that, it had good visuals and phoenix acted his heart out, but the movie ends up backing itself into a corner where it stands for jack-fuck-all and pisses away into meaninglessness for its cowardice.
you’ve got this element of class warfare, except this is poorly done; the first problem you run into is that there are riots in support of the murder of the financial sector pricks. how, and why? in a fictional city where murder theoretically takes place daily, why does anyone care about the deaths of upper-middle assholes? furthermore, why the fuck does anyone immediately know who these people are? these financial sector pricks, while they are complete assholes, are only complicit in the living conditions of gotham’s poor, not the cause of it. they are, essentially, nobodies in the grand scheme of things, but their deaths become a rallying point because the movie is too cowardly to show the joker, i don’t know, killing someone in a higher office, someone with direct control over gotham, a death that would have reason to rock the city and its residents to the core. something that would actually cause believable political tension, even a spokesperson for someone who has any power in gotham. literally anyone other than some upper-middle class creeps, who no one has any reason to know or care about beyond vague surprise when they check the paper that day to see someone in that expensive of a suit gunned down. there’s just zero reason for the city to rally in support behind the deaths of a couple absolutely nameless dickwads, but again, this is a movie terrified of having a point. of course they weren’t going to depict something that shakes up the people in power too badly - it’s a WB film, after all - but even then, why go there? why strike on that particular nerve, if you can never follow through? the answer is that, this movie wants your money and will do anything topical-but-vague-enough-to-lack-real-meaning to get that money. (ironically, the murder i feel could have actually inspired the protests shown throughout the film happened at the end - thomas wayne’s murder, but at that point i really stopped caring.)
following that, if a key element of joker was some hand-wavey anti-rich sentiment that the movie completely refuses on describing in any sort of accurate detail, arthur’s considerable stack of murders muddles the point. he murders his former coworkers, a talk show hosts - and i mean, i get it, fuck talk show hosts, but you wasted a bullet you could’ve sunk directly into thomas wayne’s skull. you would’ve made a much better political point, that way, if that’s what arthur was going for, but of course that’s what he was going for only a little bit. enough to have a fun rant about how society created him right before he kills said talk show host, but not enough to, i don’t know, finally get around to making a point. and if this movie is trying to be anti-rich, why does arthur kill his former coworker? and, considering that, if this movie is trying to send a political message, why does it double down so hard on presenting arthur as distinctly mentally unstable and completely uninterested in delivering any sort of message outside of, “kill everyone who fucked with me even a little bit”? why even include any sort of political element at all, if you’re going to fuck it up and refuse to follow through with it?
and then there’s the mental illness aspect to the movie; i want to talk about one scene in particular, the one where he kills his clown-y coworker. in this scene, arthur states that he’s off his meds and feeling better, and then proceeds to butcher the guy. this movie does not exist in a vacuum. it exists in a cultural space which is inhabited by other movies, with other portrayals of mental illness, and it chose to directly link mental illness and the lack of treatment to violence, when that is the statistical opposite of what actually happens to people with untreated mental illnesses. this movie chose to feed into a conveyor belt of stereotypes about people with “scary” mental illnesses (anything that isn’t anxiety or depression, essentially) and how they interact with the world. not that i really expected a shining representation of mental illness from a movie about the joker, but, you know. you still get negative marks for what you got wrong, even if i could guess what you would do wrong, because everyone before you has also done it wrong. (and here i have to confess bias on this point, because i am a person with a “scary” mental illness. i have experienced delusions, and i have experienced psychosis, and miraculously, i haven’t killed anyone. shocker.)
but there are some things i liked. i liked the personal moments, with arthur, i liked the revelation about his mother. i liked the first third of the movie really solidly, before the plot swanned into absolute disarray and stopped making any logical sense, and i could spend another 14 paragraphs talking about just that muddy middle bit where the whole plot decided to go fucking off the wall. i really, really love a good sympathetic villain; i’m not against the joker having a tragic backstory, because i think one of my favorite things fiction does is make me have sympathy for the devil. really good, deft writers can pull that off beautifully, and i love it. but the most necessary thing in any sympathetic villain origin story is the moment of personal choice, where the villain chooses to do something horrific - that’s the moment that the audience goes FUUUUUUUUCK and feels maybe a little bit like crying and cheering at the same time. that’s the great emotional chord that you have to play the fuck out of, or you’re not going to sell the villain, and it’s the emotional chord the joker denied me because, ultimately, the only message the movie was able to stick to was, “lashing out at random people because you’re in pain is justified, and will get you a crowd of followers dressed like clowns showering you in adulation.” and i think the movie arrived at that message entirely by accident, because, again, it’s really bad at saying anything at all.
