Note on the failure of "Joker"
Because it enables me to make points I think should be made, I am going to violate my usual rule to not evaluate a film and especially not go on about one I don’t like. “Joker” is a disappointing film because of how little it says about any of the social problems we may associate with losers like this man. It is a film that fails to realize its promise to say something crucial and illuminating about our society today. Everything it does suggest about that is little more than a pale rehashing of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “King of Comedy” (1982). Those films present a critique both of a psychological condition and a social one. They are acerbic comments on our time. The first film is about narcissism, the society of the spectacle, a crisis of masculinity in the face of feminism, the traumas felt by returned Vietnam veterans, fantasies of heroism in the name of decency, and, of course, white male rage driven partly by a deeply racist disenchantment with the society of the time, in a New York that was facing bankruptcy and ballooning crime. “King of Comedy” is also about narcissism and failed masculinity; it is about wanting to be important by getting attention and being famous, and the absurdity of such a vain preoccupation. These are films with a strong social vision that leads thoughtful viewers to want to think about them and see them again and again. It was a dark view of America at that time. The films also now seem horribly prophetic.
By one count, there were, in a recent 12-year period, 271 incidents of mass killing by guns, resulting in 1,358 victims. That is way too many, but not enough to suggest that most “angry white males” who oppose feminism and affirmative action (a definition I found on Wikipedia) are proto-killers or their sympathizers. Not enough either to say that everyone who can be called “mentally ill” is dangerous and should be locked up.
At the same time, there are roughly one million meth addicts and half a million heroin users in America. Many of these people lose their lives because of these addictions, and many are driven to them by despair. And there are other signs and forms of social malaise, despair, wasted lives.
If “Joker” were meant to be a comment on some kind of faux empowerment of aggrieved white males, it sadly falls short, since if that were the explanation, we would be stuck not only with the semi-official belief of the psychiatric profession that 25% or more of Americans are “mentally” ill, but that most of them are conservative Republicans. In that case, they could throw away the ballot boxes and lock them all up.
“Joker” is a right-wing film that basically makes an argument for more and better policing and “mental health” services, since otherwise the many crazy loser men like this man may commit horrible crimes. “Mental illness” is one of those great tautological notions that at best only explains itself, like saying that people who have problems have problems because they have problems. In fact, it means that the person can be excluded from the fictional inclusive/exclusive totality that is “society,” and it really says nothing more. In this respect, the film’s final scene does have something fitting about it: in the mental hospital, he moves rapidly between doorways at his left and right, as if wanting to escape, as if it momentarily seems that he is a force exceeding both psychological treatments or cures, and the film’s own spatial and temporal framings.
The “Joker” is a man who is believable, and may have real complaints. They may not be so readily reducible to psychology. With or without any real injustices, living in precarity, a reality for many Americans, can be a situation of permanent crisis.
Broadly speaking, the American ideology in our time has largely been psychology. Spirituality reduces often to therapies, promising some elixir of an absent good and happy life, and, as the labor activist and social theorist Stanley Aronowitz long ago noted, psychology is repressive power’s great resource: power, he said, today is essentially psychological, and when that fails, it resorts to violence. (When the police stop you and ask if you are “ok,” that is less genuine concern for your happiness than a threat, expressing the Cartesian notion (a blank slate perceiving self confronting a world of others revealed as observed) of (to misquote one of the pop psychotherapies that emerged into prominence back in the 70s), “I’m ok, of course, but you might not be.”) The dominant conservative liberal ideology, which is still individualist, attributes personal failure to the persons who fail, with “mental illness” thought to be the most pervasive social problem (it is also the object of America’s most exploitatively profitable industry, pharmaceuticals). The implicit notion here is that the society, whose consistency as a form derives from the government that claims it as object of its representation, is a neutral force of just laws and administrative procedures held beyond dispute, which is unfortunately faced with many aberrant individuals whose malaise is theorized to originate in their defective nature. Thus supposing or showing that our society is beset by problems that amount to those of individuals is another form of the hypothesis that a good social order is always threatened by crime and deviance, until the good guys show up with the right policing to restore order. This film tacitly appeals to the figure of a benevolent mommy and daddy state to give us what we need and protect us with appropriate care from every strange person including ourselves.
Though to see what the “Joker’s” problem is, we should look in the film’s story not for the presumed anterior causes (neglectful parents, poor urban bachelor loneliness, and a broken system of social services, particularly in “mental health”), but to the synchronic elements of his life: it is one of vulnerability, or precarity. Also, the first killing starts out as ambiguously but plausibly a case of self-defense. But by the time he appears on the talk show near the end and boasts about that killing, he has become emboldened by his own braggadoccio. He wants, like many narcissists, both the attention and admiration of others, in this case partly anonymous crowds. His real desire, or pleasure at any rate, seems to be to enjoy himself dancing.
Is he just a crazy person with a bad psychology that for an adult should be presumed his own responsibility? Yes and no. He is lonely, and is half-attached to a job that seems to involve some amount of being demeaned, as well as the precarity that makes it possible for someone like him to be fired from a job for an incident that is not his causing. As a comedian, he’s rather a failure, since nothing he says or does is funny. He does show us the fragile line in stand-up and clown comedy between funniness and sadness. Beckett identified the two: “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” But the comedian must play with this boundary and know how to, so that the sad truth is expressed in the darkly but indeed funny line. In fact, he is his own audience, for whom the people out there are auxiliary, a mediation. He has enough of an artistic bent, though perhaps with limited talent (it is hard to say), and wants to feel that he is successful in expressing himself somehow. Hence, the dancing on the steps, in a momentary abandon, with no one else watching except maybe some passers-by by accident. The awful truth about him is that he turns out to be willing to commit murder in order to basically prove to himself that he can take the idea of doing so as a dare.
What the film says that is interesting is all about Joaquim Phoenix’s character. This character is a way of performatively experiencing social conditions of precarity. This is a concept that should be more used; it is a sociological, not psychological, notion, except by way of consequence, and perhaps a far more useful notion than “mental illness” (with its inevitable companion term, which it virtually designates as possibility, crime itself).
Cinematic art can help us understand this condition, as many films today surely do, but art plays this role best when it opens onto what we do not yet well enough understand, instead of closing itself off with what many people already think they know. The reductive answers that result tend to either name the problem merely (again, “mental illness” does that nicely, as do sociological kin such as “dysfunctional families” or even “underemployment”) or blame someone, as he does (an absent father who is rich but owes him nothing, a neglectful mother, a stand-up comic he identities with who has the temerity to criticize him morally, the rich in general — or, the “Joker” himself, since it is a truism that there is crime only because there are criminals). This is a film that illustrates without explaining. It tells us nothing about our neoliberal dystopias except that we should avoid expressing the rage we may sometimes feel lest we make things worse, at least for ourselves. Bourgeois and neoliberal capitalist societies sustain themselves partly by blaming individuals. Which may be another way of saying that there is nothing to be done that can make things better; all idealistic and utopian social projects are dangerous as they portend the evils of Stalin’s Russia, and the best anyone can do is engage in stupid rioting that, as in this film’s ending, merely blames the rich (and, of course, leaves the system that they benefit from, at the expense of many of the rest of us, entirely intact). “Joker” is an anti-political film because it involves no thinking in the constructive sense that is the stuff of a true politics, and which is not discovered but built. It is a cynical and melancholy ode to the desperation of the powerless.
But the theatricality of the film’s presentation of its designated loser does achieve something of interesting social commentary. The boundary between the serious and the funny here is also that between reality and fiction. This is a boundary that comedy routines, like theater generally, can question, in a more or less ill-at-ease way that they manage; and “Joker” effaces this boundary. Why? Because he refuses, he mis-recognizes, the boundary or distinction between statement and enunciation, between what is said in a statement in all its potential seriousness, since it may represent something real or, if it is a performative utterance, invoke something that is to be done, on the one hand, and, on the other, the act of saying something that engages an “I” with a “you.” The “Joker” delights in the way he manages to do this, because that “you” is taken for granted. He assumes that the audience will think he is funny, though he isn’t. The film may further illuminate one thing the Scorsese films do a pretty good job of invoking: the possibility that theatrical art, and the uses of it in cinema, can give us some purchase on certain forms of instability of character. It is only too bad that a film about a man who can make no true connection with anyone else turns out to also be one that makes no interesting connection between his malaise and ours, or at least that of many people today.
For (must it be said?), we viewers can ask (why not?), what world, society, or form of life could some “progressive” politics offer the Jokers of the world, or the Travis Bickles, other than the failed one of social welfare paternalism and infantile individual or collective passing to the act of an expressive oppositional violence? If the answers are obvious, then we don’t need art to help us find them. But they aren’t, and we do.