JOKER is such a dark and heavy film. It depicts the rise and origin of Batman’s arguably most prominent archenemy (starring Joaquin Phoenix).
Todd Phillips must have a reason for making the Joker. A rather simple way of looking at it is from the side of business or sales. VARIETY, an intelligence platform, reported that: “despite mounting controversy and security concerns, the R-rated comic-book movie scored an even bigger debut than the studio initially reported.” It is further reported: “even with Sunday estimates of $93.5 million, ‘Joker’ now stands as the biggest October launch of all time.”
But there’s much to review and reflect on the movie. Its scenes may be disturbing but its message is strong. The discomfort is at the same time the challenge to anyone who would prefer the usual “happily ever after.” Here we have a bad guy in focus. There is no superhero against whom he is contrasted. Precisely why some have been led to think that the antagonist is the protagonist. In focus are “twists” and “negations” – this reminds us what life basically is all about: bad things do happen and sometimes unexpectedly. Perhaps this is why some would say that the movie is so much of a justification of evil’s genealogy.
One, however, has to think beyond his biases in order to generate more creative reflections. Anyone who gets easily absorbed by movies should have himself processed after watching it. Apparently, it is not for children. In an age of (the so-called) post-truth, much has to be discerned between evil as human reality and as a mere subject of artistic license.
There are those who would give a rather postmodern take on the matter. This refers to that trend of privileging micro-narratives or suppressed stories. We have heard of people’s sympathy for the likes of Thanos,
Maleficent, and now the Joker. Some conservative sectors though are not happy with this. It may be a trend but for the critics it is reflective of this generation’s twisted idolatry.
The name Joker “itself” is an irony. He is not funny. In fact he is a symbol of hopelessness. He himself is a “bad joke” and “no joke” at all. But if one would look deeper into the soul of the character, a different kind of truth would emerge before us. At its core, the narrative reveals an irony. The villain is not only a person who experienced suffering, pain, hopelessness, and madness. He is the personification of all these realities. Above all, however, he is the personification of the context from which these realities were shaped.
Joker is the symbol of all the things we dislike and most of all those that societies have long desired to abolish. Sadly, he is also the very symbol of the monsters which societies are capable of creating. Joker represents our illness. But he also stands to remind how we got such an illness. In the end he is the bitter pill we have to swallow if we are to regain our sanity.
It’s not that we glorify evil over goodness, nor promote insanity over sanity. We cannot deny though that every civilization has its madness. Each and every generation has its way of hiding and marginalizing whatever those that lie outside the norms. Social control, however, has its limitations.
Whatever cannot be consciously controlled would slip out or emerge in various forms of reprisals. Sometimes, it would emerge as a joke.
Our battles against our ills both personal and societal always happen as a constant friction and tension of realities we cannot live without much as we want that they be done away with.