Rooting for the Bad Guy
Joker is dark, dirty, and violent. There’s your trigger warning.
It’s also riveting for every single one of its 122 minutes, and manages to be so while posing big questions to its audience, dropping in well-timed absurd humor, and rocking out with a soundtrack including White Room, crooning standards, and heavy classical music that couldn’t possibly underscore the action any better.
Come award season, it won’t matter that the “controversy” surrounding it—that it might inspire people to do bad things, or something—was probably contrived by Warner Brothers to bait story-hungry media organizations into providing free advertising for the film. The Academy simply won’t touch it. That doesn’t change the fact that the shots of the seedy underbelly of New York City are Oscar-worthy and Joaquin Phoenix is so ridiculously good that yes, you wind up rooting for the Joker.
The controversy, such as it is, boils down to this: Joker makes us reflect on what parts we might have played in creating him. We ultimately see his pain and hatred of the world in ourselves. If it does so to a greater extent than other films or books, or on a more visceral level, that’s a testament to the film—not a valid attack on it.
Of course, rooting for the bad guy is nothing new. We root for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for John Q. when he holds a hospital hostage in order to get an emergency heart transplant for his son. What Joker reinforces, then, is that the distinction between good and evil is not objective. That it comes down to whose side of the story is being told and who can tell it better.
Joker’s story is told really freaking well:
Early in the film, he taps into one of our deepest fears (despite all the evidence that the world is safer, healthier, and more literate than ever): “Is it just me or is it getting crazier out there?”
He writes in his journal, “The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t.” While almost everyone in the audience knows what Joker eventually becomes, it’s impossible not to sympathize with him there.
The close-ups on the Joker’s face during fits of uncontrollable laughter make it look more like crying. His first murder comes in self-defense (and includes the always fun subway on-the-train-or-off-the-train dance). He lives in a home, and a world where the only acceptable public persona is to smile, to be happy, when “All I have are negative thoughts,” as he says.
And the clown masks that pop up around Gotham harken back to V for Vendetta, where it wasn’t some manic-depressive, dangerous villain who is the agent of chaos, but a hero to be remembered forever. What, then, sets the Joker apart from V, seeking to rescue his country from an authoritarian regime? Only our subjective interpretation of the systems they seek to change. In Joker’s case, the class warfare — “Kill the Rich” say the newspaper headlines—threatening to erupt would surely make a certain segment of the real-life world happy.
A young Alfred makes a brief appearance that will warm the hearts of diehard Batman fans. An adolescent Bruce Wayne appears, too. And in a way, that’s where this Joker-origin-story film ends, for it leaves one thing absolutely clear: The whole reason that Batman exists is because the Joker does.
If you enjoyed this story — and even if you didn’t — you should check out my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together.
