Joker - The Movie

Are there two versions of this film? One that the American reviewers saw, and the one I saw recently at my local Cineworld?

This is not the Ultimate White Anger movie. That remains the remarkable 1993 movie Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Michael Douglas. “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?” Douglas’ character D-Fens is stone cold sane and sober. He knows exactly what he’s doing, which makes his anger and actions so much more significant. Want to know what Whitey looks like when he gets angry? He looks like D-Fens: it’s deliberate, it’s not pretty, and it’s not backstory.

Joker is backstory: of one of the most well-known baddies in cinema and comics. As that, it is excellent. Unrelenting, intense, gripping, sloshing between wince-making bathos and shocking violence, with a central performance the like of which comes along once a decade.

Joker starts out being a hopeless loser living with his invalided single mother. By the time he strikes out against the three White Boy oafs on the subway, he has a psychotic break. That’s where the touching sequences with the lovely Zazie Beetz come from. I’m not sure if psychotic breaks really work like that, but comic / movie convention says they do.

He has the psychosis because he can’t accept what he’s done. Only Big Bad People kill, and he’s not a Big Bad Person. He’s a loser who idolises Robert de Niro’s TV comedian - some reviewers got very carried away with The King of Comedy references, forgetting that large amounts of cultural appropriation is allowed in comics to ease the creative strain.

However, back in the movie, times are so bad that the majority of the population think that a man who kills three asshole Wall Street guys is pretty much a hero. People show up at protests wearing clown masks.

What do you get when you cross a mentally-ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you deserve...

Not quite. Most mentally-ill loners fade into oblivion, bumbling along under the influence of drugs so awful that there’s no secondary market for them. We’re very carefully told that due to budget cuts Joker can’t get his perfunctory counselling and the bottles of drugs he needs to stay doped-and-functional. He’s off his meds. Literally. His psychosis is over - no more hallucinations involving Zazie Beetz; he has literally killed the source of his dysfunctions (watch the movie to understand that remark); and he is now a conscious moral actor. He is only crazy like a fox.

I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a comedy

A comedy can be about laughs, but it can also be a play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. Joker’s life is that kind of comedy: he triumphs over adversity by becoming a criminal without intent. Which is, of course, the conclusion the film has to reach.

Is there an action take-away from the movie for incels and the downtrodden, ignored and reviled?

If there is, it’s ditch the distractions, the meds, the cliched counselling and advice because those are hiding the real world from you, and you from the real world. Then strike back at those who hurt you. At that point you can see why SJWs would start to get worried. And then Drop out of the economy and live off illegal earnings. Which would get agreement from the Invisible Committee.

Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?

It’s not you. It is getting crazier out there, and the Wokeful and the SJWs are the ones making it crazier.

However, that’s not why the Wokeful circled round Joker. They knew from the Venice Film Festival that Joker was going to be received as one of the best films of the decade. No matter what anyone said, it would make a profit. It would get audiences. So the Wokeful hitched on to Joker's star to get the publicity for their causes.

It’s a good comic-book movie. I’d put it right up there with Watchmen.