We are all clowns
The 2019 film Parasite received the top awards at this year’s Oscars ceremony: Best Motion Picture, Best Director, and Original Screenplay. It not only won for Best Motion Picture, but it also nabbed the Best International Feature Film; it was so good that it won two best film awards! Except that, while it was a good movie that I enjoyed, it wasn’t the best film in its category, or even the best film released last year. It wasn’t better than Joker, a movie directed by a master of comedy, Todd Phillips. Watch out for the scene in Arthur Fleck’s (the clown who becomes the Joker) apartment when he violently kills his co-worker and then spares his other co-worker, a dwarf who was kind to him. I don’t think Parasite was better than some of the other films that were snubbed by the Academy like Dolemite Is My Name, where Eddie Murphy skillfully portrayed the funny and sympathetic role of Rudy Moore, or Jordan Peele’s US. I guess the Academy thinks one Oscar is enough for Peele who won Best Original Screenplay in 2018 for Get Out. When we talk about US, you can’t tell me there was a better performance in all of 2019 than the physical transformation executed by Lupita Nyong’o whose portrayal of the doppelgänger Red, like Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, transformed the movie; it was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. That Lupita wasn’t even nominated is yet another reason why I’ve become less and less enamored with the Oscars over the years. They get it wrong one too many times. Lupita is a hell of an actress—give her the Oscar whenever she steps on screen—but it rubs me the wrong way that the Academy will give Lupita the award for playing a slave in 12 Years a Slave and then completely ignore her when she bodies a double role in US. But that’s Hollywood. And to pass over the Joker for Best Film when it’s a masterpiece is inexplicable. One of the reasons I’ve heard for its loss is because the Academy didn’t want to glorify violence. Well, I think that’s a lame reason because it’s a movie based on fiction. The only thing the film was guilty of was making you feel things, which is what art is supposed to do. While watching Joker, I squirmed uncomfortably in my cushioned seat, diverting my eyes whenever Arthur laughed grotesquely because of a condition he can’t control called pseudobulbar, which immediately draws attention to how different he is. I watched Arthur unsuccessfully fit into the world, because as a sick man who wants to make people laugh while feeling no remorse for killing, his sanity teeters on a broken balance beam. I left the theater feeling…squeamish. Yeah, this movie is grimy.
Anybody who saw Joker would say it was uncomfortable, gritty, and led to conversation; that’s art. Before its release there was a threat of a mass shooting on a U.S. theatre like what happened in Aurora, Colorado when, during a screening of The Dark Knight (where the Joker character was depicted by Heath Ledger), twelve people were killed and seventy injured by a man donning a Joker mask, which led to police officers guarding the entries of movie theaters like sentinels for fear that it would happen again with Joker. The massacre in Colorado was evil and should have never happened. It speaks to the issue of mental health, an issue that is central to Joker. I agree with the statement released by Warner Brothers ahead of the Joker’s premiere: “Gun violence in our society is a critical issue…Make no mistake: Neither the fictional character Joker, nor the film, is an endorsement of real world violence of any kind." It’s true that Joker was unnerving. Phoenix’s portrayal of a mentally ill man is disturbing to watch because we, the viewer, don’t want to feel bad for the shooter. We don’t want to relate to this character we know so well as the villain in the Batman comic books and movies. But anybody who has been through dark times (and who hasn’t?) can understand when Arthur asks his social worker to speak to the psychiatrist about increasing his medications despite being on seven because, he says honestly, “I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore.” Watching the social worker sitting across from Arthur, we learn that she doesn’t listen to him; she doesn’t even remember that Arthur’s pursuing a career in stand up. In his joke diary, he writes “I just hope my death makes more cents than my life,” (has he considered suicide?) and “The worst part about having a mental illness is that people expect you to behave as if you don’t.” These aren’t jokes that would get laughs; they’re just raw, real statements. Arthur’s mental health deteriorates because society fails him: he lives in a broken-down building with a sick mother he takes care of; he depends on social services for his medications, but now the social service program is closing because of funding cuts; and on top of that, there is a revolution happening dubbed the “Kill the Rich A New Movement” against the wealthy in Gotham City, a city plagued with crime and unemployment. We’re witnessing a revolution happening in our world today: We know that when you oppress people, maintaining inequality as the status quo, it’s only so long before the people fight back.
In the final scenes of the movie, Arthur—either in real life or in his imagination— meets his hero, late night TV host Murray Franklin, and admits to killing three businessmen who worked for billionaire Thomas Wayne, inadvertently intensifying the riots whose protestors wear clown masks in Arthur’s image. Throughout the movie, Arthur’s mom writes letters to Wayne, expecting him to respond to her correspondence because he’s the only one who can save them from poverty. But instead of helping the poor, Thomas calls those envious of successful people “clowns,” inspiring picket signs that read “We are all clowns.” Wayne doesn’t want to understand the people or empathize with their plight, merely focusing on the acts of violence. Murray, too, fails to understand what the problem with Wayne is and why Arthur dislikes him. Arthur mocks Murray and asks:
Have you seen what it’s like out there, Murray? Do you actually ever leave the studio? Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy. You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think to be someone like me? To be somebody but themselves? They don’t. They think that we’ll just sit there and take it, like good little boys! That we won’t werewolf and go wild!
Do you actually ever leave the studio? This line particularly struck me because it speaks to the privilege some people have whether it’s because of their class in society, wealth, race, gender; some people are just blind to the problems in this world because they aren’t affected; they live in a bubble—safe and unaware. Arthur doesn’t even feel like he exists because as someone both mentally ill and impoverished, society shuns him. He learns from his mother’s file at the psychiatric division of Arkham State Hospital that as a child he was abused by his mother’s boyfriend, was tied to a radiator and malnourished, and sustained a brain injury. His home was described as a “House of Terror,” so whose fault is it that he’s crazy?
Arthur is relatable and that, along with Phoenix’s delivery of the character, who, impressively, is in every scene of the movie, explains the success of Joker, a masterful work of art that grossed over a billion dollars, the first for an R-rated movie. It’s disturbing how Arthur’s dark thoughts echo the loneliest parts of ourselves. We are all him. His countless cackles are not an expression of happiness but of pain because as he tells his counselor in the beginning of the movie, “All I have are dark thoughts.” You might think Joker is offensive and bad because you don’t leave that movie feeling good. You might prefer Batman, but remember that without the Joker there would be no Batman.
Hutchinson, Bill. “‘Joker’ movie prompts mass shooting threat at US movie theatres.” abcNews, https://abcnews.go.com/US/joker-movie-prompts-mass-shooting- threat-us-movie/story?id=65875724.