Peter Goers: New Joker film is subversive and dangerous
The Joaquin Phoenix vehicle ‘The Joker’ is going to get innocent people killed, writes Peter Goers. Remember when comic stories were supposed to be fun?
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The movie Joker is boffo at the box office but is subversive and dangerous. It will kill people. Innocents will die because of this ugly movie not only because it is a celebration of nihilistic violence (like much Hollywood fare) but it actually encourages morons to riot and kill people – even kill your friends who try to help you and innocent police doing their job.
Joker says kill and become famous and loved. Kill because you can.
This old cineaste has never been so distressed by a movie. I saw it nearly a week ago and it has upset me almost every moment since.
A bad movie is easily dismissed but this is a suspect, ugly, portentous movie.
The first hour of Joker is promising. We’re in Gotham City, circa 1980, in a garbage strike. Arthur Fleck is mentally ill and works as a party clown and, after suffering social and medical neglect, goes off his meds and succumbs to psychosis.
There’s an ultra-violent scene in a subway train which steals from A Clockwork Orange followed by Arthur’s macabre dance of death.
The subsequent hour is illogical, over-egged and tragically one long dog-whistle, calling morons, dropouts and the mentally ill to mayhem and murder. Not just in the movie but beyond.
It’s a call to incels to kill. Incel is a term for involuntarily celibate young men who fail to engage with life other than through a computer screen.
We all know an incel.
They compulsively kill and maim on computer games and also live through websites encouraging misogyny, misanthropy, rape, self-pity, self-loathing and victim-blaming.
They leave their fetid bedrooms in houses shared with their concerned mothers only to go to midnight screenings of Star Wars and comic book movies and live for the fake, commercialised mythology of these movies.
Joker says to them: Go out and kill, massacre and maim. In America’s obsessive, endlessly excused gun culture there have been 322 gun massacres so far this year alone and Joker will cause more because it inspires violence as the only solution.
Comic books used to be fun.
I stopped reading them at age eight after a brief infatuation with Scrooge McDuck.
The celebrated Batman 60s TV series was wholesome, funny and camp. But superhero movies became darker and darker in tone, style and even literally noir.
Joker is almost exclusively set in dusk or night.
What was always intended as parody (including Star Wars) became as real as religion to so many young people lost in life.
Christopher Nolan’s genius Batman movies are dark, stylish and moral.
Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the greatest film performances as he skips through sadism – and we love to hate him.
I wept when he died because we probably lost the greatest actor of all time.
Ledger IS the Joker.
Joaquin Phoenix just acts – with occasional bravura among self-indulgent, campy, ham. That’s no crime but it’s dishonest in a dishonest picture.
Joker begins and ends in mindless violence and, indeed, the first shot of the film is the whole film in close-up prologue.
Joker rips off many other movies.
It is often audacious and aesthetically fascinating, too often prosaic and predictable and incomprehensible at the same time.
The sun never shines on good here. Evil flourishes in this movie’s darkness.
Tragically, the Joker is on us. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
■ Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide