Antihero Joker changed the face of cinema
The Joker has had many faces, but the villain’s influence on cinema should not be underestimated.
The figure of the Joker comes in many guises. Criminal mastermind. Trickster. An entertaining supervillain. A CGI Lego character. A fun guy. A psychopath who wants the world to burn. In a new film, Joker, in which he is played by Joaquin Phoenix, he’s a lonely, isolated man called Arthur Fleck, an aspiring comedian who’s been told by his mother that he was born to bring laughter and joy to the world.
What also makes Arthur very different in Todd Phillips’s film is that there is no Batman figure directly in his orbit. Not yet, at any rate. This is an ambiguous origins story, and an incomplete one: who begets Joker, and with what consequences, is debatable and deliberately unclear.
Traditionally, the Batman-Joker nexus is vital. The Joker needs the caped crusader. It’s a relationship of dependence, even if the acknowledgment of this comes freighted with irony. “You complete me,” Heath Ledger’s Joker says to Batman in The Dark Knight, hijacking a line from Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. In The Lego Batman Movie, Batman tells Joker, “You’re the reason I’ve given up a life spent with Russian ballerinas and lady activewear models.” He’s seeking help from his nemesis, and this pitch is just what the needy bad-boy Joker wants to hear.
The Joker made his first appearance in a Batman comic in 1940 as a supervillain in a purple suit, with green hair, a pale face and a penchant for announcing his fiendish schemes in advance, specifying time and target (something also true of Ledger’s incarnation). He’s a master thief and a killer, and his victims die with the rictus of a smile on their faces — a detail that turns up in the modus operandi of Jack Nicholson’s Joker.
The Joker, of course, is also the name of the intruder in a conventional deck of cards. The card doesn’t belong to any of the four suits, and looks completely different from them. A Joker can be high or low, it can add value to a hand, or damage it: it can be a wildcard or one that needs to be discarded, perhaps covertly. The Joker character often uses a playing card as an avatar, a sign of his presence, a warning, a threat.
From his beginning in comic books, the Joker has made his way on to TV and cinema screens and into animation (voiced in one series, curiously enough, by Mark Hamill). His movie incarnations have been notable. Nicholson was first billed in the 1989 Batman, ahead of Michael Keaton as the title character. Ledger’s remarkable performance in The Dark Knight (2008) won him a posthumous Oscar for best supporting actor.
The Joker is first described as having distinctive features — “masklike face, but for the eyes, burning, hate-filled eyes … A smile without mirth: rather a smile of death” as the first comic book has it — but he can also be a master of disguise.
One of the avowed inspirations for his comic-book appearance was a 1928 silent film, Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs, based on a Victor Hugo novel. Conrad Veidt plays the tragic title figure, whose face was carved into a fixed, unnerving grin when he was a child. Veidt’s character, Gwynplaine, is a victim, not a villain, and in that way he has nothing in common with the Clown Prince of Crime, the Harlequin of Hate, as the DC Joker was known.
There was a period when the comic-book Joker became a more genial figure. The 1960s TV series and 1966 feature (both called Batman) established a combination of deadpan delivery from Adam West in the title role and high-camp hijinks from everyone else. The suave Cesar Romero had fun with the Joker role.
“You can do everything you’ve been told not to do as an actor, in other words you can get as hammy as you like and go all out,” he told an interviewer. Romero drew the line, however, at shaving his trademark moustache. He simply covered it up with the white face makeup.
By the time Tim Burton’s lavish, cartoonish 1989 Batman arrived, the Joker’s panache had a nastier edge. Here, Batman was a more tentative figure. Gotham City inhabitants and authority figures didn’t know how to respond to a mysterious giant airborne bat, and the Caped Crusader seemed a little unsure how to project himself.
Nicholson’s Joker is a different matter: assertive and dangerous from the very beginning. He begins as a mobster called Jack Napier, a larger-than-life figure with an uncontrollable violent streak. When he has an accident in a chemical plant, followed by botched plastic surgery, he emerges with green hair and a masklike white face with a fixed grin, everything about him heightened.
The transformation might have frozen his face, but it unlocked his inhibitions. He becomes a vicious vaudevillian putting on a show: the Joker as experimental homicidal artist, laying waste to a city and its inhabitants.
Nicholson apparently co-wrote his dialogue, and watched The Man Who Laughs as part of his preparation, even though his character is completely different to that film’s protagonist.
The Man Who Laughs has been an influential film. Several of its elements run, perhaps coincidentally, through the Joker-Batman narrative and it has had an impact on other stories, too. There have been many adaptations of Hugo’s novel, most recently in 2012, when French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Ameris moved it from Hugo’s English setting to Revolutionary France, bringing the political dimensions of the work closer to home.
Leni’s inventive expressionist film has a political dimension, in that it evokes a society divided between haves and have-nots, aristocrats and the teeming populace, a world of spectacle and disgust, prevailing cynicism and rarely sighted innocence. Gwynplaine feels shame at his appearance, constantly hiding his smile behind a scarf, a coat collar, a handkerchief, his hand. His face is on public display as a carnival attraction, “the man who laughs”, a so-called freak paraded in front of a gaping crowd. Veidt gives a strong, poignant physical performance, full of uncertainty and longing.
The agony and horror of the permanent smile, the face as immovable mask, has been borrowed and transformed several times. Brian De Palma, in The Black Dahlia (2006), the story of a notorious 1950s Los Angeles murder, references the 1928 film on several occasions: the female victim in this historical case had been terribly mutilated, and her wounds included a smile carved into her face. Bertrand Bonello, in his 2011 House of Tolerance, set in a 19th-century French brothel, includes the character of a young woman who has been attacked in this way, haunting the brothel with her presence.
In The Dark Knight, Ledger’s Joker has a distorted version of the clown face makeup, as well as the scars of a carved smile, for which he provides different explanations — including an unfinished one — in the course of the movie. We don’t know which, if any, is true. What we do know is that he’s a self-proclaimed (and extremely well-organised) agent of chaos, whose mission is to watch the world burn. It’s an unhinged yet delicate performance from Ledger, full of dexterity and excess.
He carries out large-scale heists, with the help of criminal gangs, but he doesn’t care about money: he’ll happily burn that, too. He organises deadly schemes to gain psychological leverage or to make philosophical points. At one stage he bets that two groups of people he has taken prisoner will choose murderous self-interest, in an experiment based on his dismissive assessment of human nature.
In 2016, we had another onscreen Joker: Jared Leto, in DC’s Suicide Squad. The premise sees him as a member of a supervillain gang held in a maximum-security prison then freed for a save-the-world black ops mission.
Tattooed, skeletal, with a mouth full of metal and a mannered whisper, this Joker has a reptilian vibe, with a touch of Marilyn Manson. He’s also a man in love, in his own manipulative and possessive way, with psychiatrist turned supervillain Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), who’s even more into folie a deux than he is.
Leto’s account of his preparation for the role seemed as much of a creative achievement as his performance. It included sending bizarre gifts to fellow-cast members ahead of the shoot, to help “build a reality, create a dialogue”.
In the end, hampered by surprisingly limited screen time, he made less of an impression than his partner-in-crime. Robbie is in a sequel, The Suicide Squad, and a Harley Quinn spin-off, Birds of Prey, both to be released in 2020, but another Joker-Quinn film is unconfirmed. This is a rare example of a Joker with a low rather than a high value.
In Phillips’s version, the Joker is alone. There is no Batman as antagonist, although Bruce Wayne makes a brief appearance in the film as a young boy, and there are intimations of a Batman origins story. Bruce’s father, Thomas Wayne, is depicted as a wealthy patriarch who dominates Gotham City with a dismissive contempt for its inhabitants. In circumstances that gradually emerge, he has a role in Arthur’s past and future, although not a completely transparent one.
Gotham City, a metropolis in crisis, is always an important ingredient in the Joker story. If Bruce Wayne/Batman is a wealthy, entitled figure, insulated from the rest of the world, does Joker stand, in his troublemaking, chaotic way, as a symbol of resistance to established order? Is his solitary, outsider status something to aspire to or identify with? Or something he can cynically capitalise on.
There are ways in which the Joker diverges from the DC vision. As many reviewers (including David Stratton in this publication) have noted, Joker is clearly influenced by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and King of Comedy as much as it is by the DC tradition: it’s a connection underlined by the appearance of Robert De Niro, playing a version of the Jerry Lewis character in King of Comedy.
Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is not exactly Rupert Pupkin, the aspiring comic, but he’s no vigilante Travis Bickle either. He’s a fragile, distressed figure, increasingly agitated by events around him. He’s picked on and persecuted; rules and regulations make it hard for him to get the medication he needs. His job is under threat; his dreams are likely to be thwarted. There’s always the possibility that he will break apart, and a rising sense of dread about what that breaking point might lead to.
Phoenix gives a ferocious, vulnerable performance. In a few ways, he’s more like the character from The Man Who Laughs, someone trapped in the appearance of mirth, exploited as spectacle. Arthur has a condition that causes him to laugh compulsively, at inappropriate moments, and there are many occasions when he is misunderstood or treated with contempt.
Like Gwynplaine, the man who laughs, he’s a member of a ragtag entertainment organisation, appearing in clown costume on the street and at children’s hospital wards. He dreams of a career in stand-up, and prepares for a tryout.
Like the character he played in Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here — although he’s different in significant ways — he lives with his elderly mother (Frances Conroy), whom he tends to lovingly. They are fans of late-night TV host Murray Franklin (De Niro) and Arthur dreams of being on his show.
In our first glimpse of Arthur he is applying his clown make-up. Can the Joker also be considered a clown? Does he draw on the strange, baleful associations that the figure often carries: recent examples include Pennywise, the terrifying child-killing clown of Stephen King’s It, or the worldwide phenomenon of “creepy clown” sightings between 2016 and 2017, scenes of public panic that were accompanied by almost no instances of actual crime or threat.
The Joker inspires others, but indirectly — the disaffected of Gotham City adopt the Clown/Joker persona, but in response to something Thomas Wayne says. By the end, however, as circumstances push Arthur towards the edge, he assumes an identity in part bestowed on him, in part channelled by him. It’s as if, unwittingly, he embraces the legacy of the DC character as he takes on a more flamboyant, confident, dangerous guise.
There are many contentious issues and provocations that Phillips brings up, some more deftly than others, including matters of race, power, violence, the depiction of mental illness and the operation of authority. It’s a messy, shifting scenario — and by the end of the film, the Joker is quite definitely wild.
Joker opens on Thursday