Let's talk about Joker.
Directed by Todd Phillips (director of The Hangover trilogy, of all people), Joker has turned heads since its announcement by promising an origin story of sorts about probably the most iconic comic book baddie since the medium's birth almost a century ago. While that prospect isn't an entirely new one - it's a story that's been told, with some variations, through his multiple appearances as the antagonist in a never-ending stream of Batman media - this new film, landing Friday, focuses on the Clown Prince of Crime as its main character, with not a superhero in sight to oppose him as he descends from down-on-his-luck schmuck to criminal maniac.
Basically, think Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, under a layer of clown paint.
Depending on who you ask in the comics community, this idea is either a heresy worthy of black-listing, or the kind of bold artistic choice comic movies have been waiting on to legitimize themselves as "real art." I personally fall somewhere in the middle of those two camps, and on the whole, I admit I'm interested to see what they've come up with... but that's not to say I don't have hugeeee reservations about it, to the point where they actually might outweigh any interest -- for reasons that, surprisingly, have very little to do with its comics' roots.
I'm going to run through a brief summary of Mr. J's history in comics & other media to get everyone on the same page, and hopefully offer some context to this new film - but if you want to skip the refresher or don't feel like you need it, scroll on down a bit and, worry not, we'll get to unpacking allllll the baggage we need to.
The Spark Notes' overview of the character is this: after an unfortunate run-in with Batman early in the brooding hero's costumed career, an anonymous, low-level thug falls into a giant vat of chemicals that bleach his hair green & his skin paper-white, and paralyze his face into a hideous, permanent grin. The criminal's sanity snaps, and christening himself as the Joker, he begins a crime wave on Gotham City that has plagued Batman ever since.
Following in the great tradition of super villains posing as the dark side of the same coin to their respective heroes (a literary trope that dates back from the moment Professor Moriarty first strolled coldly into Sherlock Holmes' consulting rooms), Joker is the complete antithesis of the Dark Knight. Batman is somber, rigid, uncompromising, both a product and an enforcer (at times, a brutal one) of ruled, ordered society; Joker is flamboyant, explosively loud and colorful, frozen in eternal laughter even as he commits appalling acts of violence that have no place in society, or even undermine the rules that operate it. One of the adaptations discussed later in this post describes the pair, with perfect succinctness, as an experiment in what happens when "an unstoppable force meets an immovable object." They have been engaged in a now-eighty year dance of pursuit and escalation, a relationship that some writers have pushed into psychological realms of dependency or even infatuation.
The constancy of their dynamic, and Joker's role in it, offers a conveniently telling litmus test to pop culture historians of what was considered "villainy" at any point in the latter half of the 20th century & the beginning decades of the 21st; simply find a Batman comic from a given time and see what the Joker is up to in its pages for your answer. Depending on the contextual era and the residing writer's preferences at the time, Joker has engaged in everything from mischievous pranks - such as releasing laughing gas en masse through Gotham City - to blowing up entire hospitals, more often combining the two extremes into his own trademark brand of crime (using prop gags such as squirting flowers... where instead of water, it's acid).
According to comic-lore, the arch-criminal owes his appearance to the 1928 German Expressionist film The Man Who Laughs, an adaptation of a Victor Hugo story about a circus freak named Gwynplaine who is disfigured during childhood to bear a permanent, horribly unsettling grin. Looking at the publicity photo below of actor Conrad Veidt in his makeup, it's impossible not to see the direct resemblance to the comics figure birthed about a decade later.
Joker debuted with a series of serial murders before seemingly perishing - only to somehow survive and return, again and again, to quickly emerge as a fan favorite in Batman's classic gallery of super villains. When the Caped Crusader inevitably made the leap from printed comics to other media, the Clown Prince of Crime followed him almost immediately.
Older readers (or those with access to Youtube) probably have vivid memories of the mid-to-late 1960s Batman TV series starring Adam West as the super sleuth & Burt Ward as his teenage assistant, Robin. Joker, as played by Hollywood star Cesar Romero (previously typecast in suave, "Latin lover"- type roles), is portrayed here as a cackling, prancing goon, staging ridiculously elaborate pranks and robberies before being knocked out by a right hook and an accompanying SMACK! dialogue tag across the screen. Romero famously refused to shave his trademark mustache for the role, so the makeup team simply slathered on Joker's iconic white face paint over it. The result, like much of the show it belonged to, is ludicrous, and hasn't aged gracefully across the decades... but you can't help but smile watching it. Romero goes for broke in his performance, and his stamp on the role served as the successful entry point for an entire generation into Joker's antics.
Plus - when else would you ever get to see Joker catch some gnarly ones?
(The 60s were weird, folks.)
The character then hovered in and out of popularity for nearly twenty years, before goth godfather Tim Burton brought Gotham's brooding protector to the big screen for the very first time in 1989's Batman. Every frame of the film drips with Burton's trademark gothic fever dream style, and stars a young Michael Keaton in the titular cowl; along with 1978's Superman, Burton's Batman really serves as the forerunner/template for all modern superhero cinema. Despite all these headlines, however, nothing grabbed audiences, then or now, like Jack Nicholson's scene-stealing turn as the criminal clown. Nicholson has made an entire career off his ability to play magnetic psychopaths - Burton here gave him a layer of clown paint, some checkered mobster pants, and room to swing, and the rest is Hollywood history.
With an explosion of popularity after Nicholson's clownery, Joker began appearing in video games, action figures, playing cards, and cartoons - most notably in the masterful mid-90s series Batman: The Animated Adventures. Animation and comics historians list these 90s cartoons as some of the very greatest ever produced, thanks to their distinctive visual style, mature storylines that refused to dumb down their source material to child audiences, and an A-list voice cast... led by none other than Star Wars' farm boy from a galaxy far, far away. Yes, the one and only Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker himself, provided Mistah J's iconic cackles here, reprising the role several times since in spin-offs and even video games; Yours Truly joins a huge amount of fans in listing Hamill's as one of the very best versions of the character to date.
Post 9/11, comics and their film adaptations then followed the rest of the world's shift into grimmer, darker territories; terrorism, and the grey moral ambiguity that often arose in the "good guys'" response to it, became a central theme in comics media, and nowhere was that more on display than Christopher Nolan's landmark Dark Knight trilogy. Totally erasing the camp theatricality of the Burton-era entries, Nolan's Gotham City and its inhabitants are defined to their bones by a gritty realism that seemed more adapted from modern news headlines than comic book page-turners. At the forefront of this brilliant yet sobering treatment was actor Heath Ledger, who checked himself into a hotel room during pre-production for 2008's The Dark Knight with a notebook and a video camera - and emerged a month later as Batman's arch-nemesis.
"Why so serious?"
What Ledger did with the character is considered a landmark performance in cinema. A deeply committed method actor in his approach, Ledger spun the Joker as a twitchy, greasy anarchist bent on nothing less than the complete dissolution of rules and organized society in Gotham. Joker's clown appearance is no longer the result of a toxic chemical bath here, but a layer of clumsily-applied Halloween paint that smears and smudges, and a pair of Glasgow smile-type scars that adorn his cheeks. Even as Batman & the more official channels of Gotham law enforcement have to resort to more extreme (and increasingly unsavory) measures to stop the clown's terrorist wave, Joker dances five steps ahead, presenting his self-appointed title of "an agent of chaos" like a calling card.
Disturbing as it is enthralling to witness, Ledger's work on the Joker helped set box office records and establish standards that superhero cinema is still competing with, even a decade later. It also won Ledger an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor - but posthumously, as the performer died of a sleeping pill overdose several months before The Dark Knight ever premiered. Heartbreakingly, it was discovered post-mortem that Ledger had apparently descended so far through his method acting into the villain's psyche that he was never able to fully climb out again after filming, and had turned to prescription pills as the only means of sleep relief. The onscreen legacy left behind in his wake is a testament to his incredible ability as an actor - but also to the truly evil, dangerous nature of the character.
Which brings us all the way to 2019.
(We're going to ignore Jared Leto's weird Suicide Squad thing with the character because... well yeah, we just are.)
I want to be crystal clear here. I have not yet seen this movie for myself. Accusations that I'm being unfairly premature in making any proclamations about it are valid. As I seem to have just demonstrated at length, something about this particular character is gold. I'm not sure if it's his status as the flip-coin equal of Batman, if it's the temptation he offers to literally laugh in the face of societal rules and norms... maybe people just like the whole creepy clown thing (hello, Pennywise). I really don't know.
Maybe that's what resonates, in a way? Maybe it's that he resists explanation, resists any kind of "definitive" interpretation or categorization - hence why he can alternately have a surf-off with Batman or be an incarnate version of the War on Terror, and both are considered true versions to the character's soul. If a writer or actor can rise (or perhaps more accurately, sink) to Joker's level, the potential is there for some astonishing work - the guy inside the paint this time around, Joaquin Phoenix, is already being tapped for Oscars buzz - and longtime fans should rightly be excited to see this new version answer that challenge.
But. But.
With the world already on edge way back in 2008 about terrorism, mass shootings, and the like, Heath Ledger's "we live in a society where the only way to live is without rules" philosophy was a little too unsettling for some; when a shooter then stormed a screening of the 2012 sequel The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado with his hair dyed to match the arch-criminal and a manifesto citing him as inspiration, the chilling subtext became subtext no longer. Again, with the mountain-sized caveat that I've seen nothing of the film beyond trailers, Joker is about a lonely, mentally-disturbed, bad-break white male who finds the joy he's so desperately been looking for by turning to violent crime. Sound a little too familiar?
What's more, the press tour has been something of a nightmare, as those involved in production have been continually given chances to try and put troubled minds at ease, only to do the exact opposite. This is supposed to be challenging, problematic material, sure, and devil's advocate, they probably wouldn't be doing this interpretation of character justice if they tried to water things down from its current R-rating. Comics are a flexible enough sandbox to allow for such radical interpretations, and tonal diversity in the genre should be welcomed and celebrated. But things have reached such a level of tension here that certain theaters are taking serious precautions at their screenings, banning all audience costumes, while both the U.S. military and the FBI have issued security warnings while monitoring the Internet for any suspicious chatter.
Again, I don't want to say "see" or "don't see" Joker when it drops this weekend. If reports from summer film festivals like the ones in Cannes & Venice are to be believed, you'll sit through more than two hours of incredibly filmed, well-written, spectacularly-acted story that, while it may not be "enjoyable" in the traditional sense of that word, will at minimum push boundaries and create dialogues about mental health awareness and our basic responsibilities to each other in a decent society. But that kind of experience shouldn't come with a price tag - most especially, that of basic safety - and Joker unfortunately doesn't seem like it can guarantee that.
With the kind of invitation Joker seems to send to send (unintentionally, no doubt, but still...) to potential copycats - "yes, you're right, it's not your fault, it was society's all along, you just wanted the attention we never gave you" - is this the movie we need right now? Do we want to give the stand-up spotlight to more Jokers, in a world already so full of them? Perhaps most troubling, if eras are defined by "their Joker," and 2019's is now a main character without a Batman in sight to balance him out... what does that say about where we're at?
That call is up to you - but please, no matter what, just keep your eyes and ears open while you do.
