Joker, a key to reading the film

Who really is the clown?
And what does the figure of the clown represents in society?
It’s simple: the clown is really us, the clown is the normal, ordinary person, I would say, who is forced to wear a mask, every single day — making the best of a bad situation — in order to participate to society, to the working-system, which is often indigestive.
Mask behind which all our suffering hides.
This in fact, just as an introduction to my reading of the movie Joker.
Joker is undoubtedly a great film, maybe even a rare, cinematic pearl (on the wake of a “Fight Club” or a “Shining”), destined to be reviewed many times by spectators, in the following years.
I am more than certain of this.
While, as we know, many other films, often overflowing to the brim with clichés and patterns, re-used a thousand times — today, let’s remember, cinema as culture is rare, often it is just a consumer good — today they disappeared without leaving any trace, in the spectator, in the collective memory.
Although this film is referred to as a violent one, it is not a film of violence, it is not a movie, that, despite a fair number of scenes in which violence is present (some even certainly strong), violence is the heart, or the actual topic treated.
Violence, in the Joker society, is in fact simply the daily bread, the coffee for breakfast, as it is, in our modern western society, mass communication, just to name one.
In short, violence here is something intestine and inseparable from the society in which it lives and manifests itself.
You could also consider Joker as a “prequel” of Batman, but it is actually a film that greatly differs from the series, not only because here Batman has practically no place (just a tangential one); not only because it is not a strictly action-movie, but above all because here the Joker — or rather the figure of the man who will become the Joker — is totally central, so much so as to leave a very marginal space for the Batman to come.
Here it can be glimpsed, Batman, in the guise of a child, son of the billionaire Wayne, and it can still be seen in the dramatic event that will lead him, in the following movies /comics, to become the superhero: the murder of his parents, by the hands of criminals, driven by the “Joker wind”.
But this does not affect the total centrality of the Joker and its life story, which precisely dominates the movie.
I believe that this film easily underlies a series of themes that have become central and increasingly “pulsating” in our society, which is why it deserves special attention, which goes beyond the man told and the history.
I speak of the role of the weaks, in a society that is ever more distant from the real needs of men; from the concentrations of wealth and private properties that make beauty and bad weather over the public interests; of anger, wandering everywhere among the lower classes and the excluded, etc.
A series of themes that put us in front of the mirror — the cinema screen — that which, with a certain margin of approximation, can become our society, if a certain kind of globalization will continue to be supported and perpetrated by the majority.
Moving on to the protagonist, it must be said that Joachim Phoenix’s, much more than an interpretation, is a real complete identification with the character, so strong and pervasive, his part is — which forced him to lose twenty-five kilos — that forced him, even more, to have horrendous crises of laughter, self-suppressed and recurrent, in the images.
Just like those of a neurological patient, real, who must justify himself to others by showing a plasticized business card, explaining his pathological condition.
To conclude, but I think it would be really useful and interesting to open a debate on this movie, what can ever tell us, or teach us, after all, Joker?
Perhaps, that follows him/herself, to the end, in the end, no matter how many mistakes he/she may have made, no matter how much he/she had to deal with his own limits and madness, he/she will still be destined to triumph over the mass.
Or, instead, it will be destined to a straitjacket ..