The Joke’s On Who?

Amidst the familiarity of threats of violence, condemnation of artistic provocation, and cries for complete free reign over speech the dust is settling on the arguably most iconic villain ever created: Batman’s Joker. Introduced to the masses on April 25th, 1940 the notorious DC antagonist has been assigned every kind of backstory and conflict imaginable — on screen, in video games, in song, and in print. The Joker as a character is the perfect antagonist. He is a stencil that can be filled in over and over again in different colors and approached from different angles; and generation after generation, artist after artist has taken this stencil and filled it in with anxieties of their time. This is why in a social climate filled with equal parts dread, irony, and disillusion a movie like Joker makes so much sense.

The movie touts themes of mental health and class warfare, yet does not seem to care to deliver on either in any meaningful way. Set in a Gotham City (always a stand-in for NYC) of the early 80s, Joker focuses on Arthur Fleck, a downtrodden clown-for-hire with severe mental illnesses, and his struggle as a member of the lower class of Gotham. This is important as the film goes out of its way to stress that the ever-growing class inequality is the cause of most of Arthur’s woes and all of his devolution, including the cutting of public funding for the mental health services that he relies on. It is worth mentioning that this plot point runs parallel to the Regan repeal of The Mental Health Services Act of 1981 because it highlights the central problem with the film…