Joker (2019) Review - Part II (Binge in the time of Corona)

Captain Passive spends 90 minutes getting the shot kicked out of him and 30 minutes shooting people who don’t deserve it. He acts like vermin, gets treated like vermin, and incites fear of the mentally handicapped. Thank you Captain Passive, you fear mongering dipshit!

Smoke and Bullshit

I would accept the subtext as complex and controversial if the film was not so fucking pleased with the amateurish banality of the unreliable narrator. Look how we turned his girlfriend into Tyler Durden, we're so insidious. He masturbates on the bed with his hand in his underwear and then gets the call from the talk show, is it all a fantasy? He enters a fridge you can’t get open from the inside, is it real? We fooled you, we're so sophisticated, haha!

This is the same kind of “subversion of expectations” as The Last Jedi, that is, proud of how directionless and empty it is. This is like if Batman Forever ended with Batman not saving Robin or Chase Meridian, but instead it revealed the whole thing was an RPG campaign Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent and Edward Nigma are playing. Unexpected, like making a left turn off a bridge. The universe contains organic options, some expected, some unexpected, all organic. To chose to make everything in the story unreliable means there are no stakes as all of this might be the hallucination of a mental patient doodling in his own shit. Investment requires immersion, immersion requires stakes, stakes require consistency, consistency requires credible reality. If all of the film reality is not credible, I have no investment in any of it.

The Fucking Monologue

Then came the monologue, the reason why Joker Jokers, the summary of everything we learned in the last 90 minutes. This was it, the reason why we sat and suffered the smug satisfaction of the film as it overdosed on its own farts. So why is the clown prince of crime the way he is, what makes him tick? The answer is: "the world is terrible, so I'll kill whoever annoys me". And then he shoots the host in the head because he laughed at him once. Wow.

I’m so glad I sat through 90 minutes of brain-damaged torture porn for this, this message is truly on a Cloud Atlas level. Step aside Good Will Hunting, this is what an abuse victim with PTSD and mental superiority should be like. The Joker, the fucking Joker, Batman’s greatest nemesis for 80 years, the agent of chaos, the clown prince of crime, is an angry thug with a gun. Arthur Fleck has the backstory of a Joker’s henchmen. The Joker tricked a swat team by dressing the hostages as kidnappers and vice versa, tricked Superman to commit horrors, turned Gotham into zombies, and drove Harley Quinn to insanity, could Fleck do any of that?

The lazy kills

No, Fleck couldn’t do any of that, because he is too busy killing the wrong people. He truly believes in his message of “I’m pissed and you’re close, so you have it coming.” The gang that attacked him and smashed his sign on his face? Nothing. Thomas Wayne? Someone else will take care of it. The boss who fired him? Nope. The city officials who cut his mental health care? Nah. The people who laughed at him at the comedy club? Please, they are too far away and need to work to avenge them. If you are not within pistol range the Joker forgets you, like an NPC with poor artificial intelligence.

We’re not even sure he really killed his mother, she’s shown holding the nurse call button but doesn’t press it, and there are no alarms that go off when a patient dies while attached to instruments. “Unreliable narrator” crows the movie and I die a little inside trying to understand if the talk show shooting was real either.

Let’s go for the kill most likely to have actually happened, Randel, the co-worker. Did Randal deserve to die or is it another lazy kill? Randel shows up, presumably to get Arthur to incriminate himself and give that information to the cops. Arthur then kills Randel in front of a witness and lets the witness go. So, Arthur killed a man in order not to go to jail, in front of a witness he releases, before going out to kill the talk show host on-air/to commit suicide on-air. What? This makes no functional sense, as the witness is probably what brought the cops down on him as soon as Arthur goes out of the building, so the murder was not to ensure Arthur gets to the talk show. Was Arthur enacting some deep revenge that could not wait? Nope, all Randel did was just contributed in a minor way to Arthur losing his job, and came sniffing for dirt, not exactly a "My name is Inigo Montoya" level motivation. Does anybody remember that the Joker is The Dark Knight used violence to advance his goals? The bank heist, and the assaults on Dent and Gordon and the two boats, all pushed his agenda. Arthur is just a petty asshole who kills based on proximity and mild insults, not much of a foil to Batman.