Exploiting the Archives: Control Nathan Rabin #91: Hoo Boy Did I Ever Not Care for Joker

Joker is a real clown show, and I don’t mean that in a positive, Insane Clown Posse sense

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’m deep into a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.

Or you can force me to finally watch and write about movies that I have been putting off seeing despite, or perhaps because of their enormous cultural significance. I’m talking about movies like Joker, which one of you kind souls paid me to finally write about, or The Rise of Skywalker, which I would be happy to see for a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledge. 

One of the nice aspects of not being a professional film critic anymore is that I am no longer professionally obligated to have an opinion about everything. If my job still involved watching and reviewing new movies I undoubtedly would have seen and formed an opinion on the creative merits of Joker when it was far and away the biggest thing in not only film but pop culture as well. Joker wasn’t just a runaway surprise blockbuster that won star Joaquin Phoenix the biggest and most prestigious prize in acting in the form of the Best Actor Academy Award: it was a bona fide pop culture phenomenon and the subject of endless, intense debate and countless think pieces. 

Joker didn’t just over-perform commercially for a modestly budgeted, R-rated superhero movie with few of the trappings of the ubiquitous genre: it made a billion dollars. A billion dollars! That is a fuck-ton of money. 

Not having to have an opinion about every buzzed-about new movie suits me just fine. I am of the mindset that people are way too attached to their opinions and the opinions of others, to the point where they sometimes feel like if someone else has a different opinion than they do then that contrasting opinion is an insult that must be avenged or a challenge that must be taken on. 

So I want y’all to know that if you were blown away by Joker, if you found it powerful and moving, relevant and provocative, then I respect the hell out of that. I am not here to deliver a definitive objective judgment on Joker. That would be impossible. Instead I am going to share my ragingly subjective opinion that Joker is an abomination that I despised with every fiber of my being from the first frame to the last. 

To put things in Roger Ebert terms, I hated, hated, hated this movie in no small part because Joker manages to combine many of my all-time favorite things in a concoction I found not just unpalatable or unpleasant but downright repugnant, repellent, vomit-inducing. 

For example, I adore the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s. There is no era of film closer to my heart and Joker goes out of its way to be as gritty and provocative and artful is as 1970s as fashion as humanly possible. Two of my all-time favorite movies are 1976’s Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, which was released in 1982 but has the soul of a New Hollywood movie, in part because it had been in development for so long that for a while Dick Cavett was slated to play the Jerry Lewis role of superstar talk show host Jerry Langford. 

I like superhero and superhero origin stories; I have a special fondness for R-rated superhero and villain movies that take chances and deviate from the trusty D.C/Marvel template like Super, Logan, Deadpool 2 and Punisher: War Zone. If you were to ask me yesterday who my favorite living actor was I would confidently assert Joaquin Phoenix, who delivered three of my all-time favorite performances as punishingly intense spiritual seekers positively vibrating with anger, confusion and desperate longing in Walk the Line, I’m Still Here and The Master. 

Yet somehow Todd Phillips made, in Joker, a 1970s-style character study/super-villain origin story about an alienated, depressed outsider just barely getting by on the fringes of society that borrows unashamedly from Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, overflows with grungy, pre-Giuliani New York atmosphere built around a punishingly intense lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix as a mentally ill loner looking for meaning and identity in an insane world that I not only do not love, but actively despise.

It’d be like if someone designed a partner for me to my precise specifications, someone who would embody everything I want and find admirable and desirable and it somehow ended up looking, acting and talking like Donald Trump, probably the human being I hate most in the world at this point. Alternately, it’d be like if someone combined all your favorite ingredients yet it ended up tasting like sardine-flavored flaming horse shit. 

They have fun! #PairofJokers

Before the crushing disappointment to come I experienced a brief surge of nostalgia and excitement at the appearance of Warner Brothers’ logo from the 1970s. This was one of a seemingly endless series of tributes to the gritty, socially conscious cinema of New Hollywood. 

It was at this point that this slavish homage to all of the things I love almost instantly became something I hated. Joker isn’t just oppressively self-serious and self-important; it’s goddamn dour, solemn, a two hour slog through the depths of human misery.

We open with our hero, anti-hero and villain toiling as a sign spinner dressed as a clown doing the first of an endless series of freaky dances. Despite being the most dedicated sign spinner in the history of sign-spinning, when he’s beaten up by a gang of Hispanic kids who steal his sign, his employer gets angry at him and accuses him of taking the sign himself. 

Arthur’s life is pain. He has a condition that causes him to laugh loudly and inappropriately and constantly, a laugh without joy or light or an iota of happiness, a grim chuckle that feels as sad and angry as anguished sobbing. Along with freaky clown dancing, this angry, unintentional laughing comprises about fifty percent of Phoenix’s uncharacteristically terrible performance. 

He has fun!

As someone who reveres Phoenix’s performance in The Master and identified with it on a level that is not healthy I wasn’t just disappointed by the crude burlesque of mental illness Phoenix offers here; I was disgusted. 

There is no truth or substance to Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck. All is acting. All is artifice. All is punishing intensity in service of a heinously bogus movie that believes in nothing beyond its own supreme importance and greatness. 

I’ve written before about how actors generally win Academy Awards not for best actor so much as they win for most acting. That’s true of Phoenix’s performance here. Arthur Fleck is an alienated urban loner whose brooding angst soon develops a body count once he gets a gun and gives into his rampaging demons exactly like Travis Bickle. But he’s also a failed stand-up comedian who worships a hack late-night talk show host and whose “act” is barren of jokes or comedy but long on psychodrama exactly like Rupert Pupkin. 

Arthur Fleck is Trapert Pupickle, The Taxi Driver of Comedy, but also the Joker, eventually. There is a difference between inspiration and theft. Joker falls unmistakably on the “theft” side of that divide. It’s not derivative of Scorsese masterpieces like Taxi Driver and King of Comedy the same way that Oasis is derivative of The Beatles. Instead it’s derivative of Scorsese the way the Broadway revue Beatlemania—where musician-actors dressed up like the Beatles and played Beatles songs and that was pretty much it—was derivative of the Beatles, to the point that Apple eventually sued them and put them out of business for nakedly stealing from the Fab Four without permission.

Arthur keeps getting abused by the world until one fateful night he’s being menaced by some yuppie Stephen Soundheim devotees/Patrick Bateman types on a subway train who literally sing “Send in the Clowns” while menacing him like some cockeyed West Side Story cosplayers from the wrong decade before Arthur goes all Bernard Goetz and blasts them all with a gun that transforms him INSTANTLY from a impotent, limp prick sad sack victim who lives with mommy  to a big swinging dick full of confidence and malevolent swagger.

Joker shares with terrible variety shows from the 1970s like The Brady Bunch Variety Hour an unshakeable conviction that it is impossible to use “Send In the Clowns” too often, or too literally.

I’m not sure why but for some reason I assumed that Joker would deal with the Batman connection like Teen Titans Go! does, indirectly and artfully, as a matter of inference and allusion. At the very least, I hoped that we would finally be spared a Batman origin story with the painfully cliched image of poor, endlessly traumatized young Bruce Wayne losing his parents to violence all over again, his mother’s pearls spilling artlessly around her as she bleeds to death alongside her husband. 

Nope! We get to experience that all over again. And not only does Bruce Wayne exists in this world, Arthur thinks he’s his half-brother and actually goes to Wayne Manor so he can stick his grubby hands in li’l Bruce’s mouth before being chased away by Alfred Pennyworth. 

There is no subtext in Joker. If the movie wants to deliver a heavy-handed message it has one of its character vomit it forth in painfully didactic dialogue. So when it wants to establish that the government and “the system” doesn’t give a shit about people like Arthur, they have his psychiatrist tell him, “They don’t give a shit about people like you, Arthur.”

Joker further establishes that Thomas Wayne, who is roughly as nuanced and subtle a representation of the moneyed classes as the Monopoly Man or Gilligan’s Island’s Thurston Howell III, looks down on the less fortunate as “clowns” unworthy of shining his monocle or pumping gas into his Rolls Royce, he sneers “those of us who made something of our lives will always look at those who haven't as nothing but clowns” while stroking an invisible handlebar mustache villainously.

Killing cartoonish representations of awful rich white people really gets Arthur’s mojo working. He turns into a psychotic male answer to the Mary Sue; call him a Bloody Lou because despite being so emaciated that he’s essentially a human skeleton and seemingly getting all his exercise via freaky clown dancing as soon as Arthur puts his mind to hurting people in revenge for the way he has been hurt all his life he turns into an impossibly effective killing machine, half  Jason Bourne and half Welterweight Golden Gloves champion. He’s like an idiot-savant when it comes to killing people. 

Joker is incoherent in its racial politics in that its black supporting characters are not human beings so much as abstractions who matter only in how they help shape Arthur’s paranoid worldview and sense of himself as a victim before re-inventing himself as a nihilistic avenger. 

The only exception is Atlanta’s Brian Tyree Henry as an Arkham asylum clerk with the unenviable task of having to deal with Arthur requesting and then stealing files related to his even more mentally ill mother. Henry doesn’t have much dialogue or screen time but his character has a depth, a sense of life, and a realism that sets him apart from the rest of this dreadfully artificial enterprise. He’s a human being with a past and a future in a movie where everyone else is human scenery for Arthur’s rocket ride to hell and super-villaindom. 

The wonderful Zazie Beetz is utterly wasted in the nothing role of a single mother who Arthur develops a delusional fixation on that causes him to imagine that they have a friendship with a distinct edge of flirtation. 

Absolutely nothing in the brief scenes of Arthur acting warmly towards his gorgeous neighbor suggests that they’re anything other than the pathetic romantic delusions of a mentally ill man incapable of having any kind of a real relationship with another human being, let alone having a girlfriend. 

Yet the atrocious, heavy-handed script nevertheless treats the revelation that Arthur’s relationship with her exists almost entirely in his head as SHOCKING and IMPORTANT and something that will set the audience reeling yet again instead of the most clumsily telegraphed twist in the history of film. 

Somewhere along the line Arthur’s stand-up act attracts the attention of a Johnny Carson-like talk show host played by funnyman Robert De Niro. It’s a good thing De Niro was cast or the only way we would know the filmmakers were influenced by King of Comedy would be from all the characters, scenes, dynamics, themes and motifs it shamelessly steals.

As 2016’s The Comedian indelibly and hilariously illustrated, Robert De Niro is an effortlessly, naturally funny human being with a famously light, jovial personality so it’s easy to buy him as a fabulously successful chuckle merchant who runs clips of Arthur bombing at a tiny club without the failed comedian’s knowledge, consent or approval, with insulting commentary of a decidedly personal nature. 

It reminded me of when I was a kid and Johnny Carson would famously feature amateur footage of clearly mentally ill nobodies having psychotic breaks/meltdowns, and then invite these deeply troubled souls to appear on the show without any kind of pre-interview or preparation, so they could get within stabbing or shooting distance of him and his crew. 

With Carson, it was always a toss-up: was he going to interview someone like Burt Reynolds or Dr. Ruth or was he going to try to goad a random person with Borderline Personality Personality into committing an act of violence against him? You never knew until you tuned in. That’s why he was the king of late night: he had a smooth, ingratiating personality and was always needlessly antagonizing the mentally ill. 

Carson, and later Jay Leno did that over and over again and nothing bad ever came of it. It was kind of his shtick.  The same is not true of De Niro’s Murray Franklin, however, who gets shot in the face at close range for his trouble and then all hell breaks loose, as anarchists/revolutionaries/gangsters/nihilists in clown masks riot in protest of Arthur getting arrested for his exceedingly violent, exceedingly public crime. 

Arthur killing the stockbrokers inspires a grassroots movement of angry young men in clown masks whose politics are as nonsensical as the movie’s. Donald Trump famously boasted that his cult of personality was so mindlessly loyal that, in his own words, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Joker imagines a figure who attracts and keeps a mindlessly loyal cult of personality for essentially shooting a whole bunch of folks in the middle of fifth avenue, not despite committing murder in public. 

Murder in public is where Trump draws the line. That’s kind of Joker’s whole thing. Otherwise they’re pretty much the same: weirdly popular conduits for the self-pity, impotent rage and pathetic power fantasies of entitled white man-babies convinced that the world has dealt them a singularly terrible hand.  

In hindsight, it seems a little ridiculous that I was a little worried that Joker would prove too powerful, that it’d be so disturbing that it would invade my nightmares and haunt my psyche like a similarly buzzed about, but infinitely superior movie like US did. 

Boy, did I not have anything to worry about! Joker inspired a strong response in me all right, but it was instead a curious combination of boredom and rage. 

Joker is phonier than a damn Washington D.C Senator or Hollywood celebrity. We, as a society, deserve better. 

Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything and get access to original articles AS I write them and plenty more bonus stuff like exclusive cards featuring Felipe Sobreiro’s amazing artwork for the book at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/cart

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here