The Most Offensive Thing About ‘Joker’ Is How Little It Has to Say
The controversial new film is an empty Trojan horse.
Joker discourse has consumed our culture. Since winning the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival, the new comic-book riff has become an unlikely political flashpoint, with some in the media suggesting it could provoke violence even as it breaks financial records. Is Joker dangerous? Is it a violent rallying cry for incels? Is this film simply too inflammatory?
The answer to all of these questions is simple: of course not. No rallying cry has ever been this downright stultifying. Shockingly enough, the director of The Hangover Part III has not made a daring political statement here. Instead, he has made a boring, mediocre super-villain origin story that feints at controversy because it has nothing else remotely interesting up its sleeve. It’s South Park for wannabe film snobs, a “both sides” assault on reason with the political and cultural understanding of a 12-year-old.
Joker pairs every piece of text that could possibly be perceived as violently partisan with an equal and opposite piece of text that tells the story of the other side. Yes, the titular character takes out his anger on a group of Wall Street frat boys on the subway, but later he releases that same energy on a woman who rejects his advances. Yes, he goes off the rails after losing government access to mental health resources, but he also rages against PC culture on a talk show.
If anything, Joker is a movie about itself: a story about how anyone a little angry and very ignorant can latch onto a politically muddled jerk and assume he agrees with them.
Take a quick look around the Internet and you’ll find that both ends of the political spectrum have claimed Joker as their own. Jacobin says that it skewers Reagan-era economics; The American Conservative claims it’s a daring attack on PC culture. Both and neither of these interpretations are true, because Todd Phillips and Scott Silver’s script is one of the most ideologically incoherent pieces of toothless moralizing since the original Iron Man.
Your neoconservative uncle will tell you that Joker reveals just how mentally ill the liberal mob really is. Meanwhile, your dirtbag leftist cousin will tell you it’s an unapologetic look at how the toxicity of capitalism has radicalized a generation. Everyone will be pleased, and no one will be. Phillips has stylized a silly children’s cartoon about a man who dresses up as a clown in the trappings of a Taxi Driver for the 21st century. The director has disguised his own clueless political outlook as a controversial broadside that, deep down, has nothing to say at all.
Have you ever seen a baby try to talk to an adult? They babble away and succeed at approximating the rhythm of a real conversation, but they lack the vocabulary to actually complete the illusion. That’s all Joker is. The only truly shocking thing here is just how easy it was to trick the world that a nihilistic Scorsese knock-off was actually a “Movie for Our Times.”
