Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

          At least since Pagliacci the clown who laughs on the outside while crying on the inside is a most familiar figure, a sentimental cliché, but the much discussed new movie Joker takes that concept a good distance farther.  The title character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) works for a hire-a-clown agency, where he dresses in a costume and waves advertising signs, entertains children at parties and in hospitals.  A man singularly without joy, he suffers from a neurological problem that causes him to laugh uncontrollably for no reason, a condition that, not surprisingly, lands him in trouble when he laughs in the presence of the wrong people at the wrong time.

          A very different person from the Batman’s notorious adversary, Arthur lives with his disabled mother in a crummy apartment in Gotham City, stamping grounds of course for our old friend the Caped Crusader.  (Among references to other movies, including such disparate titles as Psycho and The King of Comedy, the Batman franchise dominates the plot, with names, people, and events that echo the comic books and the films).  Inevitably his character has inspired much learned commentary on his predecessors in the role; his makeup recalls several of them and his behavior perhaps most closely resembles Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character as a sort of Iago, in Coleridge’s words, “motiveless malignity casting about for an occasion.”  Since he lacks the compelling enemy represented by Batman, in effect he ends up striking out at any target that attracts him, and some of the attacks are shocking.

          Dogged by bad luck, his disability, and his extremely odd personality, Arthur finds his world increasingly frustrating, another motivation for his violent actions.  Since the comic book script takes his story all over the place, the movie often teeters on the brink of incoherence, with new stories frequently intersecting with Arthur’s daily life and all its problems; he embarks, for example, on a quest for the man he thinks is his father, a man who also becomes a victim of his increasing distance from reality; he may or may not have a girlfriend who lives in the same apartment building; he may or may not join the audience for a late night television talk show.   At times the movie makes it difficult to discern if he is living in the real world or in a fantasy of his own creation; at a certain point the real and the hallucinated world merge and Arthur commits a series of shocking crimes while the city explodes into violence.  His actions, one of them captured on television, inspire riots that serve as the background to what becomes his homicidal insanity.

          Perhaps because of its origin in comic books, Joker displays a kind of drab, muddy color scheme and a consistently squalid setting.  Gotham City entirely lacks glamor and most of the dwellings, especially Arthur’s apartment, look shabby and grimy, needing paint, repairs, cleaning.  Even the talk show that Arthur ultimately appears on—with Robert De Niro playing the host—looks dark and dull, without the brightness and glitter one would expect from show business.

          Although Joaquim Phoenix no doubt deserves some praise for his performance, which must have been a grueling experience, the horrible sound of his endless cackle and the constant closeups of the pained rictus of his grinning countenance grow difficult to endure.  The insane violence of his actions adds another level of disquiet to the film’s subjects and incoherent themes, which somehow manage to be simultaneously excessive and narrowly defined.    

          Perhaps at least partially as a result of the publicity and the debate surrounding the movie, Joker enjoys a record size box office, and apparently its nihilistic themes strike a chord in certain young people, so troubling a notion that some theaters post a security guard in the audience.  Personally, I am not sorry I saw the film, but somewhat sorry it exists for me to see it.