G.K. Chesterton once observed that, in the novels of Charles Dickens, there are no characters who are fully evil. Consider his classic villain, Ebenezer Scrooge: although a penny-pinching corporate monster at the beginning of the story, his evil has a very human past, filled with his own experiences of loneliness, unrequited love, and social pressure to pursue greed over human relationship, requiring ghosts in his closet to help awaken him to the relational costs of these social norms and personal choices.
In The Joker, we travel on a Dickens-like journey with the Ghosts of Gotham’s Past, focusing primarily on a man by the name of Arthur Fleck. He is the man who eventually becomes the Joker, but unlike A Christmas Carol, there is no need to introduce Ghosts of the Present or Future because those stories have already been written in previous films. With regards to Arthur Fleck, his future was portrayed most memorably by Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which portrayed the Joker as a character who “is more of a force than a person restricted by space or time; the Joker is not a body, but a panopticon, which makes him more fearsome because he can arrive at any moment at any time. With no ground concept of character or stable back-story, he has no identity, no morality, nothing.”1 The Joker seeks to provide a backstory to such a phantasmic panopticon, considering how it would be possible for social conditions to combine with a frail personality and unique historical tragedies to generate the comedic horror of a quasi-mythological character like the Joker.
The Joker unhesitating affirms that such a character is possible within the real world, and it is the Joker himself who explains how, for he says that his personality is what you get “when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society who abandons him and treats him like trash.” From the very beginning of his life, Arther Fleck was mistreated and abused, left chained to a radiator and beaten by the boyfriend of his unwed single mother. He suffers from further neglect by the deranged psychosis of his unstable mother, the indifference of a wealthy employer (Thomas Wayne, the father of Bruce Wayne), and the general ridicule of everyone around him. Such is the beginning of his mental illness, a deep psychological wound which craves for attention and recognition by anyone for any reason whatsoever. According to the film, the deepest roots for this wound is the absence of his father, for in his wildest dreams, Arthur Fleck is told by his hero Murray Franklin (a comedic talk-show host, played by Robert DeNiro) that “I’d give it all up to have a kid like you”. Fleck spends his whole life dreaming to receive the affirmation of a good father, but it is a dream which never comes true.
Fleck’s primordial paternal wound is relived later in the film when he confronts Thomas Wayne, a person who might be Fleck’s biological father. Fleck tells Wayne that all he wants is to be recognized by the person he thinks is his father: “All I want is maybe a little bit of warmth! How about a hug, Dad!” But Fleck has been the son to nobody, has been given fatherly care by nobody, and he is left with a hyper-affection for recognition that simply cannot be provided by anyone else in the world. Thus it is the absence of a real father, and the subsequent abuse by other fake fathers, which is the earliest and deepest wound responsible for a further series of tragic events which culminate in the genesis of the Joker.
But the film does not begin with Arthur’s birth; instead, we encounter Arthur further along in life. In the opening scene, he is only an incompetent clown, a mentally unstable citizen who, even among his comrades in comedy, is recognized as a social outlier who exists a bit too awkwardly beyond the norm of an adult clown. Fleck is painfully aware that he is perceived by others as an oddity in an already odd world, and no amount of counseling or medication is able to erase this self-awareness, driving him to deeper despair and restlessness.
And then one day, he snaps.
It all begins to unravel when three young professionals approach and ridicule Fleck in an empty train car. In this encounter, Fleck is prepared to endure his daily dose of suffering as another victim to pity-less maltreatment and misunderstanding by others. But these frat boys go further, and they begin to beat him and stomp on him. Even in this beating, Fleck is huddled in the fetal position and prepared to take their abuse. We know that Fleck can take such a beating, for in the first minutes of the film, he is beaten by street kids while huddled up in this same fetal position on the ground (it seems that the abuse of Fleck’s step-father trained him well for such events later in life). But after this first incident, a colleague gives Fleck a gun, a gun which becomes very handy in this next beating, for in a sudden fit of rage (or was it self-defense?) he shoots two of the three frat boys to death, while the third is wounded and tries to escape. Although he has neutralized the threat, Fleck is still not satisfied, and what might have been self-defense at the beginning of his gunslinging becomes cold-blooded murder when he shoots the defenseless and helpless third aggressor on the steps of an empty train station. What does this act generate within the Joker? Not pity or remorse, but rather a psychotic desire to dance. Locking himself in a disgusting inner-city bathroom, he dances slowly and eerily in a place barely worthy for the depositing of urine. Arthur Fleck is starting to become the Joker…
Chronologically, this murder happens about one-fourth of the way into the film, and the rest is spent patiently unraveling the effects of this event that, combined with further tragedies, produce the Joker. What buys Fleck some time is the fact that his murder is just one terrible act amid a culture already swimming in depravity, and he is hailed by many citizens in Gotham as a hero who gave these frat boys exactly what they deserve. In the eyes of one citizen, their death means “three less pricks in Gotham City, and only a million more to go”. Although the Joker could not have been created without his absent father and early abuse, equally indispensable for his development into the Joker is this underlying social depravity, this mob-like herd which understands itself to be the victim of so many inequalities and injustices, and they need a hero for their cause. Ultimately, they are the ones who support Arthur’s development into something more than a sub-par clown, for they are the ones who lift him out of a police car and lead him to safety; they are the ones who plan to kill Thomas Wayne; they are the ones who exalt Fleck and swarm around him at the end of the film. Without this mob, Arthur Fleck is only a mentally ill loner, but with them, he can become “more of a force than a person bound by space or time.”
It is Arthur himself who detects a vulgar heart to this mob when he writes in his journal, “People expect you to behave as if you DON’T”. He makes this note in his journal after observing comedians who make everybody laugh by recounting stories of their bad behavior, and Fleck understands that this is the ultimate moral code of The Mob of Gotham: to behave as if you do not behave. And thus a third and equally important ingredient for the Joker’s genesis is revealed: Gotham is full of citizens who do not behave. Gotham is a moral waste land, where the person running for governor is self-absorbed and greedy, where young professionals beat up innocent loners on the subway, where counselors don’t listen and nobody cares, and everybody is just laughing at the chaos, but it is not a laughter of joy. The entire society is a mirror of Fleck’s own psychological disease, an illness which manifests itself in uncontrollable spasms of laughter which do not correspond to how he is actually feeling. It is an illness that is portrayed powerfully by Joaquin Pheonix and highlighted several times when we see tears run down Fleck’s face during or after a crime, smearing his painted face as he laughs aloud in psychological delusion. In actuality, all of Gotham shares this illness, for their laughter at the immorality of their lives does not reflect joy but rather sadness and despair. The Joker is their hero, not only because he brings “justice” in a world of inequality, but also because he is the perfect reflection of their own tragic lives.
Given the cultural expectation to behave as if you don’t behave, it is no surprise that we encounter not a single “good” person in this film. Everyone is selfish, impulsive, indifferent. The single mother living down the hall expresses the kindest words that Arthur will hear in the entire film: “Please leave”. There may be no such thing as a purely evil person in a Charles Dickens novel, but there is certainly no such thing as a purely good person in The Joker.
The film does not reduce such evil to the personal level but instead invites us, from the beginning to the end, to reflect on structural contributions to this city-wide depravity. For example, there is one concise but crucial scene in which Fleck’s mother says, “Thomas Wayne will make a great mayor. Everybody says so.” When Fleck asks her, “Who is everybody?”, his mother states, “Everybody on the news.” His mother is an isolated individual whose only source of community is the TV, and whatever is said on the news becomes truth for her, but she is not the only person in Gotham to divinize this electromagnetic oracle.
The opening lines of the film are “The news never ends”, which are spoken by a broadcaster over the radio. The next two minutes continue with this broadcaster telling his listeners about all that is evil and wrong in Gotham, and although Fleck is only casually listening, his first lines in the film are “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” He seems to make absolutely no connection between his personal convictions about society and the “news” about society, but the film makes it clear that not only are these two connected, but also that the news comes first.
His uncontrollable dependency on the news is revealed in several other places, especially at the end when he tells Murray Franklin, “Everybody is awful these days. It is enough to make anybody crazy”. If we asked Fleck, “who is everybody?”, he would say the same thing as his mother: “Everybody on the news.” Murray rejects this conclusion, telling Fleck that not everybody is awful, but Fleck is fully committed to what the news has told him, and he insists that everyone is evil, including Murray. Why is Murray evil? “Because you invited me onto this show only to make fun of me.”
There are a few interesting points about this comment from Arthur to Murray. First, even with his mental illness, it should occur to a professional clown that it is the job of a comedian like Murray to make fun of people. Not even Arthur is immune to this expectation, for he mocks his own beloved mother in his only stand-up routine at the comedy club. Second, in the dressing room beforehand, Murray is interested in Fleck, not because he intends to ridicule him throughout the show, but because he thinks Fleck will draw a strong reaction from the crowd. However, Fleck can’t tell comedy from ridicule (this ultimately is his mental illness, and the reason why he is an unsuccessful comedian and an even less successful clown), and this confusion over tragedy versus comedy, of truth versus a joke, causes him to snap in a world that only wants to laugh.
But the joke is on him, because he is just as much of a protagonist as he is a victim of this world of “news”. We see this in the defining question which is left unanswered to the viewer but indubitably answered by Arthur, and that is determining whether or not Thomas Wayne is Arthur Fleck’s biological father.
Arthur receives two contradictory testimonies: Thomas Wayne says that he never slept with Peggy Fleck and that Arthur was only her adopted son while working for Wayne, but Peggy says that Thomas Wayne made up this story to discredit her and cover-up the truth that Arthur is Thomas Wayne’s biological son. So, unable to determine the truth from either source, Arthur decides to consult the medical records of his mother, where he definitively concludes that Peggy did adopt him and also subjected him to the abuse of her boyfriend. Arthur is so certain of this conclusion that he then goes to the hospital and kills his mother, but what is the information Arthur uses to reach this conclusion? Several newspaper clippings contained in the medical records of his mother’s file. Thus, when Arthur can’t determine the truth on his own, it is the newspapers which tell him what to believe, and he believes them with absolute certainty; so certain, in fact, that he is willing to kill his own mother over this news.
For at least half of the duration of the film, someone is either watching the news, listening to news, laughing about the news (this is the primary role of Murray Franklin’s show), or making the news. The citizens of Gotham inhabit a world saturated with screens and filled with audio feeds, sometimes at the center of the frame but most often only in the periphery as something casually unfolding within the scene, a sort-of visual and background “noise” to the entire drama. Although such news is not front-and-center in each scene, Arthur and The Mob reveal just how much it is determining their minds and influencing their actions. It seems that the people of Gotham can’t help but absorb the truth from what is around them, and what is around them is a “news that never stops.” Who, exactly, is controlling this “character” in the film? Such a question is not answered directly, but it would be quite shocking to discover that a billionaire like Thomas Wayne had nothing to do with it.
While the film does not seem to be evoking memories of Martin Luther King, it does resonate with one his most famous quotes: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. The Joker is ultimately created by the accumulation of injustices inflicted upon a mentally unstable human person that is surrounded by other people who, although not suffering from such an extreme mental illness, experience the cumulative effects of Gotham’s social contract to misbehave. This leads to social collapse, and the Joker is the face and symbol of a violent movement to restore equality by any means possible. Fleck is mistreated by his employer, he is betrayed by his colleagues, he is ridiculed by a mother while sitting on a train; in so many situations, one kind act could change his day, but instead, he is only fed a long and constant diet of injustice. Thus the guilt of the Joker’s malice is collectively borne, because it is collectively created; the injustices of Gotham, partially systematic but also very personal, eventually lead to a threat to justice in all of Gotham, and it will take another masked hero with his own version of father wounds to re-stabilize the city.