I don’t usually write about movies on the blog, I tend to stick to economics and politics but this week I want to discuss one of this year’s most discussed movies, Joker. Joker is very much a product of its time, a supervillain origin story about a failed comedian turned unintentional symbol of a populist uprising. In this week’s blog post I want to briefly discuss the political undertones in one of this year’s best movies. Fair warning though, there will be spoilers ahead and the post is written assuming that you’ve seen the film already. If you haven’t consider watching it, it’s good.
Joker is set in the early to mid 80’s where it’s shown that the working class lead tough lives. Arthur’s apartment building is quite grim with lots of graffiti and the streets are full of garbage as a symbol for the city’s poor management. The film displays Arthur as being a good man at heart who through unfortunate circumstance and the callous behaviour of Gotham’s elites becomes a nihilistic, violent murderer and symbol of the rebellion against the ruling elites. The problem for me is that the movies goes out of its way to show that all of Arthur’s victims are bad people who had it coming, making the film a power fantasy about revenge instead of a tragedy about a man’s descent into villainy. Joker is unabashedly populist, making all the authority figures morally bankrupt and out of touch, repeatedly stepping on the working class, minorities, and the mentally ill.
Arthur’s targets are the financial elite, the media elite, and by proxy the political elite as well as the previous generation and Arthur’s former co-worker who set him up to be fired. Arthur kills three bankers, his former co-worker, his mother, a talk-show host and his actions lead to five other on-screen deaths, two police officers killing an innocent protester and subsequently being killed by a mob, and a protester murdering the Wayne’s. The fact that all the avatars for Gotham’s financial, media and political establishment are shown to be cruel with no regard for the regular people coupled with the fact that Arthur’s actions only lead to one ‘civilian’ casualty frames Arthur’s violent lashing out against the establishment as righteous which to me seems to glorify not only a violent murderer but also violent rebellion as the film seems uninterested in discussing the potential downsides to the rebellion Arthur unintentionally starts.
Don’t get me wrong, Joker is a good film with some stellar performances from most of the cast but it also seems to forget that the Joker is supposed to be a villain.
If you liked this post you can read last week's post about intergenerational inequality here, and follow me on Twitter here. Come back next week for a new blog post!
Written by Karl Johansson, Founder of Ipoleco
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