The Joker movies never got the point of the Joker

We live in a landscape where words like ‘reboot’ and ‘retcon’ are common knowledge. Hollywood executives use the word “multiverse” in earnest. No one can talk about “Batman in the movies” anymore – you have to specify it. Nolan Batman? Cutter Batman? Reeves Batman? Magneto by Bryan Singer, or the First class An? Raimi Spider-Man or the Amazing run or the MCU version? Superhero movies don’t have to explain comics anymore. They just can are like comics – places where creative people can drop by, give their take on a long-established character and see what the audience thinks.

The gift this era has given me as a comic book fan and critic is a new thought experiment: What would I think of this superhero movie if it had been a comic book? Did the film find anything insightful about a decades-old character? Did it play well in space, compared to all the other stories that came before it?

I think Matt Reeves’ The Batman might have been even better as a twelve-issue miniseries, giving the characters more time to absorb a new twist on Gotham. On the other side the original Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has So there’s a lot to be said about Spider-Man’s themes of responsibility and identity, and it’s also so inventive with the animated film form that adapting it into a comic would certainly rob it of some of its magic.

But this year my experiment hit a snag when I considered Todd Phillips’ Joker duology. Beyond my own issues with Phillips’ writing and directing, did these two films — which reimagine the Joker as the alternately pathetic and dangerous failed comedian turned successful killer Arthur Fleck — have anything to say about the iconic supervillain? And how did that statement relate to the comics themselves? Of Joker: Folie à Deux Now that it’s streaming on Max, it seemed like a good time to reconsider the question.

And here’s my conclusion: Todd Phillips’ Joker films have nothing to say about Joker comics because they simply don’t deal with the character of the Joker in any recognizable way.

A character’s changeability is a sign of his strength, but characters are not endlessly changeable. How many mutation is acceptable before a character becomes unrecognizable is a topic about which gallons of metaphorical blood has been spilled on digital and personal forums. But I think we can agree that line exists.

You could slowly make changes to Batman – give him weapons, make him agree to kill criminals, take away his money and friends, give him a different themed costume – and eventually he would just become the Punisher. We can argue about where exactly the line would be between the two of them, but that line consists.

And for the Joker, I believe, that line is about his interiority.

Phillips makes many changes to the Joker. His films give him a name, Arthur Fleck, and an inciting incident: he gets harassed by some corporate bros and blows them all away. They give him mommy issues and a longing for a romantic partner, and take away from his rivalry with Batman and his context within a world of theatrical supervillains and powerful superheroes. Folie à Deux has Arthur meditate out loud on the question, “Who is Arthur Fleck?” – via a sad and profoundly delivered knock-knock joke delivered during the closing arguments of a trial in which he has chosen to defend himself, no less.

You can make many changes to the Joker, because good characters are changeable. You can remove it completely a setting where superheroes and villains are commonplaceor remove Batman, and thus his rivalry with him, completely. You can give him one crazy cheater or a terrible psychopath or a Lego man. You can give him obsessions like “Get Batman to acknowledge me” or obstacles to overcome like “accidentally committing tax evasion.”

But if you give the Joker a parsable human interiority, I’d say you’re no longer dealing with the idea of ​​”the Joker” in a meaningful way. I think this is the fundamental core of his character, as reduced, honed, and compressed to a fine point by 80 years of Joker stories and hundreds of ambitious creative minds.

We like to say that the best supervillains are mirror reflections of their heroes, which is fun to apply to Batman and the Joker, because I don’t think there’s anyone who, when asked, “What’s the opposite of a bat?” would answer: “A clown.” If you dig a little deeper, you can draw some contradictions from the way they’re typically characterized: they’re just as theatrically invested in fear, but they direct it in opposite directions.

Batman is silent where the Joker is talkative, and dark where he is colorful. Batman represents order, while the Joker is chaos. But careful! Batman is changeable. He’s not always scary, grim, and lawful, nor is the Joker always flamboyant, deadly, and philosophically chaotic.

What’s unchangeable about Batman is that he does what he does for extremely specific reasons. His motivations are fully known and continually reiterated to the audience. Its core character’s trauma is infamous for how often it has been recreated in adaptation. It has been processed into immortality. With Spider-Man a close second, Batman is the origin story superhero. And so, through the power of the story, Joker is the villain against the origin story.

We don’t know why he does what he does. It’s not even clear if he knows. His interiority is a black box, open to embody our worst fears about man’s inhumanity to man. Titans of the genre have tried to give the Joker a motivating origin story, and none of them have managed to create one that sticks. And while we should never dismiss something as impossible just because no one has done it yet, I also think it behooves us to learn from history.

Even recent history would suffice: it’s hard to find a compelling emotional throughline if you can’t see into the thoughts of your main character, but the 2022 series by Matthew Rosenberg and Carmine Di Giandomenico The Joker: the man who stopped laughing gets around this problem by showing a main character who isn’t sure if he’s really the Joker, or just a man brainwashed by the Joker into a Joker decoy. Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s 2019 series Joker: Killer smilemeanwhile, is actually a series about the Joker’s new psychiatrist.

James Tynion IV and Guillem March’s 2021 joker series tells an amazing story about the Clown Prince of Crime, based on the extremely compelling observation that ex-Police Commissioner James Gordon may be the only person in Gotham City more personal wronged by the Joker than Batman. In their book, Gordon plays the point-of-view character on one Catch me if you can-esque manhunt for the Joker, as he grapples with whether he should just put a bullet in the killer for the good of humanity instead of arresting him.

The Joker said to the thief

This is why I struggled to answer the question “Is this a good Joker story?” to apply. framework for Todd Phillips’ joker And Joker: Folie à Deux. The Joker resists origin stories and clear motivation because they are fundamentally opposed to the narrative purpose he fulfills as the summary of everything Batman opposes. At his most unchanging, Batman is the man who says, “Something senseless has happened to me, and so I must prevent more senseless things from happening.” And what made the Joker his perfect foil is that in his most unchanging form, the Joker is a machine that makes senseless things happen.

If you remove Batman, the character the Joker was cast around, you might still have a Joker story on your hands. And if you change the Joker to be the main character of the story, you might still have a Joker story on your hands. But if you do all that And you explore who the Joker is and why he does what he does – you simply don’t make a story about the Joker anymore.

And that’s fine! There are a lot of characters who aren’t the Joker, and I think we can agree that some of them are actually quite compelling. But you’re not telling me anything striking or new about the Joker, a character developed over the past 80 years into a highly efficient storytelling machine that makes senseless things happen. You made sense to him. You made up a new guy for your story and stuck Joker’s name on him.

That, I think, is what I’d most like to explain to any creative who, like Phillips, sees the superhero genre as a means to an end. I don’t just want to point out the faux pas of dismissing the work of the creators who came before you, of picking up someone else’s toys when you’re not “playing in the space.” Not because I don’t think that’s important, but because I just think that if you’re someone who sees superhero cinema as a means to an end, you probably don’t care about being rude to comic creators.

What I want to see in the skulls of this particular kind of superhero filmmaker is what comics have the work already done. What you are rejecting is decades of evidence of what will or will not work, or will only succeed if you do it like this. Phillips saw the Joker’s lack of an origin story as the freedom to form his own opinion, and not as a sign that the absence of his origin story, despite 80 years of opportunity to create one, was significant.

Refusing to learn from decades of stories created by hard-working creatives developing the same character is rude, sure, sure. But it’s also shooting yourself in the foot.