December 5, 2019
I should have recognized one of Joker’s main ploys for what it was at this moment. The troubled, dejected Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) had shared an elevator with pretty neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz). He had followed her around Gotham one day---stalked is the more keen word. And so now she confronts him by knocking on his apartment door. “Were you following me today?” she asks. They begin a romance.
Beautiful women do not show up at the doors of strangers who fancy them, no matter how suitors may dream of it. It turns out only the prologue is real---Arthur has imagined every subsequent, romantic encounter with her. She in fact has not supported him at the comedy club, nor at his mother’s hospital bedside, as we’ve seen. But I felt needlessly torn and misled. When he does daydream, as when he views Robert De Niro’s Late Nite Show and places himself on stage, forging a bond with the host, Todd Phillips frames it clearly. He does not with Sophie.
Fault me if you will for believing the Joker---Why So Serious himself---would have a meet-cute in a dingy elevator, a romance that actually leads somewhere. But I wager most of you did too, for it’s presented that way. The film plays with our expectations through its entirety, where major revelations are later debunked. This fits the film’s and Gotham’s overall feel, its citizens reeling from upheaval, its visitors shocked from unplanned bursts of violence. (“The violence in this movie means to shock,” Glenn Kenny reviewed for Ebert. “And it does.”) But I think it’s deeper than that. This thread involving Arthur’s love interest feels less of a shock and more of a jerk. We are taken too abruptly from considering Arthur as A) someone downtrodden and mentally unstable but still capable of wit and love, still within reach of salvation, to B) someone who all along never had a chance at all. Whose fall is more compelling?
Maybe that is the point. We feel jerked around like Arthur does. But it helps to compare this sequence to other films, acclaimed films, that have succeeded in upending what we’ve seen in reality. What we’ve seen presented as reality. In such films, that is indeed the major conceit, the major revelation, and every deckhand works to serve that purpose. Every detail adds up, masterfully, to that conclusion. Think of The Sixth Sense, or A Beautiful Mind, or to a much lesser extent Fight Club. In each case, that is the film’s soul. To jerk us around seems cheap in comparison.
The rejection Arthur feels becomes the rejection Arthur expects. Gotham has cut his medical funding. He’s suffered untold atrocities as a child. It’s no surprise he would project that previous rejection on any prospect, including Sophie. That much is true; expecting rejection alone can cause the feeling. But my point is that instead of Sophie loving him and perhaps abandoning him, as Phillips has led us to anticipate, Arthur has merely been expecting her denial the whole time. And this differs not simply in semantics but in substance. Being spurned by a partner and cowering before a beauty are altogether different things. For a film that bills itself a psychological foray into the Joker’s mind and origin to trade that much of its hard-spent character-building---“But for Wales?” comes to mind.
Why is this particular choice of Phillips’, maybe peripheral to some, so pivotal to me? It gets at the heart of a man’s confidence, and feelings of inclusion and self-worth---in other words, the very character study of Joker. A man’s career, and a man’s love. Nothing determines his self-worth more, as writers like Jordan Peterson make plain in addressing men’s rejection head-on. So Phillips’ misdirection when it comes to Arthur and Sophie is no small, maniacally, nervous-condition-produced laughing matter. For Joker to succeed, we must witness Arthur transform from beginning to end, and he does, dramatically. But if his starting point also shifts so dramatically, what can we make of the ensuing journey?
2½ of 4
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