Sorry, I’m not that well-versed in American culture so I didn’t even know that Malaise Era was a thing before googling it right now. I’ll try to work on my jokes, there’s a good one coming up in the last paragraph of this post.
I read his confidence in front of a camera as a confidence of a suicidal man who found a way out and doesn’t care about anything anymore. I do like that scene and how you can see him becoming a villain right there during this dialogue when he changes his mind and murders the TV personality instead. He probably never does actual Joker thing like blowing up the whole city but after murdering Randall he swims like a Joker and quacks like a Joker. Which clashed with the previous part of the movie for me.
You’re right that I shouldn’t have appeal to the director’s fame, but still, the point is this movie is for a large audience. It’s hard for me to believe that a big movie like that would do “maybe it’s not real” thing without a character in the movie looking into the camera and saying “But maybe it’s not real”. As for early appearance on the show - maybe there’s something to it, even though it was much easier to see as a hallucination cause it was the same episode that Arthur started watching at home. If something like that happened after a fake girlfriend reveal then it would look like the movie gradually leads us to the fact that it’s not going to explain what’s real and what’s not.
My friend’s theory is that the initial movie didn’t even have that imaginary girlfriend reveal. And then test views showed that many viewers didn’t get that the whole romance never happened, and so they did the whole “same scenes after Stalin decided that Zazie Beetz is Trotskyist” routine. Same for a scene where he finds his mother’s photo with Thomas Wayne suggestive scribbling on it - now we know that something really happened between those two, it’s no longer ambiguous. But when you start thinking like that there’s no telling what’s a creative vision and authorial intent you’re supposed to see.
What’s their (Dingus’ and your wife’s) implication (if any) that these deaths in particular aren’t shown? I just interpreted it as predictably timid studio skittishness and not part of a grander theme specific to race or gender or the victim’s income bracket, but maybe I’m being obtuse. (The Joker wears whiteface makeup too; his green hair is a reference to how Gotham despoils the environment!) I was pleasantly surprised we got as much realistic murder coverage as we did. Obviously, I’d have lobbied for the full DePalma…
Refer to your objection to something similar you railed against–albeit on the other end of the spectrum of the surreal–with the movie Ready or Not. Because that’s the first thing I thought, at that moment. That Kelly would be none too pleased.
I was wrong. You’ve totally dismissed it in this case, whereas I see an analogy there. Again…humorifically opposed, but I saw it immediately.
Well, in Ready Or Not it was a CG death in a zany horror-comedy for a kid who had it coming. But you said there was something else thematic and deliberate going on in Joker with respect to race or something (I thought?). We should do a podcast on it!
I believe I covered that distinction above, and I freely admit it’s an imperfect analogy. However, I do think a similar squeamishness applies. The point about the mother’s death is well-taken as well. They go to great lengths to TV her smothering with out-of-focus flailing limbs and anemic whimpering as the pillow descends out-of-frame. But again…I admit it is somewhat of a stretch. It just occurred to me at the time.
If there is a lesson about how temperature works in it, I’m so there.
Most horrifying thing of all: kid Bruce lets a stranger stick his fingers in his mouth and seems perfectly okay with that. I can practically taste them.
I noticed the neighbor Sophie’s strange behavior, but it didn’t occur to me that version of her wasn’t real until the reveal. I just assumed she was another poorly written female character in a male-dominated genre. The reveal was more a relief than a surprise. :P
When we first meet Sophie, she pantomimes shooting herself in response to her daughter’s babbling, and since their elevator encounter, Arthur’s perspective on parent-child relationships has evolved considerably. Combine that with his realization that his relationship with her doesn’t exist – I assume he learns it’s fake at the same time as the audience – and he’s got plenty of reason to wipe them out.
Plus, he leaves the apartment to Scary Music, which is probably the clearest signal.
Like I say, it’s not that it’s not plausible, I just don’t think there’s any actual suggestion that he’s done so and thus I don’t think that the movie is intending that reading. It’s not always as thuddingly obvious as the flashbacks to reveal the nonexistence of their relationship (which I definitely would have taken exception to if it had been real but I never really expected it to be given that his behavior was clearly not something any real woman would find attractive - the only reason I was uncertain was they played that line for so long). But I don’t think it’s an especially subtle movie, either, and I feel like if they’d intended that we’d at least hear gunshots or see a headline about the murder or something. Scary Music feels quite appropriate to him having broken into her apartment and sat there when they don’t actually know each other, even if he just left afterwards. YMMV.
Yeah, I’m with malk. I’d also push pretty hard against the idea that Zazie Beetz and her little girl are killed offscreen, even though I tend to favor darker implications when it comes to offscreen killings of families. There is no internal evidence for Joker murdering anyone offscreen. To the contrary, he has no motivation to kill them, and his past behavior of only killing people “who deserve it” excludes them as possible victims. If murdering the woman he thought he loved – not to mention a little kid! – was part of Joker’s origin story, good lord, that’s something you’d want to focus on, or at least imply. It’s not something you’d leave open to interpretation.
I didn’t feel much about Joker at all. I guess it’s nice to see a comic book movie have so low stakes and be so character focused, and it’s worth seeing for Phoenix’ performance and the production design alone, but I don’t think it amounts to much in the end. It waves class war signifiers around, but doesn’t do anything with them. The ambiguity Tom found so interesting I don’t think is compelling ambiguity, that drives towards some thematic point. It’s just Phillips being a real goddamn sloppy storyteller.
The Telltale Batman games did as well. Well, not antagonist – he’s still dead. But it’s revealed that he was villainous when he was alive. It’s a take I really like - you don’t get Wayne money innocently, and it makes Bruce more interesting as well.
But speaking of Bruce, I really didn’t need to see that scene again. How many times have we seen the Waynes murdered now?
Smothering someone with a pillow is kind of inherently a discrete kind of murder, and isn’t the more important thing in that scene Joker’s face as he kills his mother rather than seeing a shot of a pillow being pressed down?
A little late here but thanks for doing the podcast. You covered a lot of fridge logic moments (and some I didn’t) that I had including the 7 shots from the revolver in the subway that Dingus noticed. I was just assuming that he managed to insert a spare bullet off screen inside the train.
My close over/under are movies (which I also enjoyed) with similar character stories where violennce triggers their development.
Over: Super Dark Times - makes me queasy in a way that Joker didn’t
Under: Nightcrawler - still a good movie but EDIT: Jake Gyllenhaal is too creepy and not in an entertaining way
My thoughts on the movie is that it is mostly like Taxi Driver but with catharsis. I think the ancestral sideplot seems disjointed from the rest of the arc. It’s also fine to have ambiguity in your main plot but when almost every (unoriginal) plotline (romance interest, biological parents, medicine vs. delusions/psychosis) is left untied it leaves me a little disinterested.
I think the whole tragedy/comedy part of the script was a little on the nose for what theater/cinema is and should have been subtext. The simultaneous laughing/crying seemed like an actor exercise for Joaquin Phoenix (when he can’t even keep his eyes open) but he definately has the sympathetic but villainous quality to his presence.
