I watched Joker (dir. Todd Phillips) tonight – coincidentally exactly four years to the day after its US and UK theatrical release.
It’s an emotionally and intellectually involving piece of work, with a standout central performance from Joaquin Phoenix in the title role – and it feels cinematically assured and literate, referencing previous films (notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy with brief well-chosen excerpts from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Mark of Zorro also onscreen) in ways that feel neither extraneous nor overdone. There’s similarly a sense that this film – unschematic, more than the sum of its parts - would support both political (Marxist and/or feminist) and also psychoanalytic readings.
All things considered, it's a film that speaks, one might say, to the psychological shadowiness and torment
of an America which - having elected a former Hollywood actor to the White House
in 1980 at around the time this ‘origin story’ is set and having
then made a worse error thirty-six years later in electing a malignant sado-populist, enabled by so-called ‘reality TV’ - doesn’t now know whether to laugh or cry.
('Send in the clowns...')
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(For proper psychoanalysis of culture, delivered with more
warmth and intelligence than you'll find here, do check out This Jungian Life - and for lots of in-depth discussion of intertextuality in genre cinema, pretend it's still the 1990s and invite some university friends round).
