{"id":147294,"date":"2019-11-11T12:01:42","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T12:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=147294"},"modified":"2019-11-19T10:58:32","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T10:58:32","slug":"whats-jokers-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/11\/whats-jokers-joke\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Joker\u2019s Joke?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c<\/em>Cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book and plant flowers?\u201d<\/em>
\n— Rodriguez, \u201cCause<\/em>\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not funny, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n

When I went to see Joker, <\/em>the new Todd Philips\u2019 film, there were five other people in the theater in the liberal, up-scale tourist town populated by wealthy second-home owners, exiles for the most part from Gotham City (NYC). When the cave\u2019s wall lit up, there was a string of shadows projected onto it, advertisements looping repetitively for the town\u2019s \u201cadvantages,\u201d specifically \u201cliving and working in the same community,\u201d something next to impossible in the town except for the affluent people who didn\u2019t want to see Joker<\/em>, the story of a guy in New York City whose penurious and fragile existence belies the false innocence of the wealthy elites who deny succor to the suffering poor, as the obscene gap between them grows apace.<\/p>\n

It occurred to me that Joker, with his keen eye for the ironic hypocrisies of all that surrounds him, would get a laugh out of these preliminary promotions, for he himself has a bit of a problem and no advantages living and working in NYC.\u00a0 And he would understand why the rich would shun his story, having no doubt heard that it was violent, since they are squeamish about violence directed toward their kind, but great supporters of violence directed toward the poor around the world by the American military and at home by the police, both of whom work for them.\u00a0 Such official violence, of course, is something that they never have to see because they live in doll houses constructed out of a vast tapestry of lies and illusions, where the windows don\u2019t open out onto the wider suffering world but reflect inward their self-absorbed lives where people like Joker are invisible.<\/p>\n

The repetitive shadows on the wall in the theater were advertising local services.\u00a0 Real estate, landscaping, high-end jewelry and furniture, life style companies, architects \u2013 all the amenities of the rich and famous.\u00a0 Like those who absented themselves from the theater so as to avoid a painful confrontation with truth, I knew violence was on the horizon and had to laugh at the services being offered before Joker made his first appearance.\u00a0 It was my last laugh.\u00a0 I imagined him laughing also.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

looper.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Then he was there, big as life, Joker, a man emaciated like a Giacometti sculpture portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, who from the moment he appears, brilliantly makes you realize that a poor and suffering thin man exists and attention must be paid. The viewer is mesmerized from the start as Joker, aka Arthur Fleck \u2013 fleck: a small particle, a stain \u2013 tells us that \u201cI just don\u2019t want to feel so bad anymore,\u201d despite the seven medications he takes to ease his pain.\u00a0 This \u201cstain\u201d on the social illusion of fairness and decency is a guy with no money or jewels to believe in, no real estate, no amenities, a guy who has no grass to be cut or beautiful plants to be tended to in his sad concrete apartment where he barely exists with his ill and deeply depressed mother whom he cares for. \u201cI don\u2019t believe in anything,\u201d he tells us, ironically echoing the unacknowledged nihilism of the upper classes.\u00a0 But he has good reasons, while theirs are rooted in their worship of power and money that undergirds the capitalist system of exploitation that creates suffering souls like Arthur, whose mental illness reflects a social system that is insane and violent to its core.\u00a0 It is no joke.<\/p>\n

As I watched his story unfold, I recalled the time frame of the movie, the late 1970s or early 1980s, when my wife and I lived in NYC, subletting various apartments.\u00a0 When we first arrived in our old car, friends put us up at their apartment.\u00a0 We had little money, and the first night when we stayed with our friends, we parked on the street and left most of our suitcases with all our belongings in the car overnight. In the morning, all the suitcases had been stolen.\u00a0 Welcome to Gotham City.\u00a0 While it felt like a liberation to me, as if now I could start a new life, my wife felt otherwise, as might you.\u00a0 But it was our introduction to NYC.\u00a0 And while we were young and educated and had the wherewithal to get jobs to pay the rent and live reasonably well, unlike Arthur Fleck, our time there was a wearing one.\u00a0 The city seemed dirty, unsafe, depressed, depressing, and teetering on the edge of some sort of death.\u00a0 Hope seemed to have died along with the radical dreams of the 1960s when I lived there.\u00a0 After moving from one apartment to another all around Manhattan and Brooklyn, we had our sublet on West 103rd<\/sup> street broken into in broad daylight.\u00a0 We were worn down by it all, and when we took a walk one day along the Hudson River in Riverside Park, we saw ahead of us three very large cats cross the walkway and a woman scream in terror at the sight.\u00a0 As we got closer, we realized the cats were rats, and we took it as a sign to make our exit, as if Camus\u2019 plague were encroaching. So we did so shortly thereafter, borrowing a tent and heading to the country, never to return.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

bbc.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Poor Joker had no such option.\u00a0 He was trapped.\u00a0 Fired from his day job as a clown at children\u2019s parties and store closings, ridiculed and bullied by co-workers, friendless, he continues to dream of being a stand-up celebrity comic as he and his mother laugh at a late-night television talk show they are addicted to.\u00a0 They revere the host, and Arthur dreams of appearing on his show and making his breakthrough in comedy.\u00a0 Laugh or cringe as we may, their reverence for the host, played by Robert DeNiro, reflects American\u2019s dirty open secret: the adoration of celebrities and the wealthy.<\/p>\n

Life goes from bad to worse for the two of them, becoming a total nightmare, and the viewer is drawn into its dream-like confusion, never being sure what is real and what are Arthur\u2019s hallucinations.\u00a0 Fact and fiction meld in a transmogrification that is film\u2019s specialty.\u00a0 Like life today in a screen culture, one\u2019s mind vacillates and one wanders through it \u2013 or is it Arthur\u2019s mind \u2013 wondering if what is happening in society is actual or virtual.\u00a0 The viewer feels like he is Arthur\/Joker while observing him, a perfect experience of the schizophrenic state of American life today.<\/p>\n

The suffering Arthur Fleck is abandoned by a cruel American society whose political order cares not a whit for its regular people, and in a penultimate scene when Arthur is appearing on a late-night television show where the snide and condescending host mocks him and his attempt at comedy, Joker says to the host:<\/p>\n

Comedy is subjective, Murray. Isn\u2019t that what they say? All of you, the system that knows so much, you decide what\u2019s right or wrong. The same way that you decide what\u2019s funny or not.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In that quote lies our current fate, the relativistic dark night that has descended on our world since Nietzsche issued his warning about the encroaching nihilism. The system that knows and controls so much decides human truth and what is good and evil, always of course, deciding in its own favor, even to suggest that all is woe and all hope is gone while heading to the bank with its ill-begotten lucre.<\/p>\n

This is the void that frames the film, the nihilistic void that so many wish to avoid. To question. To ask themselves where their culpability lies and what is it, beyond creature comforts and social acceptance, that they truly believe.\u00a0 To understand why jokers like Arthur pop up everywhere.<\/p>\n

But people like Arthur get pushed and pushed to the brink, and they look over and see nothing, not even their own reflections in the water, and conclude that that their only hope is to strike back at the people who personify the systemic violence that reduces them to non-entities.<\/p>\n

After being tormented by three Wall St. types on the subway while in his clown costume, he finally strikes back and kills them after they sing \u201cSend in the Clowns\u201d to harass him. This gains him anonymous notoriety which he starts to relish. \u201cFor my whole life I didn\u2019t know I even really existed,<\/em>\u201d he says, \u201cbut I do. People are starting to notice.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course they aren\u2019t noticing Arthur, but the masked clown whom they now fear. For Joker is the ultimate ironist, a man without a face, the faceless modern, just as all those who hide behind their wealth and public performances are masked actors in a bad play, one they try to control but which sometimes gets out of hand.<\/p>\n

For those who say the film encourages violence, I say no; it holds a mirror up to the violence that undergirds the system of economic and political exploitation that already exists. Of course this too is ironic for a Hollywood movie.\u00a0 Like the films that it echoes \u2013 Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, Network<\/em> \u2013 Joker,<\/em> like all good works of art, is open to polysemous interpretations.\u00a0 It encourages introspection and extrospection.\u00a0 It asks viewers to question themselves and their part in the social charade that passes for a just and equitable society. It asks viewers to contemplate Dr. Martin Luther King\u2019s statement that is as true now as when he uttered it:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own government.\u00a0 I cannot be silent.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The joker\u2019s joke is no joke at all.\u00a0 It is deadly serious.<\/p>\n

When Arthur Fleck says, \u201cI used to think my life was a tragedy, but now I realize it\u2019s a comedy,\u201d<\/em> and unleashes his murderous violent rage with a Joker\u2019s smile, he was turning into those he condemned as his oppressors.\u00a0 Their nihilism became his own; their violence his.<\/p>\n

The film asks us to contemplate such a marriage of seeming opposites, its dialectic, and not turn away from the faces in the mirror.<\/p>\n

\u201cHave you ever noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and the Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us,\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

says Dostoevsky\u2019s Underground man.<\/p>\n

But where are the rats?<\/em>
\nQuick, send in the rats.<\/em>
\nDon\u2019t bother, they\u2019re here.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They have taken complete ownership of Gotham City.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=YCfrS-lpn-A<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The joker\u2019s joke is no joke at all. It is deadly serious. When Arthur Fleck says, \u201cI used to think my life was a tragedy, but now I realize it\u2019s a comedy,\u201d and unleashes his murderous violent rage with a Joker\u2019s smile, he was turning into those he condemned as his oppressors. Their nihilism became his own; their violence his. The film asks us to contemplate such a marriage of seeming opposites, its dialectic, and not turn away from the faces in the mirror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":147298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[915,555,870,70],"class_list":["post-147294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-art","tag-elites","tag-reviews","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}