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The gravity of these words cuts across the gritty veneer of Gotham City where, in Todd Phillips’s sobering big-screen adaptation JOKER, the angst and ennui of modern socioeconomic malaise hover over the city like an impenetrable fog. Across sewage-chocked alleyways, in and out of shoddy public transportation, slinking into their tenement houses, the masses of Gotham’s citizens are reminded of their inescapable fate. In Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), whose journey we follow from rundown man to maniacal murderer, the question of purpose and place in the universe are poignantly laid bare.
From a cinematic standpoint, much has been made of the movie JOKER. We are initially introduced to Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), emotionally damaged yet defiant as he suffers the ignominies of being a clown-for-hire. In true Todd Phillips (The Hangover franchise, War Dogs) style, the coterie of characters that inhabit his big-screen world scarcely exhibit characteristics that bring the audience closer to them. From the social worker assigned to manage Fleck’s mental disorder, to the coworkers that unintentionally upend Fleck’s meager livelihood, every action taken by the citizens of Gotham inexorably lend themselves to Phillips’s vignettes of human suffering. When speaking on the subject of poverty, Phillips has achieved in JOKER a level of anthropological nuance that should give the viewer some pause.
Setting aside the topic of Arthur Fleck’s mental illness (a topic that has made for contentious critical discussion), Fleck embodies a deeper societal pressure that seeps from the screen into the real lives of modern man. A study done by the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare indicated that men tend to feel less hopeful when in poverty than women. While controversial, books like Emerson Eggerichs’s Love and Respect correlate well with the aforementioned study. In his treatise on human relationships between genders, Eggerichs makes the case that men value respect as paramount to love.
Poverty is a condition that strips people not only of material wealth but also of societal benchmarks like respect. In the case of impoverished Arthur Fleck, all of his attempts to court respect are snubbed. The mother who scolds him on the bus for playfully attending to her child. The talk show host, gloating in Fleck’s flat comedy routine. Everywhere he turns, Fleck encounters people who deprive him of respect. As he ominously states towards the film’s climax, “it’s enough to make anyone crazy.”
As financial markets soar to dizzying heights, seventy-eight percent of American citizens live paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile, politicians and pundits continue to praise stratospheric economic growth, stating that people are better off than they have been historically. This is most likely true, and yet, in our daily news, the plight of the working poor are splashed across news headlines and written about in bestselling books. From the homelessness crisis in California to the decimation of the rural Midwest by globalization and automation, for many, the illusory American dream forever remains a mirage in the growing desert of inequality.
In a particularly ironic twist, Phillips introduces Thomas Wayne, the billionaire father of Bruce Wayne, as the all-too-familiar archetype of an industry man, emboldened by his own success, convinced that his rightful role is to manage the fortunes of a Gotham that “has lost its way.” Emerging for media interviews and charity events, Wayne’s appearances in JOKER depict a man floating above the impenetrable fog of poverty that suffocates men like Arthur Fleck.
Indeed, Fleck’s journey through poverty unfolds like a panoply of unfortunate events. His mother, Penny Fleck (Frances Conroy), largely figures as a positive force in Arthur’s life. From drawing her baths to waltzing with her in the blue, TV screen light, the mother and child dynamic between the Flecks show how human empathy transcends socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, we are still in director Todd Phillips’s reality, where sentimental strings resonate for a moment before they are drowned out by despair.
For poor men like Arthur Fleck, Gotham is a place where despair takes center stage. Many of the moments we experience with him invite us to be a fly on the wall in the life of a have-not. At the end of each day, Fleck drags himself up a gauntlet of steps, beset by the sea of soulless block towers that loom behind him. One may ask oneself, much like Arthur is asked from the article’s introductory question, what purpose is served by living such a life?
In his review of Heartland, Sarah Smarsh’s elegiac memoir on the multi-generational poverty, critic Dennis McDaniel ruminates on the concept of bootstrapping, the idea that the less fortunate are determined to work hard, perhaps harder than others, in hopes that their work will be rewarded. Of course, the irony of McDaniel is that, like the fictitious Arthur Fleck, those in Smarsh’s work who embrace the “bootstrap” mindset are most often cheated by it.
In JOKER, Thomas Wayne reacts fiercely to the horrible subway murders of three of his employees, all upper-middle-class, waspy archetypes. In an interview, Wayne states of the lower class Gothamite who committed the act, that the privileged “will always see them as clowns.” Within the shadow of this heinous act, Wayne manages to broadly paint the cities struggling majority as jointly and severally culpable, laying the prophetic groundwork for the movie’s climax that pits bootstrapper against the system.
Much like with financial markets, many politicians tout record low unemployment rates as the case that, as a society, we are thriving. Once more, reality fails to match rhetoric, as it is thought that forty percent of Americans are a paycheck away from poverty. And in Gotham, where the license plates are affixed with the slogan – Industry First – socioeconomic unrest bubbles over in the wake of the murders. When Gotham society gathers to enjoy a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times – a movie about the struggles of the labor class in the industrial age – one can’t help but think that Phillips chose to use the moment as a metaphor for our current society.
When we watch stylized portrayals of human hardship, much like JOKER, we can become desensitized to the unvarnished reality of poverty that surrounds us in our everyday life. Arthur Fleck’s character is an extreme and thankfully fictional example of what happens when the socioeconomic system destroys a man’s desire to chase (in his own tragic way) his American dream. Above its superhero origins and cinematic sheen, JOKER’s larger portrayal of the motif of poverty, especially its effect on the male psyche, is a topic we should all take interest in.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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