You Get What You Deserve: A Review of 'Joker'

*spoilers ahead*

I saw a comment on social media that remarked that American liberals were idiots: they praised Black Panther (a fantasy about a neo-liberal, technocratic, African monarchy) and Captain Marvel (a CGI commercial for the Air Force), but lamented Joker as dangerous and disturbed. Why? It was the most thorough going leftist critique of America given in quite awhile. I am in full agreement with this claim, though for many this position requires unpacking what makes something "left".

When I say "left" it's not about Marxism or the faux-left of progressives who simply want to add minorities to the great minority, the rich oligarchy. Rather, what makes Joker a leftist critique is its ruthless social criticism that has no root in the past. Unlike a more conservative, or reactionary, criticism, there's no going back, there's no golden year that has sunk behind the horizon. The past is a series of symptoms only signalling that things are, as Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix; the Joker) remarks, "getting worse". Blade Runner 2049 is another great leftist social commentary: there's no past to return to, the future is the only opening. However, unlike Blade Runner, there's no future community in which hope is deposited. There's no future, there's only destruction. It's a pessimistic criticism that the Joker is not simply someone society has left behind. It's not one of the more reserved leftwing criticisms that behind the veneer there's rot (something David Lynch was quite adept at showcasing in his cinematography). The whole city is drowning in literal garbage, with all gripped with either fear or viciousness (or both). Joker demonstrates that homo lupus homini is Gotham: it's a feature not a bug.

Like the Nolan movies, Gotham is a microcosm for the entire nation; a kind of city-state that tells an allegory of things as they are. Thus, Arthur Fleck's transition into Joker is not a character study but a cipher. While the movie draws heavily upon the vibe of Taxi Driver, it pushes the envelope. He's not simply the ugliness of the American world, the remainder of what Progress has reaped. Rather, Joker is the very soul of the world. It's for this reason that the film continually drops messianic hints throughout. Arthur is an only child and without father. Over his mother's bed hangs an image of the Madonna and Christ child. Arthur discovers, after opening his mother's letter, that he is the child of Thomas Wayne. After various confrontations (revealing Wayne's paternal liberal reformism is as brutal and fanged as the rest of the world), Arthur discovers this revelation was fraudulent. His mother was crazy and had abused Arthur; there was no grand cover-up conspiracy. In the end, Arthur becomes the Joker because there's no redemption. There's no hero coming, no long lost father whose compassion can be drawn down. The only warmth and humanity throughout the movie occurs when Joker fantasizes (and hallucinates) it.


When the movie hits its brutal climax, it comes through the camera lens. Having gained notoriety as a bad comedian when his bit is aired on a popular night show, Arthur is invited on as a guest. The host, the gregarious and fun-loving Murray (Robert DeNiro), is something of an idol for Arthur. In one fantasy, he hopes to be on Murray's show and receive fatherly warmth and acceptance. Instead Murray is bestial, humiliating Arthur and planning to do so again on live TV for better ratings. Asking himself to be called Joker (based on the fact that Murray had called him "this joker"), Arthur reveals to all his involvement in a triple homicide that had incited the city to violence. Arthur had killed three Wall St. young adults on the subway when they attacked him. They were drunk and harassing a woman on the train, and when Arthur's nervous tick of laughing uncontrollably gets the better of him, the men harass him and attack him. In defense, and hitting a breaking point of abuse, Arthur uses a gun he was given for self-defense (which was used to get him fired by a fellow employee). Because he was wearing his clown make-up, police are on the search for a man in a clown-mask.

 These murders had galvanizes resistance towards an elite who are indifferent to lives of the working poor. In protest, the masses condoned the murders as an expression of enraged vengeance, with protesters carrying signs like "Clown for Mayor" and "Kill the Rich". The televised showed compassion for the "best and brightest" but utter contempt for the masses. Joker becomes a kind of anonymous hero, until his televised revelation, an everyman symbol for throwing off the shackles of wage-slavery, city-planned slums, and hoplessness. The politics of this uprising has no goal but destruction: the system can't be reasoned with, fixed, altered, or adjusted, but burned down to avenge the blood and tears of the victimized. The efforts of propaganda had reached their limit: no more time for talk.

Joker is a critique of "fixing" this system. Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullon) is running for mayor to fix the imbalances, to try and solve the problems. But Wayne is also a law-and-order man, having no time for the growing street riots. People need to patiently wait for him to come, to save Gotham, to uplift the poor through greater top-down spending. His paternalism is marketed through newspaper, radio, and TV as heroic (with headlines saying he is the only one who can save Gotham). But the reality is, as the Joker is quite clear, that this is all lies. When on Murray's show, Joker states indignantly that if it were him lying dead on the subway as the Wall St. guys kicked and punched him, they would just step over him, shedding not a single tear. Murray tries to turn this back onto Joker with accusations that this sounds like a sob-story, a justification. But the rules no longer apply. Arthur is quite clear that he's not looking for justification; he's not looking for sympathy from the system anymore.

Murray, as well as his studio audience (us?), don't understand anything that is happening. Instead more idle threats are offered, attempts at cheap psychoanalysis, and an anxious biding of time until the police arrive. Instead the wealthy are insulated, no different than the animal like behavior of the average people encountered throughout the movie. The only difference is that the elite posture themselves as above it. Murray quite fittingly interviews a sex therapist, offering the kind of liberal advice common during the 70s, before Arthur comes on. When welcomed onto the stage, Arthur steps up and kisses the therapist (an older and bourgeois looking woman) on the lips for an uncomfortably long time, leaving her visibly shaken. The commentariat, the politicians, the entertainment industry, all are built upon feeding upon the lives of the despondent, the weak, the foolish. Murray's comedy routine is all about making fun of the idiots through sarcasm, comedic pauses of unbelief, and eye-rolling. It's a fun-loving and family-friendly inhumanity as it feasts upon the flesh of the losers, the burnouts, the roadkill of Gotham.

In the end, Arthur violently summarizes his point when he turns to Murray, pulling out his gun, saying: "you get what you f&*%ing deserve". Murray's brains are splattered, and yet from the TV production room, the audience sees that the network hadn't cut this violence from airing. Gotham got to watch their beloved TV host and comedian executed in graphic display. The point of this, I think, is obvious: Murray's brutalized corpse became a prop, ground up as the machine inevitably rumbled on.

"You get what you f&^%ing deserve" is the radical punch of the movie. The class-consciousness is rage. It's not a revolt and revolution to rebuild the world, but to simply burn the system down. There's no help from within, only the potential for a critical meltdown. The polished and posh faces of the rich, the celebrity, the Wall St. aristocracy are the true masks, the true disguises in a city full of trash. While Arthur paints his face throughout the movie, his final identification with his clown make-up is the true revelation. The face of the clown is the face of the city: we all live in clownworld now. The order of the capitalist city is an unmoored subjectivity that claims dominion through manufactured consent. While Wayne is the face of the orderly reformer, the idea that voting represents the city is given the lie. The people's political preference is to take to the streets and riots, and thus formal democracy appears as a tool to pretend a level of respectability and popularity. Canned laughter is the norm, not the artifice. The artificially smiling face of the sad clown in make-up is the reality.

Joker's increasing brutality throughout the movie makes liberal consciences wince. We, like Thomas Wayne, may want reform, but we abhor the killings, especially of the city's (America's/the West's) best sons. But the whole order is built upon squalor, upon having custom Italian-made leather shoes on the necks of the poor. Even so, the poor are not valorized but are themselves the degraded and degenerate parts of the city. All are corrupted, though some as victims more than vampires. But why do we shy away from the view? Christians especially should appreciate that Joker is more of an Old Testament vengeance than anything. Sow wind and reap the whirlwind. Joker is neither a hero nor a villain, but the system breeding its own destruction, the worm that eats the decayed plant. In OT terms, this worm was not from nowhere but sent from God. Jehu didn't simply come from nowhere to topple the Omarides, but a peculiar emissary of God. The vampires manage the mild and legitimate violence that pulsates throughout the movie until they're forced to reckon with a kind of divine violence. We may strain to grasp this concept, but divine violence is not a subtle and logical application along utilitarian lines. This is not violence to fix the system, excise the corrupt, calculated and precise. Rather it's brutal and unrelenting, appearing from nowhere, a storm suddenly overtaking a region.

Given the messianic imagery, one might paint Joker as a kind of secular anti-Christ. But that would be to dull the criticism. A lazy interpretation will contrast Joker with the Prince of Peace who sacrificed Himself rather than slay the enemies of God. But even after the Crucifixion,Christ strikes down Ananias and Sapphira, kills Herod at the height of his blasphemy, is identified by St. Jude as the same Lord who killed the rebellious Israelites in the Wilderness (blurring any kind of progressive revelation), and is seen by St. John to come again with a sword, unleashing bowls of judgement upon the wicked. But how is this to be reconciled when the sons of Zebedee want to bring fire down upon the rebels? Jesus appears to be both compassionate and vengeful, which does not necessarily match any kind of class lines or outcast status (e.g. Jesus is quite friendly to Zacchaeus, Jairus, Nicodemus and the Roman centurion). However Christ is best understood, it's a hope against hope, not something that crowns an increasingly glorious and harmonious world system.

In short, Joker is a cipher of divine violence, the sudden and shocking overthrow of the city. God's providence is still at work, and the violence apparent in Revelation should shock us, it should unsettle us, and it should undo liberal sentiments. When the poor are eaten up as bread, when lies become the norm and the truth suppressed, when functional atheism becomes the ethics of the day, judgement may overtake such a city as a thief in the night. When we hear "you get what you fucking deserve", may great fear come upon us (c.f. Acts 5:11).

Psalm 14

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. 

The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. 

They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. 

Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the Lord. 

There were they in great fear: for God is in the generation of the righteous.
Ye have shamed the counsel of the poor, because the Lord is his refuge. 

Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! when the Lord bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.