The Tragedy of the Bastard: A Counter-Review of 'Joker'

https://jacobitemag.com/2019/10/16/bastard-moves/

  As a follow-up to  my review, most reviews of Joker fall flat. They are two-dimensional, especially those from limp-wristed liberals worried about incel mass-shooters. They can't understand the appeal of this movie. As one dope I know put it: why do I want to watch one more movie about an incel white guy? If that's all you took from the movie, then you are frankly incapable of understanding anything about our contemporary moment.

The above review is not like that. It actually pays attention to the many details and layers of the movie. But that's why it was a frustrating read. The author is right to resist a superficial leftist read of the movie ("if only Joker got his pills, he'd be fine! It's a critique of a broken healthcare system and social inequality!"). However, he only doubles-down on the inhumanity of the movie, upset about the "ressentiment" that Fleck absorbs, reproduces, embodies, and ultimately (and cowardly) cannot express. The whole review is an exercise in missing the point, oblivious to key details (like the messianic imagery peppered throughout) and fixated on misreadings (Joker's fingers "penetrating" young Bruce Wayne's mouth when he forces him to smile). It is simply an evil assessment of a complicated figure: the bastard.

The disturbed contempt the author holds Arthur Fleck in is manifest in his quote from Nietzsche. Disgusted with the man of "ressentiment", Nietzsche flays the coward who hides his pain through deflection, becoming ultimately ignorant of himself. The malignancy of his rage begins to seep into everything until it explodes, but it does not even do so directly. Instead the rage of the weak becomes cunning, which surpasses even the noble of soul. I'm not really sure how Nietzsche can correlate this account with his love of Homeric Greece, which was archetypically cunning, manipulative, and dishonest (one can read The Odyssey as Odysseus' inward failure to ever truly find out who he is, only ever getting home by abandoning the project and losing himself in an infinitely deferred disguise). But anyway, this anchor point becomes the analytical lens for Arthur Fleck.

Ultimately, the difference of review comes down to anthropological claims. The author sees Arthur's delusions (not unlike his mother's) as imbecilic and a pathetic sob and Thomas Wayne's punch to the nose as painful, but rightly administered, medicine. He completely misreads Arthur's relationship with his neighbor as some kind of incel delusion derived from his faux-charisma which emerged from his "yogic death dance" post-murder. Instead, all of this is a bid for Arthur to recover his humanity. While the author sneers at the void of having of a father, I see a desiccated humanity crying out for Heaven. Where he sees a taking conquest of his neighbor in a delusional self-triumph, I see a hallucination of a help meet and partner become a mirage for man dying in the desert of capitalism. Wayne is not normal or normative patriarchy, but its liberal instantiation: falsely compassionate, detached.

When Fleck embraces his identity as The Joker and kills Murray the talk-show host, this is not the triumph of ressentiment. The avoidance of politics (manifest in the Joker's denial that his acts were political) is not an attempt to avoid responsibility. Rather, as I've said, the movie channels biblical themes in a dark and foreboding way. Fleck becomes an angel of death, a pure channel for divine violence that would, through his representation (accidental, but then embraced), burn the wicked city down to the ground. By giving up on politics, Fleck has abandoned the liberal project. He has shown it for the vampiric force of capital that it always is: pretending with a paternal face of compassion for its underlying rapacity. It's why Fleck awkwardly kisses the self-professed "sex expert" who was being interviewed before he steps on stage. Her palpable discomfort is a tell that she is actually not the transgressor. The "rational" is itself a slipping mask for the world of monsters that Gotham had become. It's how Thomas Wayne can talk about the three murdered Wall St. goons as shining exemplar of the city who had been cut down. It's not overstatement: these boys, who were not above rape and murder, were the true face of the system before it received studio lighting and make-up. But the people, who had been reduced to rage, were done believing. The time for talk was over.

The tragedy of the bastard is the tragedy of a shattered identity. Like mirrors, who we are is defined through the myriad of relationships we have (between us and our family, our neighbors, our country, our world, our environment, and ultimately our gods, whether the true God or the demons). Arthur is defined through negativity: a missing father, an absent mother (he has to basically mother her), a missing friend, a missing love. He dreams of having a father who would accept him, of a woman who would support and love him, of a missing family that would embrace him. He can only reflect illusions of a past unknown and thus a present broken and rudderless. However, Joker finally finds his place as a channel for something: he bears the image of Gotham. He is not the city's hero or savior, the movie is not about a redemptive figure or someone to imitate. Instead, he becomes a bearer of judgement. He embraces this as he becomes the Joker, becoming (in a particular sense) the messianic figure his mother wanted. When he says he isn't doing this for politics, this is denying the attempt to rationalize. Judgement doesn't "make sense", it doesn't follow a utilitarian logic of precision.

As an aside, it's from such a vantage that we ought to understand biblical judgements. People who try to justify the conquest of Canaan through bean-counting (i.e. "God didn't kill that many people! It was mostly forts and military targets! It had a purpose!" etc.) are mistaken. They don't understand, what even a Jewish Atheist Walter Benjamin understood, that divine violence defies these categories. It's not about renormalizing, it's about total destruction. All divine judgement patterns the Noahic flood: it is divine grief and divine vengeance. It's about a complete meltdown of all preexisting patterns. It is not precise, it is obliterative. It's a return to the chaotic morass of darkness that one sees in Genesis 1:2. Liberal goofball postmillenialism that thinks Jesus will descend and say "wow, you guys did a nice job! Show me where you put my throne" is imbecilic. While I don't think Earth will literally be blown up (and we get beamed up to "somewhere" else), the eschatology will come like fire and melt the elements of this world. It will be sudden, swift, and shocking. Like a thief in the night. The powers that be will be overthrown, the pillars of the earth will shake, and all things, bathed in divine light, will be made new. Everything will be put to rights.

Anyway, back to the movie and the review, when the Joker defies Murray's attempts to peg him (are you doing this for attention!? this won't fix things! what do you want?!) are literally laughed off. That's why Arthur's disorder is so fitting within the context of divine violence. The moment of catastrophe is when God laughs (Ps. 2:4). The planning, the scheming, the bargaining, all of it comes to not. Murray can't see it, but the game's up, the dance is over, the music has stopped playing. Politics is within a frame of reference, but what happens when it has become so bloated, corrupted, degraded, and rotted? The whole thing is sent into the flames. Judgement is the end of politics.

The tragedy of the bastard is in that Arthur does not become what he hopes. He becomes representative of the system's collapse. He doesn't find a father, a mother, a girl, a family. Instead, appearing from nowhere, he sweeps it all away. It's why The Joker doesn't really have "an end". There's no day after, that's not the point of the story. The last scene, in the asylum, replaying a slapstick Chaplin scene, is an a-temporalized warning. Like the laughing millionaires who sat watching Modern Times even as they were living it, so too are we living in the same degraded milieu. Will judgement sweep up away, like the literally trash-filled Gotham? While the Christian might see the Only-Begotten is the only hope, He appears as the Way through the fire and flames of judgement. First Israel, then the World. First Christ, then His People. Suspended judgement is the eschatological drama between a two-fold act. We live in the shadow of the cross, will we heed its lesson? We stand under judgement, will it pass over us?

The above review has basically an aristocratic Nietzschean approach. It only looks at Arthur as a rat among rats, scurrying in the sewer, unable to receive a corrective wake-up from noble Thomas Wayne. Instead, he tears everything in a manic display of impotent power. But the contrast to this point of view is Arthur as a cypher for the city. He is the worm that gnaws away the plant. He becomes a subjective-negative, the palpable emptiness of what is missing and what has been stolen. The future looms like a shadow of judgement. Rather than sit in scorn, the scoffer who mocks and sneers, will we repent before we too get what we deserve?