Joker is a masterpiece of radical cinema

Many of the 1 star ratings for Joker : Folie A Deux are angry that Steffani Germanotta isn’t as hot as Margot Robbie.

Robbie’s Harley Quinn is one of the all time great sex fantasies, up there with chainmail bikini Leia. Super-villain as pornstar.

Steffani Germanotta in her Lady Gaga alter-ego laughs at these male sex fantasies about women.

Her Harley Quinn is a depiction of what the real women under the make-up of our hyper-sexualised fantasies are actually like.

And nothing makes us angrier than having our fantasies shown up as cheap.

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We’ve been living on a diet of force-fed fantasy for twenty years or more.

Fantasies of muscular men in spandex, and hot babes fighting evil, wearing only a swimsuit.

Fantasies of boy wizards, wars among the stars, games of thrones, post-apocalypses and blue alien avatars

Computer Generated Imagery made it possible to put our wildest fantasies on our screens, and we’ve been gorging on fantasy ever since

Then along come Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix and smuggle into a superhero franchise at the heart of our fantasies, a nugget of pure anti-fantasy

The Joker movies aren’t realism. Sadly, the fate of the mentally ill in our society is sadder even than the life of Arthur Fleck.

Instead Joker and its sequel are stories *about* fantasy. How fantasy holds us in a powerful grip, and the high cost of living in our fantasies.

And like the collision of matter and anti-matter

The collision of our fantasy soaked culture with this anti-fantasy movie

Is explosive 

Joker isn’t a Joker movie.

Gen-Xers and Millennials who remember Vertigo comics will know what Joker is.

The Vertigo comics imprint was where DC let its best creators mess with its IP, to remix Batman, Superman and the rest of the pantheon.

Vertigo was formed after the success first of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1985), Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988).

Moore, Miller, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis and a coterie of writers under editor Karen Berger rewrote the DC pantheon and created new characters.

Many of the best Vertigo style comics deconstructed the fantasies of superhero comics into sophisticated anti-fantasies that confronted readers with what our fantasies really are.

The second group of 1 star reviews for the Joker movies are fanboys of Zach Snyder enraged, our just confused, that Joker doesn’t continue the absurd power fantasies of his reign over DC.

The first Joker movie was the cinematic equivalent of a Vertigo comic. It was Todd Philips and Joaquin Phoenix rewriting the Joker archetype

as an indie art house homage to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with a superhero budget

that just happens to be called Joker

a movie about madness and civilization

“Madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.”

Michel Foucault

Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault is a history of how society treats the insane.

Foucault argues that madness and insanity are categories imposed by society on those at the bottom of society, in an act we now commonly call Othering.

The power structures of civilisation are predatory, Foucault’s critique argues. Because it help us deny our own role in this predatory system, we accept a fictional narrative in which the damaged victims of the system are cast as “insane”.

Arthur Fleck is the lowest victim of civilization, an orphan adopted and then abused. He has no status, so fantasises being adored by a chatshow audience. He is not loved so fantasises a lover. He has no power so fantasises killing, a fantasy he then acts out.

As Foucault argues, Arthur Flecks fantasies are a “false solution” that offer no help with the reality of his plight. But calling the fantasies of the victim “madness” is also a false punishment.

The first Joker movie is a carefully balanced dialectic between the forces of civilization and the victims of madness. It’s deliberately uncertain whether Fleck is a victim to be pitied or a monster to be hated.

Joker them goes a step further in its dialectic between madness and civilization.

Arthur Fleck’s fantasies not only bring to light his real problems but begin to give Fleck real status and power as he adopts the fantasy persona of Joker.

That in the Joker sequel will also give him the fantasy of love.

as Folie a Deux dives deeper into the sick fantasies of our civilisation

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As Batman has become an ever more hilarious parade of good actors putting on a silly voice and cashing a pay cheque

Joker is a role great actors actually want to play

Jack Nicholson’s make-up smeared mafiosi. Mark Hamill’s shrieking sociopath. And of course Heath Ledger’s seminal turn in the Dark Knight.

All laid the groundwork for Joaquin Phoenix, the greatest actor of our generation, to make Joker into his kind of story.

Phoenix is the face of the male victim. The little man broken by the world, who hears the lyrics to Folsom Prison Blues and thinks “that’s me”.

The Joker has become more and more the star of the Batman mythos as we’ve started to realise that billionaire industrialists with delusions of grandiosity might not be the “heroes” we’re looking for.

Batman has always been fighting not just crime, but the criminally *insane*, and as we begin to deconstruct the fantasy of insanity used to Other civilization’s victims, Batman looks less like a hero standing against crime, and more like a vigilante hammer of justice coming down on the weak and downtrodden.

And the Joker looks more and more like the rage, anger, violence and destruction of the downtrodden when they finally stand up. The criminal insanity of The Joker becomes the revolutionary potential of Joker.

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The third category of 1 star reviews for the Joker movies are people who dismiss them as “Incel movies”.

You get the distinct impression these people haven’t seen the movies but are repeating talking points from the many “think pieces” attacking the movies on this basis.

At a time to skyrocketing social inequality, it must be comforting for some people to dismiss all the young men alienated from the system and stuck in low paid wage labour with the fantasy that they are all “Incels”

SPOILERS BELOW FOR JOKER FOLIE A DEUX

“We have a perfect name for fantasy realised. It’s called nightmare.”

Slavoj Zizek

Arthur Fleck is finally allowed a moment of true heroism at the finale of Folie A Deux.

Fleck’s complex fantasies and his Joker persona have brought him the status and power he dreamed of. And Fleck can now see that his fantasies will bring him much, much more.

Fleck has encountered what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the “symbolic order” of civilization. The web of laws, institutions, status structures and hierarchies that exist only symbolically by our agreement

And Fleck has discovered that the symbolic order of civilization can be reshaped by his fantasies. His Joker persona strikes the symbolic order in all its weakest places, and could shatter it.

Given a public platform at his own trial, Joker has the power to incite the revolution of the downtrodden masses that could bring the civilization of Gotham crashing down.

But Fleck finds the moral courage to let go of Joker, and the power his fantasy can grant him. And in that moment becomes a better human than most of those who sit in judgement over him.

“It’s just a fantasy. There is Joker. There’s just me.” Arthur Fleck

But Arthur Fleck’s choice is also driven by the nightmare that awaits anyone unfortunate enough to actually realise our fantasies,

In The Plague of Fantasies, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek catalogues the nightmarish collaborative fantasy that is modern capitalist civilisation.

Arthur Fleck’s fantasies have manifested in what Zizek, an acolyte of Lacan calls the Impossible Gaze, in the age of mass media we fantasise ourselves through the gaze of a mediated audience – sports, reality tv, chatshows.

In becoming Joker, Arthur Fleck discovers that the crowd who cheer him turn out to be a crazed mob. The legal system that judges Joker is revealed to be just public theatre. The media, the prison and its guards, the reality of the Impossible Gaze he fantasised is a living nightmare.

And the manic pixie dream girl that Arthur Fleck had always dreamed of finding turns out to be just another human, playing out her own fantasy.

“We aren’t going anywhere Arthur. Fantasy was all we had. And you gave up.” Harley Quinn

Staffani Germanota might be the only actor who could go toe to toe with Joaquin Phoenix in the depiction of insanity and victimhood intertwined.

Lady Gaga is a deconstruction of the male gaze, displaying all the symbols of male sexual fantasy, then selectively amping them up to a repulsive absurdity.

Germanota’s Harley Quinn is a performative fantasy put on just for Arthur Fleck. Lee when we first meet her is a Prozac Nation nation fantasy, the girl in the insane asylum, a constructed persona designed to seduce Joker.

The real woman behind the fantasy is by turns broken, manipulative, lost, powerful, genuinely insane and coldly realistic. The reason men so easily accept simplified fantasies of femininity is because the real human behind them is always unknowably complex.

The anti-fantasy of Joker and its sequel are going to be two of the most hated superhero franchise movies for a long time to come

Audiences fat on our decades long feast of CGI fantasies are never going to welcome the bitter taste of reality on their plate.

But for anyone ready to think critically about the theme of fantasy itself, Joker and Folie A Deux are masterpieces of radical cinema.

And a timely warning that civilizations which cannot face the madness of our conjoined fantasy…

…will be overwhelmed by it

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