Unraveling All the Controversy Surrounding ‘Joker’

Note: The following article contains spoilers for the plot of Joker.

Joker is a fine movie—neither terrible nor great, though graced with a showstopping, occasionally transcendent performance at the center of a thematically muddled story. It envisions an origin for the Joker, Batman’s arch-nemesis, itself a creatively risky endeavor. The menace of the Joker, at least in recent screen iterations and in the last few decades of comic books, stems in crucial part from how impossible it is to make sense of him, a force of random, meaningless chaos and violence who delights in inducing despair at the “pointless” farce of our society. Defining who he was before the green hair and purple suit—giving him a name, an occupation—risks diluting some of the character’s potency. 

It’s canny then of director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver to offer not just an origin story, but a cautionary tale meant to speak to the absurdity of our times. Joker gropes at ideas about mental illness, class conflict and our worship of violence, aiming to be Taxi Driver by way of the DC Universe. But where Taxi Driver—and Joker’s other obvious Scorsese influence, The King of Comedy—indict the cultural impulses that drive such violence and fetishize its perpetrators, Joker can’t quite bring itself to say anything so pointed, let alone political. It settles for being a pastiche of the anti-hero films of yesteryear with a fraction of the bite. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.