Lesser Evils
The Delphi Filmpalast might be my favourite of the Yorck kinos. The first time, catching The Shining, I entered its lobby through an entirely separate establishment. I had a quick and pleasant exchange with a moustachioed bartender, who said the theatre was right through there. “Come get wasted after the movie!” he suggested. I lied and promised I’d think about it.
With only four or five other people in there, and perched right at the back of the whale’s mouth, the Filmpalast that evening felt cavernous. Its seats cascade towards a decent-size screen and tonight, catching Folie à Deux, I noticed it has nifty showbiz lights floating amongst the clouds of crimson drapes. I’m not trying to be a smart ass, just this once, but I found the distance between Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance and Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck wildly disconcerting — given the standard prerequisite for playing Batman villains, and even Batman himself, tends to be: have you leaned all the way into playing a psychopath before.
A new generation of film virtuosos and modern studios pretend to fill this gap with a misguided mix of fan and cinephile service. Thespians step into leading roles, the genre lines are blurred as a performance of sophistication, and sequels and HBO spin-offs (sans super-heroic foil) are sanctioned because this was (ahem) meant to be high art in the first place.
I disliked the first Joker movie because it was cavalier about mental health, and what sort of condition therein could spawn a 2-hour investigation into what maketh a supervillain. I have grown to despise it because it didn’t grasp the basics of its main character: if Gotham is a grey, decaying hellscape, and Batman its shadowy ombudsman, the Joker is equal parts verbal and aesthetic comic relief. His outfits and make-up pop precisely because someone needs to detonate a box full of camp before all this urban depravity chokes us to death. If even the Lego Movie franchise can get that, why the fuck can’t Todd Phillips?
The studios say, and will continue to say, all the right things. They cast Lady Gaga of all goddesses as Harley Quinn. They called the whole thing a musical, because somebody somewhere in the system gets that you can segment the Joker’s worldview from the brutality of his crimes. But the fan service demands its sugar. We need to skip to the bits where loyalists may espy comic book panels, if possible spot Easter eggs in the corners of these frames. We need a constant, thrumming soundtrack to tell us, Hey, even though the art demands we normalise this dude don’t forget he’s going to do some pretty fucked up things …
Repeatedly Arthur Fleck is placed at an existential disadvantage by neglectful legal and health apparatus, so that you can safely get off on the moments a) he turns his rage into homicide, and b) a romantic candidate rescues him from societal exile. When everybody said ‘musical’, and then signed off on subversive storytelling (let alone subversive casting), what happened to the ghoulish, organ-led symphonies of Gotham tales past? Where are the manic schemes of the clown instigator, the grandiose speeches, and (most important of all) the twirling, cackling getaways as sirens and smoke and laughing gas seize the air? Where is that creepy feeling at the back of our minds — certainly mine, way before the neuroses of my 30s — that if we can only be Bruce Wayne in some impossible, far-off future then we can only really be Arthur Fleck here and now?
The moments the movie segues into song, whilst trying and failing to diagnose its protagonist, are sudden, awkward breaks from a tone that is less Gotham gothic and more R-rated Law & Order. Philips implies he could hand Gaga’s pipes the keys if he wanted to, might just shoot the world from beneath Fleck’s shoes doing the can-can, but Folie à Deux never really manifests the couple’s shared imagination. Musically, the Joker and Harley ought meet somewhere only they know – and return to the real world with murderous plots ready to unfold. But they’re only ever dating in theory, or: their destructive partnership needs the story to find them stakes they can decimate.
Instead the film builds and builds towards an urban apocalypse of uncertain scale, only to collapse in lazy, unproven nihilisms about how the world overall is a shitty place where heroes don’t really exist. Why are we here then, at the Filmpalast, powering through without popcorn at the concession stand (again!)? How, why, must the Joker continue to exist in this psychiatric and also narrative vacuum, where we’re asked to suspend both empathetic convention and our baked-in knowledge that his true significant other is and always will be the Dark Knight?
At some point we have to make a call collectively. Leave this stuff where it actually (kind of) (maybe) worked, in a golden era wrought with reckless abandon, technical endeavor, and Tim Burton; or maintain dogmatic fealty to the source material we refuse to let go of. At least the comic books and animated serials weren’t weighed down by self-awareness or the take of overseas box office.
