SIO212: A Joker Review

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 212. I'm Thomas. That's Jamie. How you doing, Jamie?

0:00:35 Jamie: I'm okay, Thomas, how are you?

0:00:37 Thomas: Oh, wow. I am excited for this episode, but I don't know what to think because I don't know. I had seen the, you know, some of the controversy around Joker and the fact that it seemed from what I was seeing to be the kind of thing that, you you know, is maybe going to be the, the tale of the, uh, the loner white guy who enacts exacts revenge on society and that kind of thing. And I thought, you know, this is going to be a kind of change of pace for this show. We can, we can watch this movie and do some analysis on it.

Do some, uh, you know, give some opinions, and you were down, and I'm so glad you were game to do it, except that meant I had to follow through and actually watch it as as well, but then I watched it, and now I don't know what to think, and we were starting to talk about it, you and I, before recording, and were thinking, let's just talk, we don't really know what each other is going to think on this, let us just talk it out, see where it goes, so we watched Joker, so that you don't have to unless you still want to, that is fine, but I do think that we will have to, you know, I certainly respect the sanctity of spoilers, and I don't

0:01:45 Thomas: I don't want to I'm not going to launch into anything without first giving a warning that I do believe we will have to spoil the movie in order to talk about it in any meaningful way. Um, so if that's something that, you know, is going to break your heart, feel free to pause, come back to this later after you've seen it, but I will also say if you're on the fence about it, um, that it's not, you know, it's not, the spoilers don't really matter, like it's that this is not The Sixth Sense or anything, like, like it's not, you know, I, I personally, uh, of the, on the scale of things where it's like, "oh, you don't want to get this spoiled for you," this is like a zero for me. There's nothing to spoil, but that's my opinion. Feel free to, uh, to either check out and, like I said, pause and come back or whatever you want to do. Sorry, all right. Spoiler warning issued.

0:02:29 Thomas: Considerate issued official. And we will henceforth not care about spoiling stuff. So how do you, how should we start this? What are you

0:02:29 Jamie: Yeah, official.

0:02:38 Jamie: I have so many different thoughts about this, probably worth stating right at the beginning before we get into discovering what we both thought about it, um, that I actually tend to enjoy comic book movies. And so, you know, for most of them, I'm often at the first showing that's there. Not generally DC movies, because those have been largely disappointing. But I, unlike Thomas, I tend to like the comic book movies as a form of escapism and just good old indulgent fun. This one left me conflicted. I'm glad that I saw it, though. This was the best DC movie, I think, that they've done. Recent years.

0:02:52 Thomas: Yeah, hmm.

0:03:23 Thomas: So, wait, the Christian Bale Batmans are in that list, are they?

0:03:27 Jamie: Yeah, no, Those are very good, and I sort of put them in their own class as opposed to the more recent varieties of DC movies that we've been subjected to.

0:03:32 Thomas: Sure. Yeah I haven't watched any of them. I think we should start off by saying we both firmly agree with Stefan Molyneux. No, I'm just kidding, sorry. No, nobody pulled that audio, I was... it's funny, you said you saw a tweet from him and you're gonna send it, I was like, oh great, what fresh nonsense will this be, but it was just him saying he hated the movie. I was, and maybe, I this is the most I've ever agreed with Stefan Molyneux, I think, ever. Yeah.

0:03:45 Jamie: No, no we don't. Yeah, Yeah. So I didn't hate it. Um, you know, and I think his criticisms, the reason that he doesn't like it is probably some of the reasons that I think it's interesting, although I'm not sure that given especially some of the things that the director has said, that it was intended to to have the sort of incisive social commentary that it seemed to have at times. Um, but I don't know, maybe we should give like the setup of the movie to kind of give a more full picture before talking about it. I'm sure.

0:04:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:04:36 Thomas: That's a good point, sure, uh, feel free, go ahead, or

0:04:40 Jamie: Yeah, so this is an origin story for the Joker, and it's an attempt so This is an attempt to explain how, you know, a seemingly regular person goes on to become an iconic villain, and this is actually one of my biggest objections to the movie. Obviously, the the Joker being criminally insane is sort of standard fare for the Batman series. But I felt like this movie got there in a way that was very cheap and kind of lazy and borderline irresponsible. So just to reiterate, spoiler warning, Joker has lived most of his life not being violent. We come to find out that he was abused as a child. Um, but our first meeting with him, he's just this sort of, you know, mentally ill, um, physically disabled, um, person navigating the lower rungs

0:04:46 Thomas: Is it, sorry, we'll get to that later, we'll gets to that later.

0:05:39 Jamie: Of society as well as he can, and then what happens is there are budget cuts and he loses his access to health care and the medication that he needs, needs to treat his various mental health illnesses, and he goes from, you lowly sort of sad character to violent as soon as he goes off his meds. And I just found this not good.

0:06:06 Thomas: Well, and you can combine it with he gets free and easy access to a gun as well, that's kind of a major part of it, which, I mean, I guess that critique of society maybe is good, the fact that like, hey, maybe you shouldn't be able to get gun so easily, or anybody shouldn't be able to get a gun so easily. Yeah.

0:06:24 Jamie: Right, that's an excellent point. So, and the reason that he's given a gun, which is worth pointing out, that it turns out people with mental illness are disproportionately more likely to be the victims of violence than they are to be the perpetrators of it. And consistent with that empirical reality, you know, one of the opening scenes of the movie is him being beaten up. He's literally, you know, kicked in the ribs and abused behind a dumpster. And the reason he's giving this gun is, you know, in the interest of self-defense, or, or so it seems, and he begins to carry this gun around with him everywhere, um, after this more recent trauma occurs to him.

0:07:03 Thomas: I like, you were saying earlier, I can't decide where to even start because I have so many kind of different thoughts about this, and I'm sure you do as well, and who knows how they'll interact, but maybe we should just take a second to mention, like, the potential controversy. People, look, I would have received, I think I would've gone into this movie a lot different had the the director not said the really stupid thing that we actually talked about in the other episode about like, ah, comedies, you can't do it nowadays because the left. And, and had I not already been like, you know, a little annoyed with that, I might've gone into it differently, and, and I might've come out of it differently.

But I actually have to say that like, there was a bit of a, I don't know, there was a bit of a stir about this thing, and like, oh, is this going to to be the typical, like, white male character that people are, that that I don't know, the the kinds of people who have committed mass shootings, aka, you know, white men, basically young white men, are they going to like identify with this guy and be inspired by it in some way? And, like, I don't, of all the problems with it, I'm not really sure about that, like, maybe, but I also don't

0:07:30 Jamie: Yeah.

0:08:17 Thomas: Know that it's any more problematic than a lot of stuff that's still popular, like most things are just violent, you know, like senseless Violence.

0:08:26 Jamie: So, yeah. So Michael Moore definitely tries to make that connection in the review that he posted to his, you know, personal Facebook account, and, you know, I found his assessment of the movie to to not really be consistent with its own internal logic. You know, he's simultaneously comparing the Joker to Trump to the protesters, and he even invokes the Columbine shooters at one point because he's getting at this sense of, you know, aggrievement that people feel, what it's like to exist on the margins of of society. One of the things that really stood out to me while watching this movie is that, you know, Arthur's character, before he becomes the Joker, he clearly is marginalized.

0:08:27 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:13 Jamie: He obviously is existing in a state of, you know, financial destitution. He has, you know, multiple handicaps. And yet, also within the confines of the movie, the only people that he turns to, to sort of buoy him and lift him up, are people of color. And it really sort of struck me the way that we, that this movie sort of centered how it's difficult for white men, and so I do think there is that element where it's always how the world is difficult for white women that tends to get centered, because ultimately there isn't a criticism of how society is awful for so many different people in so many different ways, that sort of falls into the background and isn't really addressed, and I, I think, as you have alluded to, you know, it ends with this white loner dude being held up as a hero after engaging in really horrific types of violence.

0:10:12 Thomas: But then it also, the problem, there's so many problems with this, the main problem that I have, which is this annoying, uh, we'll just make this an explicit show from now on, it's this annoying fucking, uh, Fight Club thing that everybody has to copy, is the unreliable narrator, and then by the end you actually don't even know, know if any of this happened. It's actually, you're not sure if any of this really happened, which turns it all into like, well, then what was the fucking point of all this? And are you really saying anything? But I want to touch on what you said, because I had that very same thought, but I think I would put it in a little bit different way, and hopefully it's valuable. I've been thinking about this, and why it's these characters, like, you know, and it's Heath Ledger's Joker as well.

0:10:58 Thomas: I'm trying to think of the the other ones, it might be the Fight Club movie, maybe. But it's interesting to look at why these stories tend to be so effective and popular, because as we're talking about this movie, it's shattering box office records for this time of year, at least. But, but it's it's quite popular, like, it's people are buying tickets, they're going and seeing it.

And I was just thinking about it, I think it really does come down to this white male entitlement, which is to to say that, like, behind this, the this, the whole movie, so you get this, like, he's beat down by society, literally beat down by society at points, he's doing his best to make a living, but it's as a clown, which, side note, the the horror movie could just be about a clown trying to make him living, and there's nothing else going on, like, it's just that, that's already horrific enough, uh, but now we have a murder clown, you don't even need the murder, but just a clown is already horrific, no, anyway, so, so he's beaten down by society, the neighbor, you know, who's, what's her name? I'm blanking

0:12:02 Jamie: Sophie.

0:12:02 Thomas: On what she's from? Yeah, she's form something that I really like, or like two things that I really like. I think one of them is Easy, a Netflix show, and then there's something else I've seen her in. I really like her. But, you know, the beautiful neighbor is kind of a, people are ignoring him. They don't, you Now, his comedy career isn't going anywhere. And the reason this character at all works for people is because for white men, things are supposed to go well. Like, you you deserve, like, he, Joaquin Phoenix's character, deserves stuff. Like, he doesn't understand why he can't, doesn't just get to be a comedian or just get-to-be-with-a-beautiful neighbor. Uh, but, like, we never have this story, and I'm racking my brain, and please let me know if I'm wrong. We never have this same character, but, like, as a black woman, it would make no sense.

0:12:50 Thomas: Like, for example, you know, she's, by the way, part of, if you did this character for a black woman, she would be, she is completely mediocre or even like sub-par, less, whatever that is, less than par. And she would have no real sense of humor, but expects everybody to laugh at her jokes and then, like, goes on a murderous rampage when, you know, a man isn't, uh, going for it. Like, we never have that character. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't give the audience the same, like, "oh yeah, he showed it to those Wall Street douchebags that he killed on that train." We, we don't really have that same thing with any other character but a white man, because there's the entitlement that, like, this is what's supposed to be handed to white men. If white men play by these rules, then they're supposed to get all this success.

0:13:37 Thomas: And we don't have that same, I guess, mindset for most other groups of people.

0:13:43 Jamie: Yeah, so I actually totally agree with that. And that's why Molyneux's, you know, frustration with this movie was so humorous to me, because all of the things that he's worried about, that it being this sort of left-wing propaganda to raise the social consciousness, just seems to me to be misplaced, because it still takes for granted that at the center of the story, we're supposed to be sympathizing with the white men, and none of the other characters that orbit their world. They are just emotional support devices. They're not people. People. And so I don't think Molyneux really has any reason to worry about the danger that this movie poses to society because of its, you know, left-wing political message. Right?

0:14:31 Thomas: I really don't care about that guy, but I wonder why. He'll come up with some reason that he doesn't like it that's so fucking stupid that it'll be like 2SJW or something. The movie is 2SJW because of some other reason. But anyway, anyway, um, no.

0:14:47 Jamie: And it's not because, at the heart of it, isn't that we need to fundamentally restructure society so that it benefits all people, right? We're not encouraged to feel sympathy for Arthur's mother, who has obviously been equally abandoned to struggle with her mental health and the financial implications about that. We're not encouraged to sympathize with the woman of color, single mom, neighbor next door, who was existing in the exact same circumstances. We are encouraged to identify with the white guy who ends up resorting to really extreme forms of violence as a form of self-empowerment, which, by the way, is like the absolute worst and wrong interpretation of Nietzsche, in case anybody is tempted to conflate the two.

0:14:48 Thomas: It's really not my Biggest

0:15:30 Jamie: No, I-

0:15:31 Thomas: Thing is that I just don't understand the point of making this movie. Like, I really don't. And I have to say, I predicted something like years ago, because I've always hated these comic book movies, and I I, for years I've been saying I'm tired of these fucking things. And then there's 70,000 more of them. But anyway, my prediction was eventually we will get to the point where they'll just be making movies, but, like, it'll fully merge. So we started off where you have these movies that, you know, would be typically thought of as like an Oscar movie, where it's like, it's, yeah, it's dramatic, it's dark, whatever it is. And then you had comic book movies, and there were the goofy things where people put on costumes and and all that. And then my prediction was it was going to merge to where you get the comic book characters, but they just be in movies, and they wouldn't really, you know, they would still have the same names and do, but, like, they would want it to be more mainstreamy Oscar bait stuff.

0:16:22 Thomas: And we got there. Like, I was a hundred percent right. This is just trying to make a movie. And, uh, what bothers me about this is there's no fucking point to it. This really, I'm so, when you're talking earlier, uh, when you were talking about how, like, you normally like these things and I don't, I was actually, I am excited to maybe zag a little bit when people thought I was going to a zig.

This movie should have been more of a comic book movie, because I don't understand the point of this. And this is ruined a little bit, I, I had to, uh, go down a rabbit trail, which I'm mad at this movie for making me do, of, like, okay, what the fuck is going on with this thing?

And it turns out, there's, yeah, there's The Killing Joke, is like the graphic novel that everybody loved, that has the Joker, and, like, there's a line where the Joker, in The Killing Joke, says, "If I have a backstory, I prefer to be multiple choice." And so there's this like Batman in world thing that you don't really, it's better to not explain Joker. And so, in the end, the whole fucking punch line of this might be that, Heath, uh, Heath Ledger, that, uh, Joaquin Phoenix isn't actually Joker. Like, the Joker that'll go on from this to be in the fucking sequel and and fight Batman or do any of that crap is going to be somebody else. It won't actually be him.

And, like like, his, his story was either in his imagination, or it'll be like told to somebody else who will, like, use it to be the real Joker. So that all is just so frustrating and stupid to me. But what, what frustrates me about this is when you go the unreliable narrator route, and you're just telling a story of a guy who's suffering from severe delusions, it ends up being completely pointless.

0:17:56 Thomas: And why is it even a superhero movie? There's no superhero. There's... there's not even really a supervillain of any kind. There's a guy, there's a murder. There's common everyday murder is what there is. Like there's guy who shoots, well, we're not sure. He might've shot nobody or he might've killed his neighbor and his doctor and his whatever, we don't know. But either way, he's not like competent. He's not a plotting, super genius gonna do all the crazy stuff where like in, In, you know, the Heath Ledger one where he's diabolical. He's not any of that. He's just mentally ill. So, it's like, look at the severely mentally ill guy shoot some people. That's all it fucking is.

0:18:38 Jamie: Although, I do have to ask you why you hate fun, um, and happiness, um, because Guardians of the Galaxy is just a good time, um, just Wonderful, um It's No, it's great, and this is just, you're wrong, um. Um But, yeah, this, that, that was one of my frustrations with this movie, is that Joker's narrative just seemed to lack any sort of coherence, and not in the sense that, like, he's mentally ill, so he doesn't act in accordance with reason, but that narratively, it just didn't really work. You know, his original violence, his first act of murder is, I think, plausibly understood as an act of self-defense. You

0:18:47 Thomas: Yeah. It's fine. Okay. That's fair.

0:19:25 Jamie: Know, there's A, yeah. And I think there's a way to understand that as maybe perhaps an overreaction to threat, given his history of trauma, but also in that light reasonably understood, possibly, as motivated by self-defence, right? So this, the scene, these three Wall Street bros are on the train, and they begin harassing this other woman, which is, um, you know, a really uncomfortable scene, because of the misogyny that's just, like, baked into it, right, and they're obviously drunk, it's late at night, they're trying to get this the attentions of this woman, that that doesn't go well, and then they turn their attention on to the Joker, because one of the manifestations of his mental illness

0:19:25 Thomas: The train killings.

0:20:11 Jamie: Is to laugh inappropriately, which was actually the one thing that I thought was an interesting sort of choice, but he starts laughing because he's uncomfortable by the way that they're threatening this woman. And so they turn on him. And at this point, he's been given the gun after having been beaten up by the kids in the back of the street. And in response to them threatening him and getting into his face, he shoots them. And then he goes from shooting them in self-defense to following one of the Wall Street bros off the train and shooting him. It's not exactly clear how he goes from reacting in that moment of fear to actively planning murder. It just seems like a big plot hole to me.

0:20:17 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:20:56 Thomas: Well, I don't know about that. I mean, first off, like, I don't know how much he actively plants because like the whole time I'm watching this thing, I'm thinking, okay, from my limited comic book knowledge, like I at least have watched some Batmans, you know, I've watched the, the, I like the 1989 one and I like, Like, I actually like the Christian Bale one. So, you know, those are not bad. And so, you know, I'm thinking, all right, eventually we get to the Joker holding the city hostage, doing his hijinks. But I'm thinking, this guy can't do that. Like, I've seen the first half of the movie. He can't even, he can't even write a stand-up joke that makes any sense. Like, he has no awareness. They've made a character that's very much not really able to keep up with the world around him.

0:21:44 Thomas: You know, like, he doesn't, he doesn't fully, like, there's no way this guy is going to be the diabolical Joker that we all know and love or whatever. And so, he, I'm thinking he's going to go on a rampage, but he actually doesn't really end up planning much murder other than, he, I think the justification, so sorry, going back, I I do kind of disagree that it's a plot hole because I think the justification is he finally feels important because he has a line where he's like, yeah, yeah, everybody's kind of talking about me finally, cause they're all, uh, what happens is he gets away and they, the, the, you know, police put out the notice that like, it's a guy in a Joker, you know, a clown mask has committed these murders, and he, he thinks he's going to get in trouble, but he never does. And he finds it satisfying that like everybody in the, in the city has taken notice of this.

0:22:34 Thomas: And I think, I think that's where the inspiration comes. And I also, I think they are going for some sort of extreme nihilism in that it's like everything is kind of misery for this character, except, or like the only thing he, he even says, like the only thing I find funny, though, a good joke is that you're killing people. Right. Isn't that kind of where you get ends up at?

0:22:56 Jamie: Well, he says he decides to think of his life, he's going to stop thinking of it as a tragedy. And instead, he is going to think it as comedy. But to me, it just, it seems like they mashed this dialogue that they had that they thought would be good with this character whose narrative arc just doesn't really seem to me to mesh with it.

To me, even when he kills the co-worker who shows up at his house, right, like that's sort of a crime of opportunity, a sort of crime of self-defense, this has been a person who's been, you know, absolutely awful to him, who has lied about how he got the gun, um, and so he sort of, you know, this is almost most a crime of passion and he kills him, and it just seems, I don't know, inconsistent to me how these, these, it goes from doing that, um, and even the murder of the talk show host played by Robert De Niro, right, like even that I can sort of see as a sort of self-defense, he realizes that this is a person who's only bringing him on the show to make fun of him and put him down and further rub his nose in it, and it just, I can't get from there to him, you know, enjoying it, standing on the car, I just don't get the

0:23:02 Thomas: Right.

0:24:12 Jamie: Sense that he's so That's fair, yeah.

0:24:11 Thomas: Well, that I don't know that that happened, though. That's but that brings me back to the frustration of this whole thing. Like it, I'm not saying you can never have an unreliable narrator. And, you know, sometimes it's cool to do like the mind fuck, like, oh, was that all that imagined? And I actually sent you a message because 10, 15 fucking minutes into this thing, I will show you the goddamn timestamps where I was like, Oh my God, this neighbor being into him better be a fucking hallucination. And thank God it was. But that also didn't really do anything right. Right. Like, yeah,

0:24:49 Jamie: Well That just sort of gets at the kind of point that I was making to earlier, that to the extent that this movie acknowledged the existence of people with marginalized identities beyond that of white men, they were treated as emotional support animals and props and not like actual people. That really frustrated me. From, from, from my read, I interpret it as, it as, you know, his relationship with this woman was clearly false, as was, you know, his fantasies of being on the Murray show before he ended up on the Marie show. But you make a really good point. It's hard to draw a line between what's supposed to have really happened and what was just another of his fantasies. You could absolutely be correct, um, that the scene at the end where he's standing on the car, you know, enjoying the revelry of, of the chaos that he's caused, is itself another hallucination. I don't, I don't know, that's fair, yeah.

0:25:17 Thomas: It was. Yeah.

0:25:45 Thomas: Well, because right after that, and again, we've already given the spoiler alert, but that, so I was envisioning, oh, OK, now he's going to lead the crowd to some mischief. And that's the Joker part of the thing. But it just cuts to, he's in the quote unquote insane asylum, like, he just cut, like, he gets it, with the, the mob basically does the movie trope that I'm so fucking sick of, which is car driving, oh, we're just driving, we're all good, and then, car t-bones it, somehow it was all planned all along, it's every single fucking movie now and show, ah, it's the perfect, like, gotcha jump scare, car t-boned, how do you time that, how did this mob of random people, people specifically time t-boning a police car going at full speed.

0:26:34 Thomas: How do they always do that? I'll never know. I'll ever know how they time that. Anyway, the mob that somehow also decides to rescue him because he's an icon.

0:26:45 Thomas: Parenthetically, I want to note that maybe one of the possible good things about this movie that I thought was interesting was the idea that Joaquin Phoenix himself, and Joker the character, wasn't political, that he didn't actually try to kill because the, what happened was the backdrop of the movie is this Occupy Wall Street thing, you know, where like people are really mad at the rich people in Gotham who are benefiting and everybody else is not, and also in the movie, like you said, his health care gets cut because rich people and all that. And so in the backdrop of that, he murders these three Wall Street bros, but he does so for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. And I do like that his character was like, I don't care about politics.

0:27:31 Thomas: I murdered them, you know, like they had nothing to deal with politics and I'm not political. And I like, maybe if the potential message was going to be like, OK, don't just latch on, you know, there's a danger of latching on to these figureheads in movements or whatever who are actually totally immoral or amoral and aren't really people you should be latching onto. You know? Sorry. I, like, thought, like, okay, is that something they're going for? That's kind of an interesting message. But I don't really know. No, once again, because of all the gimmicks in this, I don't have any idea what they really want to say.

0:28:09 Jamie: I'm not really sure that they did. Um, I enjoyed the movie to the extent that it was a comic book movie. I thought Joaquin Phoenix's performance was absolutely brilliant given the constraints of what he had. But this seemed to be a movie that wasn't sure of what it wanted to say, and where it made its social commentary, right? Like as you point out, the backdrop to this is the breakdown of society because the rich have sort of abandoned their social contract, is seemingly accidental. I think you make a good point that it's really easy in the midst of so much suffering to read into things whatever we want it to be saying, when they're not actually saying that at all.

0:28:54 Jamie: And actually, I think Michael Moore's review makes that point better than anything else. He so desperately wants there to be the social commentary that corresponds to his worldview, that he is, you know, reading into this exactly what he wants to see and in ways that are, I think, inconsistent, because he's just so eager to have something to say, see, I'm right. And he's not really applying a metric of consistency to it.

0:29:19 Thomas: I have a few ways that I think this movie could have been way better. And I want to make a note that I feel like it's interesting. And again, I know people, I'm not the comic book, far from the comicbook expert. So I'm going to say some things. Feel free to poke holes in this or tell me this already exists or something. But I do think it's very interesting to look at the evolution of superheroes, because I can't remember when Batman's from, but it's at least like, what, the 50s or something? It's pretty old, right?

0:29:48 Thomas: And, you Know, whatever. It's quite old. It's at least the 60s, you know, that the original show or whatever. I don't know if the comic books go back even before that. But I think it's interesting that, again, as a casual observer, it seems like whenever these things were popular, whenever they became popular, it really made sense to a very white-centric worldview, which was the predominantly portrayed kind of point of view on TV back then or whatever media back then. It made sense that like the biggest threat out there are these criminals of different kinds and they got their their masks and they're stealing bags of money or they're doing whatever. And what we need is a hero who's going to go like kapow through them and like, you know, save us. But nowadays, it's funny because Batman, to my eye, is kind of just a cop.

0:29:48 Jamie: I'm not sure I'd have to Google it.

0:30:41 Thomas: Like he's just a really, really effective police officer, like an efficient, you know, crime fight. He's that's what they are, like most of these superheroes, most of them, not all of them, but like most of the classic superheroes, they're just really really effective cops, and our society is like, maybe especially, you know, maybe like this kind of culture starting to not really be super in love with cops, and we're not thinking like, okay, what we need to solve America's problems is just a cop with amazing super guns, you know, like a superhero cop that can, you know, and I, so, so I really like the idea of turning Thomas Wayne into a villain. And maybe, I don't think they have the guts to do it, but also Bruce Wayne is a villain, also Batman is the villain. I think it would be really interesting. Oh, sorry, you want to jump in? Go ahead.

0:31:30 Jamie: Well, yeah, well, I gonna say Bruce Wayne doesn't really look like the good guy in Batman versus Superman, which is a terrible, Terrible, no good movie. Don't watch it. It's, it's awful. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I looked it up, by the way, the first Batman comic came out in 1939, um, And I think this, that sort of points in the direction of why, as a culture, we're sort of drawn to to these sorts of stark contrasts of Good, well also Um, I hate to be the bearer bad news, um,

0:31:38 Thomas: I didn't see it.

0:31:50 Thomas: Okay, yeah.

0:32:00 Thomas: Well, plus back then you had like Nazis and stuff. Oh, wait, no, never mind. Yeah, no. You're right.

0:32:10 Thomas: You got me. You got me on that one.

0:32:11 Jamie: But uh yeah The Nazis are back, um, and as I like to say, class, since we're debating this again, they are still bad. But yeah, so I think this gets at the idea that there's something comforting in slicing up the world in very black and white conceptions of good guys versus bad guys. And I think that's one of the things that comic books and comic book movies provide to their audience, who are living in morally gray times that are difficult to make sense of, is this sort of fantasy world where the good guys can be easily sorted from the bad guys and the good boys at the end of the day ultimately win.

And what I think would have been really interesting, and where this movie got close, is that it engaged the gray areas that Very often, the people who become the villain in our stories are trying to navigate situations that are, are extraordinarily difficult, um, and that had the world worked out slightly differently, they may not have turned into the villains, which is not in any way exonerate Joker for his terrible choices, um, but I think that's part of the appeal, is that they, they sum the world up in ways that are neat and comforting, which is very much unlike the reality of the world we have to navigate. Kate, go

0:32:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:57 Thomas: All right. I'm sorry. I have like seven more ways that I want to remake this movie. So feel free to jump in, but along Those lines. So I think what they should have done, where they went wrong in my opinion, well, so many ways, but the mental illness, to the degree and extent that they portrayed it, I think just makes it truly, truly difficult to to have a character that, like, to have a Joker, like, so that's why I think they're gonna do the cop-out of, you know, he's not even really the Joker. And by, and by the way, another side note, sorry, so many thoughts, but the whole Joker thingy of he actually killed Batman's parents, after the movie, we got this whole thing where I was like, well, at least he's gonna do that at some point, right? Maybe it'll be political, like, we're already, and we also have another storyline that I'm gonna get back to, that we've touched on, about, you know, him thinking Thomas Wayne is his dad, so clearly we're going to

0:33:36 Jamie: Go Yeah No, go That's

0:34:24 Thomas: Get the Joker killed the Batman's parents, no, no, for some reason. And riddle me this, maybe there's some, I haven't actually come up with a good, yeah You're right. Joker me this, what, why did they decide to, a, they're still gonna do the Batman parent death thing, but they make it a guy who, who was, we don't know who it was, and who was just like inspired by the Joker or something. And it was like, ah, take this, Thomas Wayne, you get what you deserve for some reason, but not have it be Joaquin Phoenix. It just seemed like they were just needlessly trying to do a twist, you know, like, oh, I thought it was going to be Joachin Phoenix, but it was this person. That's nobody that we don't know. What the hell?

0:34:31 Jamie: A different Batman villain, yeah So this seemed to me just another example of this movie not really sure what it wanted to accomplish, um, and there's just too many different pieces Um, its handling of mental illness, I really thought was lazy is the most charitable interpretation I can give to this. And, you know, I know there's always a lively debate between Marvel fans and DC, but this to me stood out as an example of where Marvel really handled this in a way that was interesting and narratively coherent, where DC tends to just kind of throw spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. So there's a character in the Black Panther movie, which you probably didn't see.

0:35:21 Thomas: Yeah, I saw the, I said, well, are there two of those by now or just one? I saw one of them.

0:35:57 Jamie: So I think there's the one standalone Black Panther movie, but Black Panther also makes an appearance in Endgame.

0:35:59 Thomas: It's probably like seven yeah Okay I've seen all that, I've seen all those things baby Here we go, I don't remember most of it, but

0:36:06 Jamie: I'm impressed. So there's the, you know, the villain in the Black Panther movie is also, is what? No, no. Also, if you hate on The Hobbit, I may have to quit.

0:36:14 Thomas: Golem Golem, I'm Not hating on The Hobbit, it's Andy Serkis, or is there another villain who's the main villain, Andy Serkis is the villain main

0:36:27 Jamie: Oh, so Andy Serkis is in it, but the main villain is Killmonger, Right, and so he is originally um yeah Yeah, yeah And so, you know, he's criminally insane, you're right, in the way that, you know, Joker is defined as criminally sane, but he's criminally and sane in a way that's coherent with his ability to carry out the sort of crimes that result from his insanity

0:36:32 Thomas: Villain, okay, he's a henchman or something Killmonger Oh, oh Michael B. Jordan, yeah Yeah, well That's Interesting, I I see See what you're saying, but I didn't think there was any, did you, is he supposed to actually have any mental illness? I didn't get that from Black Panther at all. I got that.

0:36:58 Jamie: No I'm not He, he's not having any mental illness, right, but His, his understanding of the world is resulting in this sort of potentially world-ending violence, right? And he's internalized the historical struggle of black people, despite not actually having been, you know, held captive as a slave or whatever. He's really internalized and personalized the historical trouble to such an extent that he's taken it to such a logical conclusion that he is willing to bring about potentially world ending violence, and social change. So I think that would sort of fall under, you know, criminal insanity.

0:37:07 Thomas: Okay. Right, right, right.

0:37:44 Jamie: But it's narratively coherent, who he is as a character, what he carries out in his life before he gets to this level of supervillain is consistent with what he aspires to be, what his skill sets are, in a way that just doesn't make any sense in this movie. The Joker can't even manage to to live on his own, or Arthur, rather, right? Like, he's literally living in a one bedroom apartment with his mom. He's like, you know, the dude who needs his dad to pay rent, because he can't manage it well enough on his own. And yet somehow we're supposed to believe that this, he's going to go on to become this like great criminal mastermind that subjects Gotham to chaos.

0:38:24 Thomas: Yeah. He's definitely not. If they try, if

0:38:26 Jamie: It doesn't make make any sense.

0:38:26 Thomas: They try to do that, that's absurd because he's not that. He can't be that. And I don't know that they're even trying to dothat, but, but that begs the question for me, or sorry, I'm using incorrect usage. That raises the question is what I meant to say. That raises the question for me.

0:38:40 Jamie: I was going to let it slide.

0:38:41 Thomas: No, don't let it slide. I like the proper usage of that one. I just accidentally misspoke. That raised the question. For me, why even do the stupid comic book thing to begin with? If this is a good enough compelling story to be just the story of a guy, because it's so pedestrian. It's like the equivalent would be if you're like, okay, we're going to do a new gritty, realistic Batman. Here's what it is.

It is a guy who has has a fondness for bats and he is wearing a bat shirt that has a bat on it when a woman is drowning in a lake and he say he rescues the woman while wearing a bat shirt. Like, well, okay, I mean, you found a way to make Batman like a just a regular guy, I guess, but like, for what, like, what is the point, you know? And that's what I felt like with it.

Okay, you've, you found a way to to like, like kind of make a maybe believable, totally, like you're saying, just absolutely nonsense, insane person have a laugh that makes him the Joker and he worked as a clown. So that also is a tie in, but like, why, it doesn't, it's not, other than that, it has nothing to do with being the Joker that I can, what's the point? It should have either been a comic book movie or just make a a movie. Yeah.

0:38:44 Jamie: Right.

0:40:00 Jamie: And so that's sort of the biggest frustration with this movie is that where it hit interesting notes, it seemed to do it entirely accidentally and without respect to any sort of message it wanted to convey. Like this laughter, for example, ball, I thought was really interesting.

0:40:20 Thomas: Me too. Mm-hmm.

0:40:21 Jamie: Because, you know, it turns out this is his response to things that make him uncomfortable, right? And it gets at this idea of toxic masculinity. Here is a man who has been subject, we come to find out, to significant abuse and trauma in his life, but whose mother, you now, required him to just say that he was happy, right, that he always seemed like a happy boy. She actually refers to him as happy. And this sort of psychological pressure results in the suppression of his true emotions that whenever he does feel actual vulnerability, or any genuine emotion, it manifests in this inappropriate and out of place laughter. And I thought, wow, that could have really been interesting. But I don't think they did it on purpose. They're like, oh, he's the Joker, so he laughs.

0:40:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. They didn't, they, oh, I mean, it's on purpose, but I don't think they did enough with it. I totally agree that like, I like that concept, I thought it could have been interesting, but they don't, they do nothing with it that matters. That's just it, in the end, I, in the end, it's like, okay, so he laughs, that's what you've done with that. You found a way to make him laugh. Like, oh, I get it, the comic book character, the Joker, laughs, so therefore, you found, again, again, it's like, cool, he has a shirt with a bat on it, you found a way to make him a bat man, but it's not, you know, it doesn't, why, why are they doing this? But okay, I gotta, I gotta go back to my, my plan to revamp this movie. I'm hoping, hoping maybe, yeah, yeah. And then maybe you can help me. Maybe you can, you can revamp it together. See, get rid of the part where he's so fucking incompetent and pathetic. He can't do anything because that doesn't work. It

0:41:29 Jamie: Right. Yeah, we're only at two, so you have five more. Okay. Agreed.

0:42:04 Thomas: Doesn't. It doesn't. You know, it just doesn't because he is, like you outlined, he is a pathetic character, like, and and, you know, at times a sympathetic character in different ways, sure, but like you can't have your super villain be a guy, like you say, who lives with his mother because he can't even manage to do anything. It's not like a creepy, it doesn't even work as like, um, you know, what's the fucking Hitchcock movie, you know? It doesn't even work As Uh, yeah, it doesn't even really work in that way. Cause that, because he's just pathetic. Like he's in every way, he's not going to be a villain, but anyway, get rid of that. Keep, keep most of the other stuff. And here's the thing that drove me nuts. So we talked about that storyline. So his mom has been writing letters to Thomas Wayne because she was a Wayne employee or whatever Wayne, fucking Wayne Enterprise, whatever the company is. She was an employee of his.

And she believes that, like, he is going to, he is gonna help us out because they say that, like, everyone who works there as a family. And, and like, keep that. Like, I like that. And then you come to find out he opens one of her letters and she says, you need to help your son, you know? And so she believes that Thomas Wayne had an affair with her or something, got her pregnant and then, like, forced her, kind of forced her to quit.

0:42:29 Jamie: Norman Bates.

0:43:20 Thomas: And I'm thinking, okay, this is good. I'm liking this because this is the Thomas Wayne is a villain and maybe even Batman is a villain. Like,I was kind of into that. I was like, all right, this Is a good plot idea. I don't mind that. And then they totally fucking ruin it because unless you're leaving room for a unreliable narrator, you come to find out that she's actually just a crazy person.

And so, therefore, she, of course, made up a crazy story about the CEO of the company having had a child with her. And even after they did that, I was like, OK, that's going to be a lie, right? It's going turn out that Thomas Wayne actually is his father, right. Nope. That's just a crazy lady who makes up crazy rape lies or whatever, which is terrible. Like, yeah, it would have been Great. Had it been like, oh, she actually maybe went crazy because he gaslighted her. Like maybe he, you know, like got rid of out of company and then like lied on these records and told everybody that she's crazy. And like, that was part of her story of why like she was a bad mother.

And then it would all come around to the real villain, villain Thomas Wayne, who then I thought was gonna be fucking awesome, and then at the end he would, but it doesn't work, none of, because then none of that happened. So that's what I think should happen. He should be the real villain. He should have gaslighted her and it turns out he is, uh, Joker's father, and uh, that's why, uh, Joaquin Phoenix kills him, Batman's parents, at the end.

And then you're like, well, honestly, like Thomas Wane kind of had it coming, you know, like you turned the Joker into to kind of the anti-hero, like the, the hero, but also the darker kind of hero, you know. And then you turn

0:44:03 Jamie: Yeah. I'm totally with you on this. I was like, yeah,

0:44:57 Thomas: Batman into the fucking villain. It would have been amazing. Yep.

0:44:59 Jamie: I totally agree with that. And that's what I was kind of hoping for as well. There's been a lot of commentary, right, that Joker and the Batman are two sides of the same coin and that the real reason that Batman can never kill the Joker isn't because of like some high-minded commitment to not kill, but because he actually needs the Joker to make sense of his own existence, and so he's necessary to him. And it would have been such an interesting inversion of that to set up Thomas Wayne as the bad guy to further connect these two characters to each other. And I just thought it, it was just another place where this movie came so close. And then, because it didn't really know what it wanted to accomplish, just missed the ball.

0:45:46 Thomas: So wanted to say the other think, and this, this has been a meme that I've seen everywhere, but let's be honest, the Joker should be a woman who was told to smile too many times, right? I mean, obviously that should have been the character they make. I mean, this would be fantastic. Get some amazing feminist women to write it, you know, and come up with all these like misogynist interactions she has. She becomes the Joker. It's perfect, right.

0:46:11 Jamie: Right, that would have been awesome, right? That would have narratively made sense. You could have had a person you could understand, could have, you know, the competency to go on to become the sort of supervillain. And to be like, ooh, you know, that that's not actually how I would recommend solving these problems. But like, I kind of admire the boldness where this joker just seems to stumble into violent murder.

0:46:14 Thomas: Yeah, like, yeah. Ooh, ooh, Yeah. Yeah. And not only that, she can be super competent, but she never gets credit because some man takes her idea in the boardroom. Right. We got all every every classic like feminist, you know, like cause poured into this character and make her finally snap. I mean, in fairness, I'm trying to think like, does she have to when you have like an anti hero like this? So does she just go too far or like there's got to be some reason? Because right now she's just like a great sympathetic character that I like. So does she have to go too far? So the part where she starts killing random men, maybe that's, I guess that's too far. Yeah.

0:47:11 Jamie: Yeah, she actually embodies the sort of imaginary feminazi that the right wing has been pretending exists, but doesn't. But, you know, she dresses up, you Now, in androgynous ways. And so because it never occurs to the police that a woman could be capable of this sort of mastermind level of villainy, they never even think to look for a woman, and their, their purpose, a dude, as far as they're concerned, and the very misogyny that causes her to become violent, it ends up being her most powerful mask. Ask, that would have been some great social commentary. Yeah.

0:47:16 Thomas: I'm Having so many ideas, I mean, I shouldn't write this, but I'm having so, you could do like, when she's, you know, in her, in her origin story, she's still just, you know, person whatever, she goes on it, she's trying to go on a date, and she has to like, she could do the thing that I, you know, uh, I think Christy Winters, uh, came on my show and talked about a game that like, um, you, you have to play in first person as God, I swear I could be making this up, but I, I think she said this, where you're like getting ready for a date, you have seen the differences of like, what women have to prep for versus what men have to do, and the fact that like, she has to be so conscious of like not dressing too provocatively to, so that she'd get street harassed or whatever, but then also doesn't want to look totally stuffy and boring to her date, and like, and then in the the end you get the Joker mask because she's so fucking fed up of trying to look just right for everybody that she just like lipsticks a fucking Joker smile on her face. Right? What do you think?

0:48:40 Thomas: Be

0:48:40 Jamie: Infinitely more interesting, but then you would have had, you know, the incels screaming on Reddit just like they did with, you know, the women in Ghostbusters about how we were destroying I think

0:48:49 Thomas: Such a good movie though it'd be such a good movie, ah that should that should happen

0:48:53 Jamie: It would have been much better um although I have to say I did enjoy Joaquin Phoenix's performance, I thought he, he was great, but, you know, absent, removed from the context of the movies and the narrative incoherence, he was astonishing. So I'm glad that I got to see that, which was the main reason I wanted to see the movie in the first place. But I agree with you. I think a woman as a Joker, particularly given our current moment, would have been so much more interesting. Thing

0:48:54 Thomas: Yeah I agree mhm would've been the best, they should do that, somebody do that, I know

0:49:27 Jamie: Um. Yeah. But. Probably. Not with this director, you know, Which is funny because I was thinking about this as I was watching the movie he really seemed to undermine his own point about how wokeness is ruining comedy because it seemed to me and I don't know maybe I'm just you know too much of an sjw to like think meaningfully about this I don't know um but there are those scenes with the the the little person um right where you're definitely made to feel as though the decision of the other clowns to make fun of him is not a good one right that that their decision to sort of pick on him obviously betrays a sort of moral defect, and so, and was striking to me that the director of this movie went on about how the left is ruining comedy, and you know, you You can't do anything funny anymore if you can't punch down, when such a part of this movie was that it's obviously, like, not cool to do that.

0:49:32 Thomas: Right yeah I wish he had just kept his dumb mouth shut, this director, it would have, would have been a little better. Plus, I mean, there's again, I think there are a lot of other ways we've highlighted that this, this movie is pretty flawed, and and ultimately that's what, I, my ultimate takeaway from all this for me personally is just like, why just make, make a comic book, for the love of God, if you're gonna make a comic book movie, make a comic book movie, what, what is this, is it, I don't know.

0:50:55 Jamie: Yeah, I know. You're more cynical on this point than I am. But my favorite part of the movie was the preview for the Harriet Tubman movie. I was really excited about that.

0:51:04 Thomas: Yeah I'm excited too. Yeah, you're referencing, I was making fun of the hacky Hollywood writing that is in every movie, but that's okay, I'm still gonna watch it because it did look incredible, and especially like the acting looked incredible, I can't wait yeah

0:51:19 Jamie: Yeah, and so, yeah, and that was my favorite point. Of his movie. I really like the idea that like the person that we were meant to identify as a hero wasn't this totally mediocre white man who felt entitled to so much more than his talents were actually consistent with but the actual moral heroism of a black woman at a time when most people were not even willing to recognize that black women were people, and I just thought that was exciting, so, so for whatever this movie's flaws are, there was at least one preview that gave me hope that we might get movies that more meaningfully probe these deep social questions.

0:51:35 Thomas: Yeah I excited for that movie all Right, yeah, and I guess the only other thing, the only another note I had is, when you're, we're talking about this controversy of, of, um, you know, or is this going to be like some in cell bait, you know, murdering thing, uh, something that's going to inspirational to those kinds of people. Part of me was a little, I was wondering about this question. I kind of am curious your thoughts on it.

Like when we look at the kind of the white male entitlement part of stories like these, where you know, they are taking out their, their impotence on society, really, like they think they deserve stuff, they don't get it, then, then the the audience is meant to be like, well, yeah, then you start killing, you know, or at least somewhat, they're meant to like somewhat identify with the the idea that, you know, this person deserves something, doesn't get it, and takes it out on people.

I, some, I, one question I have, if not for this film then the next one is I I don't know whether to take a movie like this as, oh, we are recognizing that this exists and portraying it, versus we are reinforcing a negative trope, you know what I mean? Like sometimes I think a lot of the the questions I have, like I'm not sure the answer to this question. You know, I wouldn't ever say that like every movie you make, the characters all have to be like morally good and have to do the right, you know, social justice thing and whatever.

But like sometimes I really don't know if, if I watch a movie and I think, oh, yeah, this is this shows how entitled white people are that they feel this way, so therefore it's like it's it's showing us that, or you know, and you and

0:53:46 Thomas: You don't, you never know the intent, is the director like just, just subconsciously believes this, and and that's why they wrote the movie, I think the director also co-wrote it, that's why they rode it this way, you know what I mean, yeah

0:53:58 Jamie: Yeah, so I don't know the answer to that.

0:54:04 Jamie: But I think it's a good question. Question, um, to me I think this movie was done in a way that isn't going to meaningfully shed light on how to answer it, because I don't think its own message is consistent with itself, and I think it's a sort of thing that people are going to read into it, whatever sort of preconceived notions they have, I agree with you that the right answer isn't to have art that solely, solely consists of morally upstanding characters. Um, in fact, you know, one of my, it would be, it'd be horrible. It would be boring and we'd never learn anything.

0:54:40 Thomas: That would be horrible yeah it'd be like the church, it would be like when everything had to be a morality play or whatever. Yeah.

0:54:48 Jamie: Right. I mean, some of my favorite novels involve characters that are deeply morally flawed because it's, it's through them we're able to think meaningfully about our own moral flaws and what to do, um, and how to overcome, and it's that last bit I think that leaves this movie lacking the most. As I was watching this, um, just, you know, given what I do for a living, the thought that kept coming back to me was like, this, this is how Nietzsche is going to continue to be misrepresented as, you know, this drive towards meaninglessness and chaos, and I was just really disappointed, um, because that's actually not the right understanding of Nietzsche.

0:55:35 Jamie: He doesn't, he didn't do all of this writing to say, well, the world is bleak and barren, and we should just give up and be destructive and violence is as good as mercy. In fact, he's quite clear that the takeaway from the absurdity of the world and the absence of objective meaning is an opportunity for us to create something that's beautiful, to manifest mercy. In fact, he even says in one of his works that mercy is superior to cruelty because cruelty betrays that someone actually lacks power. And this is another example of that where I just feel like the transformational sort of impact that art could have isn't going to to be had here because it's just sort of a bunch of different things slapped together without any reference to anything. Yeah.

0:56:33 Thomas: I think that's a great note to go out on. We've got about an hour, so that's plenty. Yeah, I think we can leave it there. Thanks so much for doing this. I hope people enjoyed this. It's a little different for the show, but I think it was fun and there's a lot of cultural, interesting points that go into this. Ultimately, I mean, there's nothing wrong with, in my opinion, there there's nothing wrong with like watching this movie and I found parts of it enjoyable. Uh, even if ultimately I, I just thought it set up for something cool at the end and then it was nothing, like it just was absolutely nothing at the end. But anyway, whatever. I don't hate anybody who enjoyed the film. Like, have fun, that's, that's my final thought. Any last word for you?

0:57:18 Jamie: No, that's, that's it, um, this was fun, glad we got to do it, look forward to, you know, returning to our usual shtick next time. Bye.

0:57:26 Thomas: I can't wait to hear what people think about this. Feel free to call in, leave a voicemail or a email or whatever you want to do. I'm curious what people thought of the movie and our analysis, and I hope they get some uh amazing female writers to start working on that Joker idea, because it's great, and it would be great, and I know every, it's not, I didn't come up with everybody, that's already out there, like everyone knows this should be what it is anyway. All right, thanks, uh, please pledge at patreon.com/seriouspod to support the show, we really appreciate it, it's reason it keeps happening, and we'll see you next time.

0:57:59 Jamie: Guys.