Yesterday I finally got around to watching the 2019 thriller Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix as the titular Gotham villain. It left me with a lot of mixed feelings. Director Todd Phillips clearly wanted to play up the mental illness angle, portraying Joker (also known as Arthur Fleck) as a man with a lot of psychological problems. It is never clear on his diagnosis but I speculate schizophrenia might be one of them because Joker suffers from delusions and hallucinations, sometimes for prolonged periods of time. For example, he believes he is in a relationship with one of his neighbors until the day he shows up in her apartment and she doesn’t know him at all.
Arthur Fleck’s mother is also afflicted with similar delusions believing Arthur Fleck to be the child of her and the affluent Thomas Wayne. What Arthur discovers when he goes to the state hospital to obtain her file, is that not only is he adopted but she allowed him to be abused by her boyfriend which made headlines everywhere. He was trained to laugh instead of cry which accounts for his so called medical condition where he howls with laughter every time he is in a stressful situation. Penny Fleck’s diagnosis? Delusional psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder. This causes something in Arthur to snap and he begins to kill in earnest which doesn’t go as planned but sparks a huge counterculture of maniacs in clown masks with green hair.
I don’t know quite how to feel about this movie. I feel Todd Phillip’s doesn’t give the mentally ill their due. We are not all lunatics in clown costumes. I am aware that it is “just a movie” and he raises some good points about the mental health system being completely in shambles. But I don’t like to be reduced to an archetype or a stereotype or any other type. Besides isn’t the “abused man becomes the abuser” so “been done before”? On the other hand, the movie had a lot of merit to it. It was very raw. So raw it sometimes hurts to look.
His social worker bothered me. What was it she said when her funding got cut? Something like “No one cares about people like you, Arthur. Or people like me,” It is abundantly clear that Gotham or New York or Chicago does not care about their mentally ill. Many are homeless. Many go unmedicated like Arthur. But as for people like her what did she mean by that? The unemployed? The African Americans? At the end of the day, at least she can go home with her sanity.
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