Nate Hood Reviews

Last night during my screening of Todd Phillips’ Joker in midtown Manhattan, a lone thirtysomething white man snuck a bottle of Tequila into the theater. During the opening credits he poured the entire thing into his Slushee and by the middle of the film he was stone cold drunk. By the hour mark when Joaquin Phoenix’s mentally tortured clown-for-hire Arthur Fleck had fully assumed his newfound Joker persona, he began clapping and cheering wildly whenever he killed someone or ranted about society. It wasn’t the applause itself that was disturbing; Phillip’s deliberate class-based provocations against the rich and powerful were so effective that during an earlier scene when Arthur killed three businessmen who attacked him on the subway, the entire audience whooped its approval. But this man kept clapping when Arthur—now fully the Joker—and his army of clown-faced vigilantes began killing innocent people and he continued clapping long after the carnage ended. Soon people in our audience started yelling for him to shut up. Then they tried talking to him. Finally a good third of the audience, visibly disturbed by his belligerence, fled the theater. Eventually security escorted him out, but not before he started spitting on passersby. This whole experience rattled me more than I care to admit, and the same can be said for my fellow moviegoers who nervously talked in the refund line in the lobby about the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting where a maniac  shot up a movie theater during a Batman movie. But it proved to me that all the critics who’d condemned it for supposed incel sympathies were right: this film is going to speak to a subset of socially maladapted men in the worst way imaginable. And for that reason it’s dangerous. But in a way that’s what makes it so vital. Perhaps more than any other recent movie Joker reveals something ugly and true about how part of our society (specifically its white men) sees itself and for that reason it should be studied. What bothers me are arguments from fellow critics that it’s a bad film. This also is madness. Unapologetically derivative of Scorsese? Certainly. But it’s brazen rejection of subtext in favor of brash surface literalism is downright Samuel Fullerian. With a feverishly tight screenplay, gorgeous cinematography, haunting music, and a truly inspired performance by Phoenix, it’s a powerful, disturbing piece of pop-art.