Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker: Empathy Not Violence is the Psychoanalytically Understood Message of the Movie

Joker, Joaquin Phoenix, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis of Film, Psychology of Movies

The Joker is a film the Reluctant Wife and I intended to pass on.  We had heard that it was violent, and we try to avoid introducing unnecessary additional violence into our lives – the news is full of enough of that.  We also were concerned about a couple of reviews that suggested that it was providing a rationale for a white supremacist or at least a white male as victim narrative that we weren’t interested in supporting.  But then we got a couple of recommendations to see it from a friend and a student of mine who had found it illuminating and disturbing in a psychologically promising way, and we decided, despite the violence, to see it on date night.

The violence in the film is considerable – but also, with one exception, not as graphic as we expected.  But the film was unrelentingly bleak and the lack of empathy between the characters – except in fantasied scenes was, as the reluctant wife pointed out, the centerpiece of the film, and the reason that it felt so interpersonally violent.  The Joker himself is uncared for, but so is everyone else – the film portrays people who are living in an uncaring and very dark world.   This is, of course, the world of Batman – and the young Bruce Wayne makes an appearance and this becomes, almost by accident, part of the origin story of Batman – but this is not a super hero movie.  It is also not a villain movie.  Surprisingly, out of a cartoon world, a deeply human story emerges.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as the Joker is transcendent.   From the opening scene, where he, as Arthur Fleck, appears from afar, to be just a guy dressed as a clown to advertise a going out of business sale, he seems to be a kind of goofy character – like the guy who dresses up as the statue of liberty at tax time and does a dance outside the tax return place.  When he has his sign stolen by high school bullies, we begin to see the promise of the movie as Phoenix chases the bullies with a physicality that will permeate the film and that is reminiscent of the great mimes – his loose limbed running – gangly and un-athletic, but desperate – allows Phoenix to portray his character’s all-inness to the pursuit and to his life at a level that is reminiscent of the great Charlie Chaplin – who makes a cameo appearance later onscreen in a movie theater in Modern Times.  Phoenix carries the physicality into his dancing – whether in costume as a clown – or alone in his apartment, naked except for white jockey shorts that are falling off his too skinny and too ugly frame – we are forced to confront his physicality – the imperfections of it, and, in our exposure to it, as he bends and shapes it, we see its beauty.  The beauty of being inside a body that, no matter how misshapen, is our own and can magically express something about who we are that we can revel in and truly enjoy.  Like Chaplin, Phoenix falters on the edge of falling off a stair, or losing us – only to recapture us with a recovery that is so unexpectedly solid that we are more breathlessly in awe than we would be if we were in the hands of Fred Astaire, whom we fully expect to hit his mark.

Phoenix captures another complicated aspect of the character with the physicality of his laugh – an out of control laugh that he carries a card for – a card that explains that his laugh is a mental condition.  This laugh is inappropriate and inopportune.  There may be something funny about what he is observing, but there is also something – at times cruel and at times just off-putting about it – and the laugh is both forced but also painful – it feels likely a deeply felt cry – a painful howl – as well as like a cough that he just can’t stop even though he knows that it is interrupting everything else that is going on and drawing unwanted attention to himself.

Or, is the attention unwanted?  At some point, as he is transitioning into the Joker, Arthur realizes that the laugh is not a condition – it is part of who he is.  He also realizes that he has never been happy – and it seems that the laugh is a sign of that – and perhaps a cry for others to see his pain – to realize how badly he has been hurt.  Being a clown – making fun of himself – is a way of calling attention to himself – something that he fantasizes about doing successfully. 

In his fantasies, he is confident and capable and able to make people connect with him and enjoy his perspective on the world – but when confronted with the actual possibility of being with other people, even if he is just a member of an audience, he consistently calls attention to himself in unwanted and awkward ways and he ends up evoking laughs of derision rather than joy – and he ends up feeling isolated rather than connected.  It is only when he realizes that the laugh is not something alien that has been visited upon him – it is not some kind of condition – when he realizes that it arises from deep within him – it is an expression of something about his connection, or lack thereof, with a cruel world, that the laugh ceases – to be replaced by his being more and more comfortable living within himself as an alienated character.

Phoenix – even if Jack Nicholson hadn’t played this role – would evoke comparison’s with Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of feigned madness in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – but this madness of Phoenix’s – while scary and barely riding the rails of holding him together – does not seem maniacal – but poignant.  While none of the other characters in the film empathize with him, we do.  We see how deeply wounded – and essentially hungry he is.  We resonate with this guy who, to put it mildly, has never caught a break.  We want the world to be a different place.  We feel for him and with him in his fantasies – and we don’t recognize many of them as fantasies – because we, like him, so much want them to be real.  It is only when the fantasies are realized to be fantasies – and we realize that he has been angry that he has not been treated as we would have liked to have been treated, does our sympathy turn towards those we now realize are only present in his mind as fantasies – and we are, thankfully, spared from seeing how his rage at being disappointed by some of them is expressed – and even though we might be able to understand the roots of his rage, because we have become attached to these characters through his real and imaginary contact with them, we would not be able to forgive him if we were to know what happens.

The reality of his life is grim.  He lives with his mother, Penny (played by Frances Conroy) – in uncomfortable proximity to her.  He shares a bed with her and washes her hair in the bathtub before lifting her naked body out of the tub to clothe her.  They live in a tenement apartment in a slum.  And she expects that they will be saved by the man she worked for – and, he discovers, might be his father – Thomas Wayne, the rich father of Bruce Wayne – or is she delusional about that?  Can she be counted on for anything?  Has he ever been able to count on her for anything?  Or is she all that he has so that he has had to cling to her, even though she is a deeply and powerfully unreliable caregiver.  He is held together with baling wire.  He barely makes a living as a clown for children’s parties and going out of business sales and the other clowns he works with at the clowns for hire company are mean.  He becomes violent by accident.  Another clown – the meanest of the lot – inadvertently sets him up by providing him with a means of protection – but Arthur rightly feels betrayed by becoming an accidental aggressor – and, ironically, becomes murderously revengeful.

I cannot, at this point, avoid the plot any longer (I have already given away too much), so be forewarned….  It is at the moment that the most graphically violent reprisal takes place that we also, surprisingly, see empathy from Arthur.  He spares the life of the short person clown – the one whom we thought he was meanly laughing at but now realize that the laugh arose out of anxiety when others were making fun of his only friend whom he is too scared to protect, and we then also realize that Arthur is capable of making loving and reasonable human contact.  Arthur, despite what we have just witnessed, is not a monster, but a caring person, even as we watch him careen towards more and more monstrous acts.

Arthur is also a mental patient.  His weekly contact with his social worker, in her overstuffed office with terrible musty air – we can smell that along with the cigarette smoke that pollutes almost every scene in the movie (remember when smoking onscreen was cool?) – and the pills that this meeting facilitates – seven at this point – mark him as mentally ill.  Our friends commented that the film is supporting the need for more mental health services.  OK, check, but one of the questions that will then arise, especially to someone like me, is: what is his diagnosis?  And the answer is that he has multiple diagnoses.  Not because he suffers from multiple mental illnesses, but because he is a complex character who is being depicted and so, descriptively, he will meet criteria for such diagnoses as schizoid, paranoid/schizophrenic, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), delusional disorder, perhaps a developmental or learning disorder and maybe a bit of speech pathology, but also, to return to the question of unwanted attention, narcissistic disorder.  Please understand – he doesn’t suffer from any of these disorders.  He is a cartoon character who is bubbling up out of the minds of the writers who created him and the actor who brought him to life.  And his madness – a human thing – mimics aspects of clinical madness as it exists in the real world, but it is a much more intrusive and immediate thing because it comes out of the minds of healthier people.

What was personally disturbing about this film was not that Arthur reminded me of my patients, but that he reminded me of myself.  The histrionic suicide fantasies – they’ll realize what they’ve done to me when they see what I do to myself – mirror some of my more dramatic adolescent thoughts.  These occurred during a time when I was worried that no one (meaning the princess of fairy tales) would be interested in me – I would never find the promised true love.  And this is the concern about the film connecting with groups like the incel community, an online group that emerged out a 20 year old woman’s concern that she was INvoluntarily CElibate and went as far off the rails as Arthur does when he becomes the Joker.  The question about the impact of this film is whether it will do what the Joker does in the film – incite copycat mayhem – or not.

I think a far more interesting and poignant concern is that we do, in fact, live in a world where we are becoming more and more socially isolated.  Our American anxiety has always been that we won’t make it (so we worship the Frank Sinatra’s of the world who can “make it anywhere”), and for the Arthurs among us who don’t make it – and even for those who are in the process of making it, we don’t feel that we will – perhaps even the thugs who worked for Wayne Industries and were Arthur’s first victims are confronting that anxiety – and handling it very poorly – and our response to that – the response of Thomas Wayne – is to forge ahead with more of the same.  He, in the film, turns to politics with a promise to solve the woes that were caused by his own industrial system which created the kinds of economic inequities that lead to the closing of mental health facilities.  That appears to be the line drawn by the film – but I would propose that even more deeply, our anxiety about whether we will make it causes us to focus too much on making it and not enough on connecting with each other.  And having Tomas tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps – to work harder – flies in the face of just how hard Arthur – and the rest of us Arthurs – are working to do exactly that.

We are, as the reluctant wife pointed out, living on the edge of a new industrial revolution – our “Modern Times” will focus on how Artificial Intelligence has driven us out of a whole variety of jobs – from truck driving to lawyering.  Indeed, we went to a Movie Theater at the center of what had been a thriving shopping center in the heart of town for the last two decades of its existence – we hadn’t been there in a year or so – and we were surprised to find that almost all of the retail shops were boarded up and most of the eateries were gone as well.  A social and entertainment as well as retail hub appears to be another victim of the convenience of Amazon, just as countless small town downtowns were shut down when Wal-Mart arrived a generation ago.

So the scene where Arthur confronts Thomas – where we expect that Arthur will violently attack his paternal figure – there is, instead, an expression of hope for a connection with him – a hope that Arthur will finally get the paternal nurturance that he so desperately needs.  But he gets exactly the opposite of that – he is, once again, as he was with the boys who stole his sign, on the receiving end of violence.  And so it is not surprising that he begins to react against real and imagined parental figures with violence himself, even if that is hard for us to stomach – no matter how deeply empathically connected we are with him.  As creepy as his mother is – as creepy as his relationship with her is – as lousy as her parenting is revealed to be – we find matricide – and the execution of whatever fate he chooses for the other maternal figure – his imagined girlfriend – it is too much to ask for either to be gory – and for the second to be even seen onscreen.  The director wants us to understand what drives him to this, but doesn’t believe we can – or should – I identify so closely that we can stomach it, much less celebrate it.

But we do revel in the death – or at least I did – of the other imagined parental figure.   Arthur and his mother have always enjoyed watching the local late night talk show – Murray Franklin (played with requisite bonhomie by Robert De Niro).  Arthur has imagined – this is the place where we first enter his fantasy life and are cued to realize that he has a fantasy life – being embraced by Murray and being told by him that he is the son that Murray always wanted.  But when he embarks on his ill-fated comic career, carrying the evidence of his madness – the journal that his social worker has encouraged him to keep and that is filled with his ravings – to refer to so that he can tell lame jokes between painful laughing episodes – a video of his poor performance is played by Murray on his show as he ridicules the fool who tried to be a comic.  Arthur is mortified.  When, after the violence has started to take place, Murray’s show calls to invite Arthur onto the show to be ridiculed in person, Arthur accepts and practices for his role, which includes the suicidal fantasy played out in front of an audience of millions.

And here’s another weird intersection – one of my fantasies in high school was to be invited onto Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and to have a real conversation with him – not some kind of hyped up conversation.  I talked about this with friends – and we agreed that the fake conversations on TV talk shows were problematic.  Arthur asks that Murray introduce him as the Joker – and he comes out and plays it straight – he is himself – in clown make-up.  But the make-up he wears is not the mask of the copycat clowns who are creating mayhem in Gotham – it is the make-up that we have seen him cry through – it is the make-up that reveals rather than hides his pathos.  This, not surprisingly, does not go over well with the audience.  They are not there for real (not artificial) reality TV.  But it does go viral on the TV news shows – where audiences gobble up the clown going off on TV.  Meanwhile, those imitation clowns are marauding through Gotham – and one of them murders Thomas Wayne and his wife in front of young Bruce – creating a slightly new version of the Batman backstory. 

Our entertainment is meant, I suppose, to distract us from the grim realities of our life – especially at times of economic turmoil (Modern Times was created during the depression to both entertain and point out how industrialization had dehumanized us).  This film is intended, I think, to counter that.  It is intended to point towards (at least in my mind) the importance of the kinds of human connection that, thankfully, most of us enjoy in enough measure to help us not just survive from day to day but to have moments of joy.  But I think it highlights how we, as a society and as individuals, sabotage our ability to more fully do that – and exposes how our dissatisfaction with the lives that are available to us can lead to rage when we don’t feel the kind of empathic contact that Arthur so desperately craves.  My hope is that I won’t see too many copy-cat clown masks at Halloween; that people will understand that the distorted enactment of violence – the mayhem – is not the point or the intent of the movie.  That if we connect with the Joker, we are connecting not with an essentially angry person, but with a person who is poignant and needy.  That the identification he invites is not of being like the bullies who abuse him, but like the little guy who takes care of him.  But, of course, there will be those who can’t face their own vulnerability and will identify with the violence – we just have to hang onto the idea that this is not the intent and work to build a world that would welcome the Arthurs (including ourselves) who live in it.

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