joker

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – The Long Halloween Pts. 1 & 2 (2021)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

When I watched Matt Reeves’s The Batman a couple of years ago, one of the things that struck me about it was how much more I thought I would have enjoyed it as a standard crime movie without all the baggage of being attached to a huge intellectual property. Although that comes with making a film that’s all but guaranteed to make a profit (note: I started composing this review before the underwhelming opening of Folie à Deux), it’s also ultimately pretty limiting in how creative you can be before you start alienating that core audience by deviating “too much” from the source material. When it comes to The Long Halloween, I read the source material some fifteen years ago, but there were elements of the Robert Pattinson movie that seemed familiar, and now having had my memory refreshed by the animated adaptation of that comic, it’s clear that the live action movie took major plot inspiration from it. Strange that two such similar projects/products were in production at the same time and released within such proximity, with this week’s double feature having been released in 2021, followed closely by The Batman in 2022. Given that this was split into two roughly 85-minute halves, they add up to almost the same length (2 hours 56 minutes for the Reeves film, 2 hours 52 minutes for The Long Halloween) as well, which makes the comparison between the two almost a requirement. Since this is also a special double feature “issue,” I also did something a little special this week and watched this movie with a couple of friends, instead of late at night, alone and ashamed in the dark, so we’ll have some additional commentary tonight. 

A special note! This film is based on a highly regarded comic book from the 1990s, and which essentially continued the story from the 1987 miniseries Batman: Year One, which was previously adapted to an animated film. This film is not a sequel to that one. It is, however, placed in the “Tomorrowverse” series that began with Man of Tomorrow. This means that this one has that same thick-line art style as that film, which I mostly managed to get used to over the course of almost three hours, but every time Jim Gordon was on screen all I could think about was Rusty Venture. This is neither derogatory or a compliment, just an observation. 

Ok, it’s a little derogatory. 

It’s early in the career of the Batman (Jensen Ackles). Bruce Wayne is pressured by Gotham City mob boss Carmine Falcone (Titus Welliver) to help him launder his money, leading him to ally himself with new, seemingly incorruptible Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Josh Duhamel) and Commissioner Jim Gordon (Billy Burke) – not as Wayne, of course, but as Batman. When he breaks into the Falcone penthouse to search for evidence, he encounters Catwoman (Naya Rivera), who is doing the same thing; they chase each other around doing parkour and other such foreplay. She leads him to a warehouse where cash is waiting to be laundered, and Batman, Gordon, and Dent agree to destroy it in order to strike a crippling blow to Falcone’s machine. Falcone’s waging a war on two fronts, as people close to him begin to drop like flies at the hands of a serial killer that the press nicknames “Holiday,” as each of the victims is slain on a holiday, beginning with Halloween. The killer’s m.o. is simple: a single gunshot, silenced by the nipple of a baby bottle. As the year of the titular “long Halloween” plays out, Arkham Asylum lives up to its reputation, as several of the old rogues gallery escape from their confinement there, including Scarecrow, Poison Ivy (Katee Sackhoff!), and, as you would expect, the Joker (Troy Baker). At the heart of it all, however, remains the question: who is Holiday? 

During the break between the first and second parts of this story, one of my viewing companions asked me how this one compared to the others that I have watched so far. I explained my tier system and said that, at least at that point, The Long Halloween was above average. I genuinely had no idea who the killer would turn out to be, I was engaged with the mystery, and I appreciated the film’s attempts to be more of a gangster movie than a comic book one, even if all of the goodwill it had in that arena required that it lift lines directly from The Godfather. And, hey, the last scene of that first one involved a man being shot overboard in Gotham Harbor and then getting atomized by a yacht’s giant subsurface turbines. You don’t see that every day! There are a few seemingly irrelevant scenes early in the film that featured Solomon Grundy, and I asked my not-well-versed-in-comics viewing companion if any of those scenes meant anything to her or if she even understood them, and she assured me that they did not. It’s rare to be able to get that kind of feedback from someone with neither much interest in these films in general or knowledge about all the things that get stuffed in here. This illustrated one of the issues that I have with these movies, which is that they aren’t really accessible to someone who isn’t already at least somewhat steeped in the fiction that this conglomerate has been producing for nearly a century. On the other hand, it’s not really clear who would be interested in these things other than those people. 

For what it’s worth, I appreciated that the film had a consistent theme of duality throughout. That’s patently obvious in the character of Two-Face, but one of the things that I liked here was that it was unclear from the outset whether Bruce and Selena know about the other’s nocturnal activities. My interpretation of the narrative is that neither one of them knows, but that Selena figures it out first and it takes Bruce a bit longer. When the two of them break up (as Selena and Bruce), Bruce says something along the lines of “We’re just two different people,” which I appreciated as a little bit of clever dialogue since both of them do, in fact, literally have two different personae. Where this is least interesting is in Bruce’s struggle between working in the darkness versus the light, and I have to be honest—I could not make myself care about this at this point. There was this podcast about a decade ago called The Worst Idea of All Time, wherein two NZ comedians watched the same (bad) movie every week for a year and did 52 episodes about it. I had friends who were fans, and at the time I thought I would be tough enough to do that with certain movies. Now, having seen Batman contend with his moral code for the umpteenth time, I can say that those men were brave. It’s beginning to feel purgatorial, frankly. 

That’s not this movie’s fault, however, and I would praise it for having a mystery that I found pretty compelling, and when all of the pieces fell into place, the resolution scratched that same part of my brain that gets pleasure from Murder She Wrote and Columbo. The clues really were there all along, and although I got to the solution before the characters did, it was only by a matter of minutes. That having been said, my viewing companions were not as entertained or engaged by it as I was. Their notes, collectively, identified that the mystery was not that interesting, that Batman seemed kind of dumb, and that the art style makes Jim Gordon look too much like Dr. Venture (oh, wait, that last one is me again). Neutral comments included that “the art style was easy to get used to,” and that it was derivative, but that this could be because it inspired some storytelling elements that are now commonplace or otherwise old hat. We were all in agreement that the film did not, perhaps, need to be this long. The film does not do itself any favors by featuring panels from the comic in its opening credits sequence—artwork which is moody, shadowed, and full of rich character detail—which makes the film’s animation look plain and dulled in comparison. If you want to experience this story, that’s the preferable option. This one makes a case for its existence and makes for a fairly interesting watch, though. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The People’s Joker (2024)

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The People’s Joker made me cry. 

A festival darling a couple of years ago, this DIY transfemme autofiction bildungsroman took an usually long time to reach general audiences, seeing as it was stuck in legal limbo for a while. You see, Vera Drew chose to tell the story of her life—from her earliest realizations that her body didn’t match her concept of herself, to her first real romance and how that other person’s journey of self-discovery helped her understand herself even further, into a happy, fantasy future—all through the lens of living in a comic book world. After an opening that parodies the framing device of Joker, we see a flashback to our essentially unnamed protagonist as a child (when her deadname is spoken aloud, by her mother for instance, it’s bleeped, except in one scene later where it’s uncensored to great effect). In this world, the little AMAB’s greatest dream is to one day be a cast member on UCB (that is, the United Clown Bureau, rather than the Upright Citizen’s Brigade) Live, a parody of SNL in which men in the cast are credited individually as Jokers or Jokemen, while all of the women are consigned to being credited en masse as “The Harlequins.” 

Notably, in this imagining, that Bruce Wayne is Batman is a well-known fact, and he all but rules Gotham with an iron glove. His drones scour the streets for crime, all comedy other than that of UCB Live has been outlawed, and there are films about him in-universe, one of which is clearly a take on Batman Forever, with one of the lines spoken by Nicole Kidman cracking our protagonist’s egg. When she asks her mother about it on the car ride home after the movie, and whether one could be born into “the wrong body,” her mother takes her straight to Arkham, where the sinister Dr. Crane prescribes a semi-antidepressant called Smylex, which is taken via inhaler and instantly distorts the patient’s face into a rictus grin. After a troubled childhood in which an eternally offscreen father leaves all child-rearing to his wife, and with whom our protagonist has an understandably strained relationship, our protagonist (now played by Vera Drew as an adult) moves to Gotham and attempts to get involved on UCB Live and is accepted into the incubator program only to discover that it’s a for-profit scam. This does enable our protagonist to meet their new best friend, Oswald Cobblepot, at the UCB center, and the two of them decide to set up their own illegal anti-establishment “anti-comedy” club. A whole rogues gallery becomes the (lampshaded) found family of the protagonist, including Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Bane, and the Riddler (who gets in early as riddles are, in fact, the antithesis of jokes, making him perfect for their anti-comedy). Our protagonist finds that none of their jokes land, until one day, they see a performance by a Joker named Jason Todd, who’s modeled after the Jared Leto “interpretation” of the character, down to the “damaged” tattoo on his forehead. 

The audience notices before our protagonist does that Jason’s open coat reveals his top surgery scars, so it comes as little surprise to us when he comes out as transgender to our protagonist, although it’s a mild shock to them. Our protagonist asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin, and we see Joker and Jason, whom she calls “Mistah J,” play out, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the complexity of relationships with people who are, whether they tell you at the start with a tattoo on their face or not, damaged. People who are toxic can also be the first people to see us for who we really are, and while that doesn’t cover for the ways in which their behavior is harmful, it does add shades of gray to the fact that these are people who may ultimately teach us something about ourselves. This culminates in our protagonist’s decision to proceed with gender affirming care, presented here as her plummet into a vat of estrogen, Harley Quinn style, only for her and Mr. J to come face to face with the Batman, who has his own abusive backstory with Jason. This is all stuff that is better discovered than recapped, so I won’t summarize further, but this sort of gives you the idea of what this narrative is. Kinda. 

What’s really fun here is just how many different ideas and styles are combined. The segments about J-the-H’s childhood are largely live action, sometimes in locations or sets but sometimes backgrounded only by collages or drawings of her hometown of Smallville. The film-within-a-film mentioned above uses action figures and 3D models to bring not-Batman Forever to life, while some sequences are fully comprised of what appears to be hand-drawn animation. One character exists solely as a puppet, while Poison Ivy is a purely a computer model that looks like she was rendered for a Windows 2000 ROM-based semi-animated point-and-clicker, and characters with more immediate impact on the plot appear in whatever the reimagined memory demands. Some of the film is some combination of several of these, and it’s often so poorly composited that it looks like it’s been cobbled together with excerpts from The Amazing Bulk, but that adds charm rather than taking away from it. I should warn that making the film “busy” in this way might not work for everyone; my viewing companion in particular said that the film’s constant jumps between styles did not mesh with his particular strain of ADHD, and this seems to have made the narrative less legible to him than to me. If you’re able to handle pastiche movies like the kinds put out by Everything is Terrible, you’ll be able to follow this. 

There’s a lot of heart here, especially when it’s clear that Vera is speaking through Joker, like when she admits that when she first arrived in the city she would sometimes call suicide hotlines that would automatically connect her to Kansas because of her area code, and she would use that experience to ground herself by asking how the weather was back home, even if that place had never really been “home.” It’s not all positive, however, as we also feel the biting sting of betrayal when Mr. J calls her by her deadname, the only time that it’s said clearly, in an argument; as she recalls, he had never even known her by that name, so it wasn’t an accident or a slip of the tongue but an intentional use to hurt her. It’s visceral and real, which feels like an odd thing to say about a movie that so provocatively calls attention to its artifice. 

One thing that this one has over the film that it’s parodying/satirizing/reimagining is that it’s actually funny. I’ll admit that I didn’t see the entirety of Todd Phillips’s Joker, but I can promise you that I saw enough. It’s not funny. And hey, not every joke in this one lands, but they come so fast and so furiously across a variety of spectrums that there’s going to be something for everyone here, except for the people who refuse to give the film a chance based purely on their ideologies. The anti-comedy stylings of several of the jokers are funny in their anti-humor with no real knowledge of comics, but there are obviously in-jokes and references, like the omnipresence of the TV-topping mind control device that Jim Carrey’s Riddler’s plan in Forever hinged upon and Catwoman’s complaint that Frank Miller always writes her as a sex worker (not that sex work is bad, she clarifies, but because it’s sexist of him to think that women can’t just be burglars). Most of these are funny even without the context, and some of the jokes that landed most with my theater crowd were oblique jokes about pop culture in general; the biggest laugh of the night came when the yet-unhatched Joker asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin for the first time and their Penguiny friend commenting on their femme attire and pointing out that drag, like comedy, had been outlawed, but only because of the fallout from the explosion at RuPaul’s fracking ranch. 

This is an unusual experience of a film, and I expect that whatever impact it might have been able to have on larger culture has been largely blunted by Warner Bros’ intensive scrutiny and attempts to prevent its release with (unsustainable) claims that it falls outside of fair use, and the overall silence about it (so far at least) from the dipshit side of the cultural divide means that it may not get the popularity bump that everything the right wing pundits complain about does, for better and for worse. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I got something that was unique in its presentation but universal in its examination of the way that (sigh) sometimes, it’s society that’s sick, or it’s our parents who make us sick by their reaction to curiosity and parts of the human experience that are repressed due to societal pressures. It’s an Adult Swim fever dream, and, in its final moments and with its final line, it brought tears to my eyes. You know if this is for you, and if it is, seek it out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Swampflix Guide to the Oscars, 2020

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There are 38 feature films nominated for the 2020 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix are conspicuously more attracted to the lowbrow & genre-minded than we are to stuffy Awards Season releases, so as usual we have reviewed fewer than half of the films nominated (so far!). We’re still happy to see so many movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including four titles from our own Top 10 Films of 2019 list. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but as a list this isn’t too shabby in terms of representing what 2019 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 16 Oscar-Nominated films from 2019 that we covered for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best, based on our star ratings. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

1. Parasite, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best International Feature Film, and Best Production Design

“Money is an iron. For the Parks, it is the metaphorical iron that makes life smooth and effortless, and the iron strength of the walls that separate them from the riffraff below. For the Kims, it is the iron of prison bars that keep them in a metaphorical prison of society and, perhaps, a literal one; it is the weight that drags them down, a millstone to prevent them from ever escaping the trap of stratified social classes.”  – Boomer

2. Avengers: Endgame, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“This is the perfect capstone for this franchise. If there were never another MCU film, it would be totally fine, because as a finale, this is pitch perfect. Every important and semi-important character gets a moment to shine, as the Snap is undone (come on, you knew it would be). There’s even a moment where every living lady hero from the entire MCU is onscreen at once, and it is delightful, although I’m sure the internet is already full of comments about how it was ‘forced’ or ‘cheesy,’ but I don’t feed trolls and I try not to cross the bridges that they live under, so I wouldn’t know.” – Boomer

3. Knives Out, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“I’ve long been a fan of comedy pastiches and homages of genres that function perfectly as examples of those genres despite humorous overtones; my go-to example is Hot Fuzz, which I always tout as having a more sophisticated murder mystery plot than most films than most straightforward criminal investigation media (our lead comes to a logical conclusion that fits all of the clues, but still turns out to be wrong). Knives Out is another rare gem of this type, a whodunnit comedy in the mold of Clue that has a sophisticated and winding plot.” – Boomer

4. Little Women, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Saiorse Ronan), Best Supporting Actress (Florence Pugh), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score

“This is a beautiful film, a timeless piece of literature made fresh once more with a cast overbrimming with talent and filmed with an eye for chromatic storytelling and such beautiful Northeast scenery that when I tell you I was there, I was there. This is also such a talented cast that they breathe a new life into characters that, in the original text and in previous film incarnations, were at times sullen, unlikable, or intolerable.” – Boomer

5. The Lighthouse, nominated for Best Cinematography

“Packed to the walls with more sex, violence, and broad toilet humor than you’d typically expect from high-brow Cinema. If you can push past the initial barriers of Eggers’s patient pacing & period-specific dialogue, the movie is a riot.” – Brandon

6. I Lost My Body, nominated for Best Animated Feature Film

“This is two films for the price of one. And it’s a very low price at that, considering its 80min runtime. As with all two-for-one bargains, however, one of the two complimentary films on this simultaneous double bill is far more satisfying & impressive than the other. To fully appreciate I Lost My Body, then, you have to appreciate its two dueling narratives as a package deal. The stronger movie in this combo pack carries the lesser, even if just by the virtue of their pairing.” – Brandon

7. Marriage Story, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Adam Driver), Best Actress (Scarlett Johannson), Best Supporting Actress (Laura Dern), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Score

“A superb breakup story about how you can love somebody so much, and create a life with them that you love, and it still has to dissolve. It specifically illustrates how hard it can be for parents when their child arbitrarily prefers one over the other. The way those formative childhood phases affect permanent legal repercussions is devastating, as is the realization that you might not actually be best parent for your own child.” – The Podcast Crew

8. Joker, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing

“None of the endless months of vitriolic complaints against its honor resonated with me in the theater, where I mostly just saw a creepy character study anchored by an effectively chilling performance. If anything, the fact that a movie this unassuming and, frankly, this trashy was somehow causing chaos in the Oscars discourse only made it more perversely amusing.” – Brandon

9. Missing Link, nominated for Best Animated Feature Film

“Very cute in its slapstick humor, and often stunning in its visual artistry. It’s about on par with The Boxtrolls all told, which is to say it’s mediocre by Laika standards but still on a level far above most modern children’s cinema.” – Brandon

10. 1917, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects

“The video game mission plot might not make for especially complex drama between its solider protagonists, but the way those babyfaced boys contrast against the unearthly gore, rot, and decay of the war-torn earth beneath them is viscerally upsetting. There are many ways in which the long-take gimmick is a distracting technical exercise, but it does force you to stew in that discomfort for long, uninterrupted stretches. It’s surprisingly brutal in that way.” – Brandon

11. Once Upon a Time . . . In Hollywood, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonard Dicaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Brad Pitt), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing

“I appreciate this movie most as a passionate argument for a sentiment I could not agree with less. I have no love for the traditional machismo & endless parade of cheap-o Westerns that clogged up Los Angeles in these twilight hours of the Studio Era. Still, it was entertaining to watch an idiosyncratic filmmaker with niche interests wax nostalgic about the slimy, uncool bullshit only he cares about.” – Brandon

12. The Irishman, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Al Pacino and Joe Pesci), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Visual Effects

“Finds plenty more to say about the corruption & violence of organized crime that Scorsese has not addressed in previous efforts. Unfortunately, it allows that new material to be drowned out by an overwhelming flood of the same-old-same-old.” – Brandon

13. Jojo Rabbit, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Scarlett Johannson), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, and Best Production Design

“Works best as a maternal parallel to the paternal drama of Boy. The difference is that I left Boy marveling at how he pulled off such a delicate tonal balance with such confident poise, whereas I left Jojo Rabbit wondering if I had just seen him lose his balance entirely and tumble to the floor for the first time.” – Brandon

14. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, nominated for Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects

“Look, Rise of Skywalker is good. It’s not great like The Force Awakens or passable like The Last Jedi, but it’s also not that spectacular either. It doesn’t take the chances that TLJ took, and I was glad that the return of JJ Abrams meant that we went back to mostly practical FX for the aliens (those stupid chihuahua horses from TLJ will haunt me to my goddamned grave) even if the resultant film felt like he was trying to railroad the ending back to his original concepts after not liking how another director played with his toys.” – Boomer

15. Ad Astra, nominated for Best Sound Mixing

“Has all the building blocks needed to achieve something great; they’re just arranged in a confoundingly dull configuration. Worse, there’s literally not one thing about its combination of vintage sci-fi pulp & faux-philosophical melodrama that Interstellar didn’t already achieve to greater success, so there’s constantly a better viewing option hanging over its head.” – Brandon

16. Rocketman, nominated for Best Original Song

“The narration continually reassures the audience that Elton John’s life was ravaged by sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, but everything we see onscreen is musical theatre kids playing dress-up in squeaky clean sound stage environments.” – Brandon

-Brandon Ledet & Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Joker (2019)

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Uh oh, I ended up enjoying the disreputable movie about the Crime Clown, may the gods of Good Taste have mercy on me. The angry backlash surrounding Todd Phillips’s supervillain origin story Joker has been raging since before the movie was even theatrically released, so I can’t imagine that its recent anointment as this year’s Oscars Villain is going to make my defense of it any easier. Even I balked at the film’s existence when watching its early trailers, seeing nothing about what it was promising that hadn’t already been accomplished expertly in You Were Never Really Here & The King of Comedy. Yet, watching Joker on the big screen recently (thanks to its Oscars-boosted second run) I didn’t find anything that really needed defending. None of the endless months of vitriolic complaints against its honor resonated with me in the theater, where I mostly just saw a creepy character study anchored by an effectively chilling performance. If anything, the fact that a movie this unassuming and, frankly, this trashy was somehow causing chaos in the Oscars discourse only made it more perversely amusing.

On a plot level, there’s nothing remarkable here. Phillips merely piles another gritty comic book movie on top of the pile by replacing De Niro’s deranged stand-up comedian Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy with The Clown Prince of Crime. Joker checks off all the necessary boxes to function as both an unimaginative Batman movie (yes, that includes a shot of Mrs. Wayne’s pearls) and as a middling Scorsese riff. There’s not even any room for surprise in the titular arch-villain’s transformation from sign-twirling clown-for-hire to deranged serial killer, since he already looks like a homicidal maniac in clown drag from scene one. The only relatively daring narrative specificity here is setting the film during the grimy days of a 1980s NYC (excuse me, “Gotham”) garbage strike, but even that choice reeks of Scorsese worship. This is not a film that desperately wants to surprise you, though. We all know the sign-twirling clown will become a murder clown by the third act, and in the meantime the soundtrack bombards us with the least imaginative song cues conceivable (including “Send in the Clowns” and “Everybody Plays the Fool,” but somehow not “Tears of a Clown”?).

I don’t see all this routine adherence to prescribed story templates as intellectual laziness, however. It’s just an exercise in genre. Like many great genre films, Joker overcomes its narrative familiarity with other virtues – namely in the bizarre screen presence of Juaquin Phoenix in the central role. Like Tom Hardy’s Herculean feat of transforming Venom from microwaved superhero leftovers to deeply strange camp fest all by his lonesome, Phoenix miraculously carves out a deeply weird character study from these uninspired backdrops. From his alien skeletal contortions in the sign-twirling clowns’ locker room to his piercing laughter at the exact wrong social cues to his public displays of bedroom-dancing, Phoenix delivers a genuine nightmare of a performance, flash-freezing my blood as soon as the first scene. I was too terrified of what he might do from moment to moment to worry about how pedestrian the film around him was. If anything, heightening the world around him to match his energy might have been too overwhelming. The familiar backdrop of a “gritty,” Scorsese-inspired comic book movie was just the muted tone his loud, upsetting presence needed to pop against in contrast.

The great irony of Joker is that much ado has been made about its political messaging where there is none, which is the exact folly that’s depicted in the film’s third act. Joker has become a popular irl boogeyman as a call-to-arms for potentially dangerous white men to rise up in revolt. Such a revolt is depicted in the film itself, with thousands of rioters taking to the streets in clown masks, inspired by the Crime Clown’s perceived “Kill the Rich” ethos. The thing that he has no awareness of class politics, and his adoring proto-Anonymous fans are reading into what’s essentially a blank slate of a hero. He might as well be Forest Gump or Chauncey Gardner, offering only empty platitudes like “What’s the world come to?” and “Is it just me or is it getting crazier out there?” when prompted for an opinion on the state of things. If anything, the film functions like a horror movie about how scary isolated white men on the fringe can be once they’re fired up. Anyone who finds a hero in this indiscriminate murderer is deliberately searching for validation of their own already-established political agenda on a blank canvas – which is exactly what happens in the movie. This is a character study of a dangerous creep, not the incel dog whistle it’s been reported to be. Anyone who finds meaning there is just another kind of clown.

Of course, all art is inherently political in some way, and there’s been plenty of valid critique lobbed at Joker for its representation of racial power dynamics and mental health crises in particular. I don’t want to be dismissive of those claims, but I believe they mostly just point to the kind of movie this is at its rotten core: a trashy genre picture that has no real place being lauded in a prim & proper Awards Season context. I found Joker to be a deeply upsetting creep-out, thanks almost exclusively to Phoenix’s outright demonic performance. It’s rare that a slimy, grimy movie like that sneaks into Awards consideration, and a lot of people apparently don’t know what to do with it in that context except to get loud & get angry. Personally, I’m starting to find this particular bit of Oscars Season Chaos perversely amusing in a way I didn’t with past Awards Season villains like Green Book or Three Billboards. In other words, I used think that Joker’s existence was a tragedy, but now I realize it’s a comedy.

-Brandon Ledet