The Killing Joke: What Arthur Fleck Finds So Funny
Just as any other film, television series, animation, or comic book produced after The Dark Knight, Joker (and specifically Joaquin Phoenix’s performance) will necessarily be held up against what has come to be accepted as the gold standard of Heath Ledger’s unsettling and timeless portrayal of the clown prince of crime. While I could argue the merits of both legendary actor’s turns filling the shoes of Mister J in terms of performance, technique, etc., what I find infinitely more interesting is to examine the shift in the philosophical stance of the character between the two screen incarnations.
The general consensus amongst fans and critics alike is that Ledger’s Joker was a searing satire of and critique on the orderly, structured world he saw around him: people behaving in manners that conformed to paper-thin ethical standards that would degrade in the face of overwhelming pressure. He claims–as the Killing Joke Joker did–that “all it takes is a little push” for people to abandon their moral sentiments and revert to sheer self-interest and chaos. Ledger’s Joker was essentially fulfilling the archetype of the trickster god, reminiscent of Bugs Bunny or Loki, who wants to demonstrate the absurdity of the rules to those who consider themselves beholden to them by trapping said people in logical and moral puzzles that are a direct result of the contradictions inherent in the system: loopholes, if you will. His fulfillment of the archetype is demonstrated by the final ferry sequence, the money burning, the Rachel/Harvey choice, etc.
Phoenix’s Joker, on the other hand, comes across as rather motiveless and random, denying us even an albeit twisted logic by which to understand his actions and thought processes: he kills for sport, for vengeance, in retribution for real or imagined slights, or quite simply because he thinks it’s funny. He rejects the idea that society even functions on a set of shared rules, and takes the absurdity of the system as grounds for refuting it’s existence entirely. In this Phoenix becomes the pure nihilist Joker: the archetypal drifter-killer with no agenda and no reason to explain his madness and violence–just rage, insanity, and a freedom from ties to any sense of morality at all. The degree to which this philosophy was brought to the character even on the level of acting cues can be seen in Phoenix’s tendency as Arthur Fleck to break into spontaneous and chaotic pseudo-dances at seemingly inappropriate or even random times–here, both the cause of the action and the action itself lack an internal logic by which to understand them.
While claiming to be the ultimate embodiment of chaos, Ledger’s Joker could never truly live up to that epithet, because in attempting to use the contradictions of humanity’s purported civilization and societal rules to prove their own absurdity, he reifies their existence. We see Ledger’s Joker engage in such behavior several times in The Dark Knight, for example in the scene where Ledger kidnaps the characters of Rachel and Harvey Dent, demanding that Batman make the terrible decision to save one and let the other die. Ledger’s Joker believes that he has constructed an impossible situation in order to demonstrate to Batman that making value judgements of one human life against another are ultimately arbitrary, and that no matter the outcome the agent’s choice cannot, by human standards, be a moral action. However in doing so he both acknowledges the role of the value of human life in public consciousness and seems to, by utilizing the contradictions of utilitarianism, reaffirm its salience. On the opposite side of the equation, Phoenix’s Joker simply denies the existence of rules or governing moral principles altogether, and quite simply doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
Ledger’s Joker fails in his own nihilistic agenda by adopting an agenda in the first place. By striving to win over others (namely Batman) to his point of view, he implicitly acknowledges that there exists a superior and objectively correct point of view: his. Whereas in Joker, we see Arthur completely forgo any intentionally malicious scheming designed to manipulate humans into defying their own moral codes; he instead simply chooses to ignore their existence altogether, operating as he wishes when he wishes with no thought as to the decency or civility of his actions (though paradoxically he does blame the lack of civility in society for contributing to his crumbling psyche). Arthur doesn’t try to convince anybody of anything, because ultimately he doesn’t think it matters. The only person he ever even appears to “lecture” to, Murray, he kills at the conclusion of his speech! This suggests that his entire ostensibly “rhetorical” outburst on the show was more of a twisted confession in search of or as a completion of his process of personal catharsis than any attempt to demonstrate to others the depravity of society.
For these reasons I–personally–think that Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips delivered a much scarier and much more existentially horrifying Joker than Ledger and Nolan ever did. Ledger defied our understanding of right and wrong, but did so within a conventional framework, playing by the rules. Arthur Fleck simply refuses to even admit the existence of a system in the first place, playing a game unbeholden to a rule system of any kind, lacking even the slightest veneer of an internal logic. It is that which makes our blood run cold.
Now there are those who would claim that Arthur Fleck isn’t a proper nihilist, and that he’s actually just a depraved psychopath with an ill-formed mind and the means to kill. They would cite, for example, that almost all of his killings stem from personal slights against him: the boys who mocked him on the subway, his mother who did nothing to stop his father’s abusing him, Murray who mocked him on the show, Randall who tried to get him fired, etc. I think the answer to this protest boils down to the fact that while those may be the primary “motives” for his violent acts, this logic fails to comment on how Arthur perceives the morality of his actions.
While you could argue that Arthur feels “justified” in his killings because of the wrongs these people have inflicted against him, the more correct answer lies elsewhere. The impetus for his killing may very well be the instinctual feelings of indignation, rage, and hurt pride that accompany the pernicious acts of those around him, but he doesn’t view his killings as morally good. He doesn’t even view them as justified: he just thinks they’re funny. Consider the example of the drunk yuppie Wayne Enterprises boys that Arthur guns down on the subway. In his interview with Murray, Arthur admits that he finds the boys’ deaths to be incredibly funny, and as a principle reason for the humor he cites this: the boys were mourned and wept over because they were affluent, because they were Wayne employees, because Thomas Wayne mourned them on the news. But if it were Arthur that was gunned down on the sidewalk, he asks us to consider how many of us would simply walk right over him (a line written down in his journal right above the “cents” joke). What he seems to find so overwhelmingly funny about this is that it’s a crystallization of the fact that humanity is all tied up in a grand, cosmic joke that, because he is removed from it, Arthur can find humor in. The “joke”, in his eyes, is humanity’s use of moral codes as a way to define proper and improper manners of living. He posits that if such moral codes did, in fact, exist then they would command those obedient to them to answer Arthur’s question by stating that they would mourn his death just the same as that of the rich boys. But of course… this isn’t what happens. And so Arthur laughs. The parable of the drunk subway boys reveals humanity’s willingness to bend, break, and ignore morality when it is convenient for them to do so. The irony here is that the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this malleability of right and wrong is that there is no such thing. But Arthur is the only one who can see this. So in his final line of the film, he very simply responds to the psychiatrist’s request to hear his joke with the only answer he can give: “you wouldn’t get it”.
Many critics have bashed Joker for coming off as meandering or even aimless, which I think is really a pointless criticism of a movie fundamentally about pointlessness. If we judge a film as “good” only by its slavish narrative devotion to character-driven causality, then a character piece about a fundamental moral nihilist with no reasoning or motivation to define his actions by must necessarily appear to be a slow, meaningless, or even boring movie. They claim that because Arthur seems to have an incoherent or rambling view of society which he is impotent to express–save for in the sad, impish ramblings of a madman masking profundity in a child’s vocabulary–the film lacks purpose and fails to take a definite stance on contemporary issues/state of affairs. This argument is nonsensical, like trying to use a ruler to measure the passage of time: it’s a faulty metric. The film, barring a few instances (everything with regards to the pharmaceutical industry and treatment of mental illness), on the whole isn’t trying to say anything about modern Western society: it’s a micro-level examination of how a man could come to completely abandon every moral tenet we hold dear, including belief in the existence of moral tenets at all.
Finally, I’d like to make an interesting observation with regards to the motif of that one particular staircase that Arthur must climb to reach his apartment building. At the opening of the film Arthur trudges his way up the staircase: it’s nighttime and the scene is lit with various cool, blue hues reflecting the depths of his depression and feelings of hopelessness. As he struggles to reach the top of the stairs he clutches in his hand a bag of prescriptions, literally weighing him down. What we’re presented with via this striking mise en scene is the portrait of a mentally ill man trying desperately to conform to the behavioral and emotional expectations of a society that was not designed for the mentally ill. His medications, representative of his struggle to maintain a normal life, become the literal and emotional baggage that he must carry through his days. As he writes in his journal: “the worst part about having a mental illness is that people expect you to behave as if you don’t”. However, when Arthur finally completes his transformation and adopts the persona of the Joker, letting go of his desire to fit into a world that never had a place for him, opting to remove himself from its laws completely, we see him return to this very same staircase and his demeanor is completely changed. This time it’s in the middle of the day: the sun is shining down brightly and warmly on Arthur–himself dressed in resplendent red, yellow, and orange hues–as he literally dances down the stairs, letting gravity do the work for him. A literal, visual interpretation of Heath Ledger’s Joker’s claim that “madness is like gravity”. This representation of insanity as a journey of mental emancipation is reflected in both The Dark Knight and the comic The Killing Joke, where in the latter the Joker specifically refers to insanity as: “the emergency exit on life… You can just step outside and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened”. The Killing Joke Joker frames insanity as a letting go, as a liberation from the difficulties of life and an induction into a new, unrestricted way of living. This is exactly the transformation that Arthur undergoes throughout the course of Joker–living is no longer a chore… it’s a dance.
