OP on that post blocked me in response to my first post, and Tumblr ate my reply to your reblog of mine, so I’ll respond here, I guess.
If a trans person is a terrible human being, you still ought to refer to them by their correct pronouns. If a black person is being unkind that’s no excuse to start slinging racial slurs, and if someone who happens to be overweight is also a cruel and heartless murderer, the correct response to that isn’t to call them fat.
There are plenty of ways to tear holes in the idea that he’s a powerful, cool, and confident person that do not rely on comments on his appearance. Further, mocking his appearance doesn’t even achieve that in the first place; a person looking exactly like Trump could be a perfectly capable leader that shows concern for their people and genuinely does their best for the country, its inhabitants, and the world at large. Likewise, the most beautiful person alive can be rotten to the core. His appearance is not the thing to target here - bring up his monstrous actions and blatant disregard for others, highlight all the obviously insecure things he does, but there’s no reason to go after what he looks like.
Trump will never see your comments. He will not be hurt about you (or some other Tumblr denizen) making fun of his “noodle arms and chicken legs”. The people that will be hurt by those things? Other users that happen to share physical traits that they might (or might not! It’s bad either way!) be self conscious about. If you make fun of i.e. a fat person for their weight, your words are not just aimed at the person in question, but will hit any fat person unfortunate enough to come across your post. Making fun of Trump’s appearance is just going to cause unnecessary and unjust collateral damage to people who have done nothing wrong and don’t deserve it.
That’s Bad and Wrong, and Trump’s character is no excuse to do such a thing.
okay, I know I’ve mentioned it before that I find the criticisms of ‘joker’ very shallow and misleading - but this is the top review on rotten tomatoes...
...and I feel the need to repeat myself again. This isn’t the only one of its kind, but it’s the most popular I’ve seen. Every media outlet has written about a similar topic in some shape or form.
So I’ve read the article, hidden behind a paywall as it is, and I take serious issue with the damaging message the author took from the film. I’ve copied the article bit by bit because I’m so fucking irritated by it.
For it is essentially a depiction of what happens when white supremacy is left unchecked. It shows the delusions that many white men have about their place in society and the brutality that can result when that place is denied.
Arthur Fleck doesn’t want to be treated better because of the colour of his skin. He doesn’t ask for help because he feels he’s superior to the POC around him. He needs help because he’s ill and no one cares. The film is a criticism of austerity and classism, and the unsympathetic arrogance of those in more fortunate positions than others. It’s also, more importantly, about how all this affects a mentally ill loner with a history of childhood abuse and living in poverty.
It has nothing to do with his race. The author’s words imply that a white person in such a desperate situation is only seeking to affirm their own supremacy. That’s....so fucked up. Mental illness isn’t some tool to be used in a race war, it hurts anyone. He’s dismissing the experiences of a man who happens to be white because he can’t see beyond the colour of his skin. Doesn’t that sound like exactly the kind of thing POC have been fighting against for decades, if not centuries?
The fact that the Joker is a white man is central to the film’s plot. A black man in Gotham City (really, New York) in 1981 suffering from the same mysterious mental illnesses as Fleck would be homeless and invisible. He wouldn’t be turned into a public figure who could incite an entire city to rise up against the wealthy. Black men dealing with Fleck’s conditions are often cast aside by society, ending up on the streets or in jail, as studies have shown.
And though Fleck says he often feels invisible, had he been black, he truly would have been — except, of course, when he came into contact with the police.
Arthur is invisible. It’s painfully obvious that he is. He incites a movement because of what he symbolises and the way Thomas Wayne dismissed people like him. When he murdered the three rich boys on the subway, only his clown makeup was identified. The police weren’t looking for a man of any specific colour, they were looking for a fucking clown.
Arthur could have been black, brown, red or blue. The face behind the mask doesn’t matter, because Gotham City united behind the icon of resistance. It’s supposed to be ironic. The only way Arthur felt seen was when he was under his mask. Nobody cared about Arthur Fleck, they cared about the Joker.
So yes, had Arthur been a black man, he’d still become the symbol of resistance.
Though Fleck is pursued and investigated by Gotham’s finest, his whiteness acts as a force field, protecting him as he engages in the violent acts of the latter half of the film. Consider his appearance on the live talk show hosted by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). A black man acting as strangely as Fleck does would not have been allowed to go on the air. But the white Fleck is given access, and bloodshed soon follows.
I mean, in regards to how strangely he was acting, the reason they invited him to the show was because they thought he was a freak. They wanted him to make a fool of himself. Also Murray’s producer never wanted him on the air, but Murray insisted because he was more concerned with viewership. Again - that’s the fucking point. Murray was far too invested in his own self-interest to see a man dangerously close to snapping. The author completely glossed over that, and the producer who didn’t want Arthur, white skin and all.
Or look at how Fleck interacts with others. He is frequently in conversation with people who occupy a lower rung in society than he does: a state-appointed therapist he sees early on; a protective mother who chastises him for playing peekaboo with her son on the bus; his possible love interest, a neighbor who lives in the same building; and the psychiatrist he sees in Arkham Asylum. Every one of these characters is a black woman with whom he eventually has confrontations. Phillips consistently places Fleck in an oppositional or antagonistic position to these women.
I don’t know if this is intentional on Phillips’s part, but it is significant. When we learn that his relationship with the neighbor (played with artful restraint by Zazie Beetz) was merely a figment of his troubled imagination, the way he leaves the apartment implies that this realization has led Fleck to kill her and perhaps her child. After his final conversation with the Arkham doctor, his bloody footsteps suggest that he kills her as well.
A key fact the author conveniently ignores in his article is that Arthur never blames immigrants or POC for his misfortune. When he takes a beating at the hands of non-white kids at the start of his film, his colleague calls them “animals” (a common racist term for non-white folks) but Arthur insists they’re just kids. He sympathises with them, despite the fact they brutalised him, because he doesn’t see them as an ‘other.’
And I do think that’s why, crucially, most of the female characters are black women. Whether they occupy a lower rung of society than he does is debatable, because he’s constantly framed as being in the same situation as them. He’s as impacted by the austerity cuts as they are, he rides the bus as they do, he lives in the same shitty building as they do. To quote his therapist: “they don’t give a shit about you, and they don’t give a shit about me, either.”
Arthur doesn’t just have confrontations with them, he has an imaginary relationship with one. Whether he murders her or not is left ambiguous and up to the audience to decide her fate. We can’t say for sure that she’s dead, and that’s the theme of the entire film. We have no idea if anything is real or all in his head when he’s in the asylum.
And that’s the brilliant point.
Arthur’s world is dominated by black women because black women are one of the minorities most affected by institutional prejudice, facing discrimination for both their race and their gender. In 1970s America, they were some of the most invisible people around, ignored by the wealthy and powerful. So Arthur relates to them.
Phillips’ decision to use black women offers a double message that they, too, are suffering under austerity and classism. This isn’t just a white lonesome man’s struggle, it’s a reality for black women everywhere. Arthur’s situation isn’t exceptional because your neighbour, your therapist, the woman on your bus with her kid - they’re all going through it without going on a murderous rampage. If you feel for Arthur’s plight, you feel for theirs too. It’s fucking brilliant.
As for why he has confrontations with them - he has confrontations with literally everyone. Literally everyone treats him badly. Again, that’s. the. point. Except for the black man at Arkham Asylum who tells him to go get help, who’s just doing his job and feels pity for Arthur. But hey, the author ignores that.
Fleck kills white men because he cannot access their status and is ostracized by them, but his black female victims are so invisible that the film does not bother to show their deaths. We as viewers can and should take note of them.
Arthur killed the three white boys on the subway because they were beating the shit out of him for no other reason than him laughing. They were cruel and sadistic, and he’d just been fired from the job he loved so was on his last nerve. He killed his white ex-colleague for framing him and having the balls to still ask him to lie on his behalf so he could keep his job, when he had Arthur fired. He killed Murray for demeaning him and mocking his plight.
Every person killed on-screen was white. Every person killed on-screen was because Arthur felt they’d done him wrong. Zazie’s character is unconfirmed if dead. The psychiatrist at the asylum is implied to be dead, but Arthur’s transformation to the Joker is complete and it’s entirely possible that the act in itself demonstrates (after having sympathised with black women before) that Arthur’s sanity has cracked and his humanity has been replaced by the chaos of the Joker, who cares little for any life, even that of a marginalised minority he once related to.
There are other ways that whiteness informs Fleck’s character. He anticipates he’ll be treated as a son by the Wayne family, and assumes he’ll be given medical records just by asking the hospital orderly (played by the great Brian Tyree Henry). The privileges that come with Fleck’s race set him up for these unrealistic expectations. When they’re not met, the consequences are deadly.
It’s almost as if Arthur has no concept of reality and has little understanding of the way the world works and naively believes that things will just happen because he wants them to. It’s almost as if he has severe parental issues and was so desperate for a father, he even imagined Murray calling him the son he’d always wanted. It’s almost as if this has been established in the film multiple times.
Whiteness may not have been on the filmmakers’ minds when they made “Joker,” but it is the hidden accomplice that fosters the violence onscreen.
Let’s take a film that offers a brutal outlook on the impact of mental illness on one’s psyche and sanity and demean the entire message, important as it is, and try to steer a much needed conversation on mental health towards something that doesn’t concern it. As a POC, I find articles like this so, so damaging to the fight against racism.
It essentially weakens our arguments and offers ammunition to those that believe POC just hate white people for no other reason than, “ur white and I don’t like it.” Way to go, NYT.
Guaranteed, if Joker had been black or brown and white women were only used, there’d be a backlash against the narrative for painting men of colour as unstable and white women as victims because men of colour aren’t allowed to be mentally ill, only terrorists and criminals. Which is what Joker ultimately ends up becoming. Can’t win, can you?
Just socially awkward things™: when people call you “super kind” in their review on a second-hand platform and you ascend to another plane of existence.
IF YOU ARE A COACH OR MENTOR PLEASE DONT BRING YOUR ATHLETES OR STUDENTS DOWN BECAUSE THEY MESSED UP. THEY ARE YOUNG AND ARE GOING TO MAKE MISTAKES. CHANCES ARE THEY ALREADY FEEL AWFUL AND BLAME THEMSELVES. IT DOESNT HELP WHEN YOU YELL AND BRING THEM DOWN EVEN FURTHER.
