SPOILERS for Joker. Joker puts bad things into the world. It's one of the reasons I don't like the movie, and reason enough.
But since I haven't yet figured out why I think Joker puts bad things into the world, but why I don't think The Dark Knight does that, I'm going to save my criticisms in today's post for something more superficial and plot-focused.
When I wasn't being bothered by the gratuitous shocks and tone deafness of Joker, I was being bothered by the way it makes mincemeat of the familiar Batman mythology.
Or, at the very least, the way it recontextualizes the most notorious moment in Batman's backstory, the one that gets parodied more than any other.
And this is something it has in common with Rogue One.
Rogue One -- which I also gave a milquetoast 2.5 stars as a way of acknowledging that I appreciated certain elements of the film without actually liking it -- does things I don't like, have never liked, with what functions as the inciting incident of the whole Star Wars saga.
Instead of the transfer of the Death Star plans from Princess Leia to R2-D2 serving as this almost quiet moment in an episode of successful espionage, we now know that it was preceded by a giant battle involving AT-ATs. So much for the innocent little space caper that led to a galaxy-defining narrative. It was always operating on the largest of scales, we now know.
That didn't sit well with me at all. It was complicating a story I admired for its simplicity, and it was all in the spirit of mining our nostalgia to sell us "additional breadth and depth" on what we already knew. Or thought we knew, it turns out.
I think the agenda in Joker is a little different, but the result is the same.
I think Todd Phillips and company set out to make a movie about how the world can mold a deranged supervillain in its cruel crucible, and knowing that it was the Batman villain the Joker helped us understand exactly what type of psychopath we're talking about, because we've known that psychopath for more than 50 years. In its ideal form it would have been beholden to no other story or existing narrative timeline.
But we live in a world of cinematic universes, and the suits at DC just could not resist continuing to ram the connections to the story of Bruce Wayne down our throats.
Which I guess is why they ultimately have Thomas and a pearl-clutching Martha Wayne killed on the same night in which the Joker announces himself to the whole world by killing Gotham City's version of Johnny Carson live on air, launching a citywide riot.
Come on.
Look, this origin story for the Joker does not have to fit in perfectly with what we know about the character. Looking him up on Wikipedia just now, I found that his origin story has changed to fit the needs of whichever of the umpteen stories someone was telling about him at the time. I'd appreciate something close to the story where he falls into a vat of acid that turns his skin white and his hair green, but I'm okay if you don't want to give me that. There's only so many times you can film that scene.
I'm even okay if you give me a Joker who's "just some joker," to quote late night host Murray Franklin -- who has no "particular set of skills" that allows him to marshal an army of freaks, create all kinds of poisonous weapons, and evade capture for as long as he does and as often as he does. If you want to make Arthur Fleck just a failed clown with the remnants of childhood brain damage, I can work with that as well.
What I can't work with is the idea that the Joker would be on the scene for something like 15 year before Batman even becomes Batman. I mean, how old can Bruce Wayne be in that scene in the alley where his parents are killed? Eleven? Twelve? And what's the youngest Batman can be when he first emerges? Thirty?
So in Todd Phillips' and Joaquin Phoneix's Gotham City, Bruce Wayne grows up with a hatred for the Joker his whole life, with a single focus for all his efforts toward shaping himself into a tech-savvy vigilante. No, this Joker does not pull the trigger that killed his parents, but he might as well have. He incited those copycats to violence, and besides, he came to my damn house and talked to me through the gate. He's the face on my voodoo doll and my punching bag. He's the last face I look at when I go to bed and the first I see each morning before I wake up.
It's a problem because I can't abide by a world where the Joker is on the loose for 15 years, menacing Gotham City, begging for someone to rise up and do something about him, until someone finally does. If he's on the loose for that long, it speaks incredibly poorly of the Gotham police -- though it speaks even worse of the prisons and the justice system if he keeps getting caught and keeps escaping.
I had always thought that the killing of the Waynes was a random crime, a robbery, not some vendetta on the rich launched by the villain who would become the future Batman's greatest nemesis. I had always thought their alley demise was the narrative equivalent of Leia Organa hunching over and surreptitiously sliding a disk into a slot on an R2 unit.
Rogue One tried to tell me something quite different about that scene, and now Joker is trying to do the same, and I don't like it.
I agree with a friend of mine who stated that the movie would have been better off leaning away from, rather than leaning into, the Bruce Wayne stuff. Like if they had to get Bruce in there for a cameo to make the audience chuckle, make it like Wolverine's five-second cameo in X-Men: First Class. Not everything has to be related to everything else. If Joker were more of a standalone, I might have liked it better.
Or, I might have just written this post about why I think it puts bad things into the world instead.
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