The Joker: We’re Laughing Our Way to Death
If you haven’t heard about The Joker, then let me be the first to welcome you back from the bottom of the ocean.
The Joker is a thrilling thought-provoking theatrical typhoon of a movie. It’s the story of Arthur Fleck, a mentally troubled man oppressed by the disregard, and even contempt, of Gotham City (America) towards ‘nobody’s’ like him.
One of his mental illnesses makes him laugh uncontrollably at inappropriate times. Arthur tries to turn this lemon into lemonade by making it as a professional clown. But he ends up being treated like a social clown; he becomes the comedian that everyone thinks is a joke.
Then he decided to switch things up.
He chose to deliver a punchline so funny, that only he would understand; for the first time the joke would be on society.
And this was it. (*viewer discretion is advised*)
The scene is a jolter isn’t it? Joaquinn Phoenix surely earned his Oscar! (Did you see the way his lips twitched?🤯)
Arthur Fleck shot three men and called it a joke. Those three rich young men on that unfortunate train, thought they were beating up a scrawny ugly clown; but what they didn’t know was that this clown had a gun. That’s a post-modern punchline, and I’ll tell you why.
Post-modernism is all about tearing down concepts. The trend so far has lead to the (attempted) deconstruction of even things like human life and gender. Everything is now open to interpretation; everything now ‘depends’. And nothing is too objective to escape this.
“Comedy is subjective Murray! Isn’t that what they say? All of you, this system that knows so much, you decide what is right or wrong, the same way that you decide what is funny or not.”
Here, The Joker tries to deconstruct comedy too. What is funny to one person might not be funny to another. But why can’t we all just tolerate each other’s definition of comedy? Since its relative?
Comedy is relative, but when comedy harms human nature then relativity should be left behind shouldn’t it?
Arthur doesn’t think so, in fact he thinks that the outrage is not so much about human nature, but whose human nature it harms.
“If it was me who died on the side walk, you’d walk right over me…so because Thomas Wayne went and cried about them on TV?…”
I see his point really: people are so outraged because the people that died were kinda ‘important’ (They worked on Wall Street)
You would understand him too if you think about it in another context. For instance, we have fundamental human rights right? And we have them because we acknowledge that the deliberate denial of these rights to an innocent human being does harm to the dignity of human nature don’t we? The first is the right to life. But, just like the Joker says, depends on ‘whose’ right to life we are talking about.
For example, in some states in America, a living baby delivered after surviving an abortion, does not have this right.
This movie, this scene, raises issues that have been on everyone’s mind lately (or at least have been in the news).
When he says:
“I’ve got nothing else to lose. Nothing can hurt me anymore.”
This sense of numbness comes to people who have been mercilessly bombarded by depression and its posse of emotional tormentors. And guess what? According to WHO, one in every 29 people is depressed globally. The rates are more outstanding when you narrow it down to say millennials, or teenagers.
Isn’t it funny how easily Murray dismisses Arthur’s theory concerning the cause of the rising rates of depression:
“Have you seen what it’s like out there Murray? Everybody just yells and screams at each other, no body’s civil anymore, nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy”
This might seem like a very simplistic argument until you watch award winning journalist, Johann Hari’s TED talk on the subject.
Hari made an excellent point. He says a depressed person is one with “unmet needs” i.e unmet psychological needs; particularly the need of being connected to other people and being part of something bigger than themselves — a community/tribe.
Individualism is on the rise folks! According to Hari 39% of people identified themselves as ‘no longer close to anyone’. The world is becoming more self-centered and self-interested. Too many ‘me’s’ and excessive “I-gadgets” that reduce everyone’s worldviews to the view of just their own world. So, nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy.
Then there’s one last statement which ties it all in really:
“Do you think men like Thomas Wayne (rich guy) ever think what it’s like to someone like me?…They think we’ll just sit there and take it like good little boys! That we won’t werewolf and go wild!”
Why is this statement important? Well you see there’s a link between the capitalist utopia that popular culture champions and depression. The cultural effect of pure capitalism is materialism. And as Johann Hari stated very clearly, there is an interior emptiness that comes with the showiness of materialism; because human nature has needs beyond ‘stuff’.
Materialist cultures ignore and demean our psychological needs; and they even reduce people to just their ‘material’ or monetary value. Put simply, if capitalism takes an untamed step forward, humanity takes a step backwards and dies(because exploiting other people for money is too easy).
Think about all this and all the news of unprovoked mass shootings in America for a while. Then consider The Joker’s final question?
“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash (i.e no material value)?!”
Well….
Just might get what ‘YOU ******* DESERVE!”
But hey! Why so serious?🤡
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Originally published on The Melancholic Millennial. A weird blog title for someone who’s Gen Z.
