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<h1 class="css-12oljxu">The Joker Melodrama</h1>
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<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-1q5ec3n">Eileen
Jones</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">jacobinmag.com</div>
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<p>Melodrama was an ultra-popular
entertainment form of the Gilded Age. It
seems fitting, then, that in 2019, we
have returned to the genre in <cite>Joker</cite>.</p>
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<div id="RIL_IMG_1" class="RIL_IMG">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.jacobinmag.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F10%2F10142740%2F75787c160b8c07f5b397d299a441f8a7.jpg"
alt="Joaquin Phoenix as Joker."
width="380" height="253"> <figcaption>Joaquin
Phoenix as Joker.</figcaption> </figure>
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<p>By now there are a thousand <a
href="https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/joker-and-the-long-history-of-movie-moral-panics"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">different</a> <a
href="https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/joker-reagan-1981-martin-scorsese-king-comedy"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">takes</a> on <cite>Joker
</cite>— I’ve read dozens, capping
it off with <a
href="https://danieltutt.com/2019/10/09/a-lacanian-reading-of-joker/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">“A Lacanian Reading of
”</a> which seemed like a good
time to quit. Such a wealth of
varied responses indicate that this
film is the Rorschach test of our
day. But that’s a good thing. That
means, love it or hate it, we have
an interesting and relevant film on
our hands for once that compels
people to head to the theater, see
it, and offer a public reaction.</p>
<p>What I haven’t seen discussed yet
is <cite>Joker</cite>’s heavy
emphasis on its chosen narrative
genre, which, for most of the film’s
running time, isn’t “comic book
movie” at all but melodrama. Joker,
born Arthur Fleck, is an endlessly
abused victim of cruel familial and
societal tyrannies whose suffering
is finally recognized by the
community that, in the end,
celebrates him. This is a model
melodramatic plot that would’ve been
familiar to audiences as far back as
silent cinema. Here, it’s made
bleakly ironic because of the
chaotic, violent means of its hero
achieving recognition in the end.
Fleck becomes Joker by refusing to
play the part of melodrama’s
innocent victim, who almost always
upholds society’s professed values
and is egregiously punished for it.
It’s a good move on Fleck’s part,
since the innocent victim often dies
and is wept over by people who only
learn to appreciate them
posthumously.</p>
<p>In <cite>Joker</cite>, the title
character repeatedly wonders what
kind of story he’s caught in. The
film opens with Arthur Fleck, in
full clown makeup, using his fingers
to push the corners of his mouth up
to resemble the comedy mask and down
to resemble the tragedy mask. Later,
he says, at a crucial turning point
of violence that changes him from
Arthur to Joker, “I thought my life
was a tragedy. But now I know it’s a
comedy.”</p>
<p>Problem is, if it’s a comedy, no
one’s laughing, not the audiences
within or outside the film, if you
rule out the nervous giggling at
some screenings. Arthur/Joker as
would-be stand-up comic tells
“jokes” no one recognizes as jokes,
and his last line acknowledges that
he’s redefined the form for himself
by thinking up an entirely private
“joke” and then saying in menacing
tones, both to his therapist in
Arkham Asylum and to us in close-up,
“You wouldn’t get it.”</p>
<p>The character’s creation back in
1940, and his alarming relationship
to jokes, smiles, and laughs, were
in part inspired by a 1928 silent
film melodrama, <a
href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019130/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">.</a> Based on a
Victor Hugo novel, it’s the story of
one of King James II’s political
enemies whose child is disfigured in
punishment, his upper lip cut off to
create a hideous permanent “smile”
that condemns him to an adult life
of displaying himself as a traveling
carnival “freak.” He remains
virtuous and saintly in spite of all
ill-usage as he tries to win the
love of a true-hearted and
conveniently blind young woman.</p>
<p>For the film <cite>Joker,</cite>
writer-director Todd Phillips has
added another silent-era
melodramatic influence, D. W.
Griffith’s (1919). In it, Lillian
Gish plays an impoverished waif
living in the slums of London, where
she’s routinely beaten by her
drunken brute of a father, himself a
victim of the oppressive horrors of
poverty. The father sadistically
forces her to “smile” through her
tears of agony, and she has to use
her fingers to push her mouth into a
semblance of a smile, a gesture so
poignant that it quickly became
iconic. (Silent film comedian Buster
Keaton, who relied on his
stone-faced stoicism to increase
laughs, parodied it right away in a
comedy in which brutes terrorize him
and demand that he “smile.”)</p>
<p>At the end of <cite>Joker</cite>,
when he’s set off a revolution in
the streets, he’ll repeat the
Lillian Gish “smile,” his lips red
with a mixture of clown paint and
blood. But before he’s transformed
fully into the title character who
now gets the joke of trying to
behave sanely in an insanely rigged
society, Arthur Fleck begins the
film as a slum waif, too. He’s been
taught by his mother to “smile”
regardless of his feelings, and of
course his terrible laugh, a
joyless, hacking, cawing bray
supposedly caused by a “neurological
condition,” is the darker
manifestation of his false,
involuntary expressions of
happiness. His mother tells him he
was born to “bring laughter and joy”
to the world, and his ugly
environment is emblazoned with signs
saying things like, “DON’T FORGET TO
SMILE,” which, in a moment of rage,
he changes by inking over “FORGET
TO” and creating a new sign that
says, “DON’T SMILE.”</p>
<p>He’s the struggling victim of the
world’s brutality whose suffering
goes unrecognized, making him seem
“invisible,” as Arthur puts it. “I
hope my death makes more cents than
my life,” he’s written plaintively
in his journal, showing he intuits
the class-based horror of his world.
In melodrama, the community will
finally recognize the victim’s
suffering and virtue — and champion
them in a sudden reversal at the
end. Melodramas achieve their huge
emotional effects through these
reversals, their narrative
structures like a fever chart of
soaring highs and gut-punch lows,
victory snatched from defeat, great
moments of joy and triumph turning
into total humiliation and despair.
A good example of this in <cite>Joker</cite>
is when Arthur sees his filmed
routine from a local stand-up club
being aired on his favorite TV show,
seemingly celebrated by the comedian
he reveres as a kind of father
figure, Murray Franklin (Robert De
Niro, playing out a skewed
continuation of his Rupert Pupkin
character in Martin Scorsese’s ).
It’s a dream come true until, at the
moment of peak elation, Arthur
realizes his failed routine is being
mocked for cruel audience laughs.</p>
<p>Arthur’s physical suffering in the
form of his spasmodic laugh is
augmented by actor Joaquin Phoenix’s
emaciated frame and ability to
contort his body in painful-looking
ways. It makes Arthur the grotesque
equivalent of melodrama’s typical
blind girl or deaf mute or
pathetically limping Tiny Tim, that
much more poignant and set apart as
a martyr for capitalistic cruelties
and the cosmic sins of an immoral
world. The sheer abjection of
Arthur’s situation in life is
stressed to the point that Charles
Dickens, master of melodrama,
would’ve tipped his hat admiringly.
Arthur works as a low-rent clown,
the saddest clown in the world, and
takes care of his pathetic invalid
mother at home. Then there’s the
sickening urban poverty, the
terrible living and working
conditions, the rogues’ gallery of
exploiters of misery that emerge
from such conditions, the atmosphere
of diseased greenish and bluish
miasmic light in slum dwellings
where a mad repetition of abuse is
heaped upon Arthur — not just one
but two public beatings by multiple
assailants that get him down on the
ground so he can be kicked into
total submission.</p>
<p>But it’s the backstory of
Arthur/Joker’s life, in all its
lurid plot reveals, that takes the
purest form of melodrama. Initially,
Arthur believes he and his ailing
mother, Penny Fleck, are merely the
unlucky poor, and Penny’s pitiful
unanswered letters to her former
employer, the wealthy mayoral
candidate Thomas Wayne (father of
Bruce Wayne/Batman) are deluded
because the rich never help the
poor. That’s melodramatic enough in
its built-in class critique, a big
part of the popularity of melodrama,
which has one foot in social realism
and one foot in the epic, the
excessive, the fantastical.</p>
<p>Then — spoiler alert — Penny tells
Arthur he is actually the son of
Thomas Wayne, who couldn’t marry her
because of his lofty social
position, which is why she had to
leave Wayne’s employ.</p>
<p>Holy plot contrivance, Batman! This
would mean Penny Fleck is the
“ruined servant girl” of a thousand
melodramatic plays, novels, and
films, impregnated and cast away by
a heartless man of wealth,
practically driven “out, out into
the storm” like Lillian Gish (again)
in D. W. Griffith’s (1915). And
Arthur Fleck would be the son of
wealth and privilege, abandoned to
his fate in the streets unless he
can be recognized and recovered,
like Oliver Twist in the Dickens
novel. And Arthur and Bruce Wayne
are half brothers, one legitimate,
one illegitimate, as in untold
numbers of melodramatic plots about
secret, shamefully hidden family
relationships that come to light in
emotionally over-the-top
confrontations.</p>
<p>Arthur stages a very typical one in
the men’s room of the fabulous
gilt-edged theater where he
confronts Thomas Wayne with Wayne’s
supposedly guilty secret. There’s a
screening of Charlie Chaplin’s going
on, which is attended by about five
hundred wealthy men, all in
tuxedoes. Arthur sneaks in wearing
an old-time theater usher’s uniform,
which might as well have “Little Man
of the Working Class” stitched on
it, and he stands for a moment in
the middle aisle surrounded by
tuxedoes, watching the movie. A shot
from behind frames and illuminates
him against the screen so he becomes
one with Chaplin’s famous “Little
Tramp,” who’s always struggling and
failing to keep a job and a place in
the heartless modern world that
inevitably casts him out in the end.</p>
<p>Chaplin’s comedy doesn’t age well
for many contemporary viewers
because his worldview was
fundamentally melodramatic, as
Dickensian as his own life had been
as an impoverished London child
orphaned young. His comedies are
loaded with poor but beautiful girls
of extreme virtue, sometimes blind,
and pitiful mothers and grandmothers
struggling to make ends meet,
threatened by the landlord if they
can’t make the mortgage, plus
abandoned children and heart-tugging
stray dogs. They’re all championed
by the down-and-out but always game
Little Tramp. He’s constantly set
upon by the cruel forces of the
ruling class, represented by vicious
bosses and sadistic cops, almost
always huge goons who tower over
him. When not wringing tears out of
this material, Chaplin got a lot of
very funny comedy out of it.</p>
<p>As traumatic as it is to live the
plot of an old-fashioned melodrama,
Arthur suffers more from discovering
that the story his mother’s tale
doesn’t actually conform to one
after all. He learns she was both
abused and a mentally ill abuser
herself, resulting in his
“neurological condition” of
spontaneous laughter. With the
exploding of his mother’s
melodramatic tale, Arthur begins his
violent exit from the role of doomed
innocent and starts exacting bloody
revenge. Inadvertently, he inspires
his suffering fellow citizens to
rise up in protest against their
wealthy oppressors and give them
“what you deserve.” An ugly but
fully justified class war results
from the actions of a deranged man
who doesn’t consciously understand
it, though he finds the angry chaos
“beautiful” after his long
acquiescence to brutality.</p>
<p>The ending of the film has been
frequently noted as its weakest
part, which seems erratic and
muddled. It’s possible that
Phillips, who <a
href="https://screenrant.com/joker-movie-ending-explained-todd-phillips/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">claims</a> not to have
wanted to clear up the “ambiguous”
ending, wasn’t quite sure what kind
of narrative he was heading into
once he left key aspects of
melodrama behind. It’s a form with a
proud history, cohering in the
eighteenth century when
philosophers, writers, composers,
and artists were grappling with
radical new ideas that ultimately
fostered the American and French
revolutions, and centered on the
cosmic significance of the ordinary
citizen caught in familial and
social traps. The extreme popularity
of the form, especially in novels
and plays, was taken up in early
cinema, though starting in the 1930s
it began to be rapidly devalued as
it became associated with women
writers, stars, and audiences. In
the 1970s and ’80s Marxist and
feminist film theorists began a
reevaluation of the importance of
melodrama in terms of its social
criticism, especially in terms of
class, gender, and race. But an
endless stream of soap operas and
hack plotting in movies and
television have associated
“melodrama” with “failed drama” in
the public mind, and its more
radical possibilities have been left
unexplored in our era. At least
Phillips indicates in this film that
he recognizes those possibilities,
and that’s promising.</p>
<p>A return to melodrama seems fitting
at this time. It was, after all, an
ultra-popular entertainment of the
Gilded Age. Cinema itself arises at
the end of this era and develops
fully as the Gilded Age overlaps and
partially gives way to the
Progressive Era, when reformers
attacked government corruption and
finally began to enact policies
aimed at ameliorating the gruesome
social ills of class society.
Looking at <cite>Joker</cite> for a
kind of microcosmic version of
melodrama giving way in the end to
something better, however inchoate,
is absolute wishful thinking. But
like I said before — it’s the
perfect Rorschach inkblot.</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11-10-19 08:35, A.OUT wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:cf62098e-a9a6-0791-b331-5b1817380672@ziggo.nl">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Een 296.44 tragedie van epische proporties. Meesterlijk...
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