The Morbid Contagion of Toxic Revengers: First Reformed and Joker Garry Thomas Morse

One thing learned from ’s Pickpocket1 was that it was possible to “make a film about a man in his room, and his room.”2 His obsession with the French director has resulted in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver3, and more recently, First Reformed4—a blending of elements from Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest5 and ’s Winter Light6—which is somehow the least derivative and most timely of his films. embodies Reverend Ernst Toller as the picture of grim asceticism, a man suffering over the loss of his son in an unjustifiable war in Iraq, the subsequent break-up of his marriage, and the debilitating effects of a cancer diagnosis. Toller is approached by Mary () to help her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger) whose despair over environmental issues has convinced him that Mary should abort their child. When Toller meets with Michael, politics and religion thinly veil a deep susceptibility in the pastor. As Toller becomes personally involved in trying to help this couple, his own ideas begin to change. Cedric the Entertainer is wonderful as Jeffers, Toller’s church supervisor, who balances ethical issues to do with key funding from a corporate polluter with his own genuine concern for troubled souls in their youth programs. Jeffers cites many reasons for disaffection among young people and warns Toller not to be “so much in the Garden” (ie. to focus on other good actions beyond the Saviour’s suffering). Indeed, it is Toller’s own morbidity that is seemingly activated by his brief contact with the environmental activist Michael, whose father is also described as a “morbid son of a bitch.” In one of the most interesting scenes, Toller shows a group of kids the trapdoor beneath the 250-year-old Dutch Reformed Church, which was a former stop for slaves fleeing North via the Underground Railroad. The children already have a book on this subject, but Toller encourages Benny, one of the black kids, to imagine what it was like hiding down there in the dark. Instead of considering this to be a story of survival and resilience, the children are being pressed to take on the burden of their country’s history, and to dwell on the chain of suffering. In spite of his newfound environmental concerns, Toller does not begin at home, so to speak – hypocritically, he does not make the effort to put his empty liquor bottles in the correct bin and does not stop using liquid cleaner to unplug his toilet. Subject to delusions that mingle spirituality with eroticism, Toller decides that only a cataclysmic spectacle can make a difference, not solely to gratify a touch of vanity, but also to spread the morbid contagion that much farther. Another thorny scion of (mated with Scorsese’s The King of Comedy7) is Joker8, supposedly an origin story for Batman’s arch-nemesis, one reason for the film’s commercial success that is also to its detriment. Wading through supervillainous baggage, there is still the political bait to step around, prompting many kneejerk reactions in a deeply divided America. Yet this peculiar character study written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver is about another guy in his room, a “personality” humanized beyond his afflictions and social affect. Arthur Fleck (in a dedicated performance by Joaquin Phoenix) is a depressed professional clown who suffers from pseudobulbar affect (and one or more forms of mental illness never identified), which causes uncontrollable laughter in him, most often at inappropriate times. Like Toller, he is having intense reveries during the worst crisis in his life, and also due to an arbitrary circumstance, has reluctantly become weaponized. Fleck seeks not so much empathy

1 as morbid understanding from his beautiful neighbour Sophie (Zazie Beetz) as well as Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), a nighttime talk show host whose cynical wit extends to the closing catchphrase, “That’s life.” Despite his troubles, Fleck has a great deal of lucidity, and he makes a series of childish split-second decisions to lash out against those who have what he perceives as injurious authority over him. As in First Reformed, there can only be the prospect of a violent spectacle; the only indecision is over what kind it will be. Joker might remind us to revisit Hannah Arendt’s views on movements: “The particular reality of the individual person appears against the background of a spurious reality of the general and universal, shrinks into a negligible quantity or is submerged in the stream of dynamic movement of the universal itself. In this stream the difference between ends and means evaporates together with the personality, and the result is the monstrous immorality of ideological politics…every value has vanished into a welter of superstitious pseudoscientific immanence.”9 In one scene, Fleck is in full clown makeup, being pursued by detectives onto a subway train. There, he runs into members of the self-inspired clown movement, and takes another man’s clown mask to put on over his makeup. After his escape, he drops the mask atop an overflowing garbage can. The movement is a mass in which he can be its leading symbol, and at the same time, completely anonymous. The movement is a face he can put on or take off whenever he wishes. By the time he gets his big talk show break, he no longer wants to be Arthur Fleck. He asks that he be introduced as “Joker,” waiving all moral responsibility for his actions. In what might have been the closing scene for a more provocative auteur, Fleck—like a viral YouTube star dancing like no one is watching—stands upon a car and repeats his sensual private dance to the minimalist cello score of Hildur Guðnadóttir. Members of the clown mob have caught the contagion of his violence, and are fully capable of acting out his revenge. Unlike Reverend Toller—shown in reflected three-quarter profile before a Tarkovskyesque vision—Arthur Fleck looks directly into the mirror in this movie, physically asserting that his “condition” is actually who he is. A cowardly, narcissistic figure of self-pity at that. Everyone may not get the joke.

References

1. Bresson, Robert, dir. Pickpocket. 1959; New York, NY: Criterion Collection, 2008, DVD.

2. “Paul Schrader on Pickpocket,” The Criterion Collection, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3219-paul-schrader-on-pickpocket.

3. Scorsese, Martin, dir. Taxi Driver. 1976; Culver, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD.

4. Schrader, Paul, dir. First Reformed. 2017; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2018, DVD.

5. Bresson, Robert, dir. Diary of a Country Priest. 1951; New York, NY: Criterion Collection, 2004, DVD.

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6. Bergman, Ingmar, dir. The Ingmar Bergman Trilogy: (Through a Glass Darkly/Winter Light/The Silence). 1963; New York, NY: Criterion Collection, 2003, DVD.

7. Scorsese, Martin, dir. The King of Comedy. 1982; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2002, DVD.

8. Phillips, Todd, dir. Joker. 2019. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7286456/.

9. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), 249

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