Joker | Understanding Arthur Fleck
“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fucking deserve!”
We could call it a day and end the article with that question since it encapsulates who Arthur fleck was and what shaped him into the person he became.
Joker is a film that addresses questions like that and provides some insights into why someone would be drawn to doing bad things. At the start of the film, we understand the state of Arthur’s mental health, which is something that people around him do not fully embrace or approve of. It should be noted that the film is set in the 80s where mental health wasn’t really much of a concern with most conditions going undefined or even unacknowledged.
Arthur experiences a chasm between who he is at the start of the film and who he should be for him to be fully accepted as a member of society. As a result, he becomes somewhat ostracised, forcing him to hide behind the mask of a clown.
Throughout the film, we see him being pushed towards the brink, and a series of events simply nudges him over the edge. While this is in direct contradiction to the famous quote from The Killing Joke, the principle is essentially the same. Alan Moore’s Joker famously stated, "All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy." But Arthur wasn’t a sane man, and it took a series of horrible days for his entire personality to crumble.
Going into the film, it would help to know that this isn’t a typical iteration of the famous DC villain. It does bear a fundamental resemblance to Christopher Nolan’s version as both depictions were grounded on the basis of reality but that’s where it stops. Arthur Fleck isn’t as witty or cunning as Heath Ledger’s reimagination of the character. He isn’t as calculated, he is just an angry man who got fed up with how society treats him. But Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was one of the best I have ever seen in a film. He brings out every single bit of emotion the character has to offer.
Arthur’s struggles with negative emotions and how he deals with them can be seen in practically every aspect of his life. The fact that he feels obligated to hide his feelings and pretend to be happy for the sake of others exacerbates his gloomy thoughts as he hides behind a fake smile. Later in the film, he tells a hospital clerk that it’s so difficult to be happy all of the time.
He even says "I haven’t been happy one minute of my entire fucking life", implying that he has struggled with his emotions and the need to hide them for most of his life.
Arthur resents being compelled to blend in with the general public and hates being looked at as a "freak." He notes that the hardest part about having a mental illness is that people want you to behave as if you don’t have one just so you can maintain a semblance of normalcy in order to please them.
To cope with the onslaught of negative emotions inside him, he developed his own coping mechanisms, which include the ability to construct/imagine other events and relationships with people in order to provide himself with some guise of comfort. We see this when he practically dreams up a relationship with his neighbour, Sophie and the acknowledgement from his idol Murray.
As there wasn’t much sexual elements to his imagined relationship with Sophie, it became obvious what Arthur really wanted. The things that he had never had the privilege of experiencing in his entire life; love, companionship, acceptance, sympathy and happiness.
At the beginning of the film, Arthur is attacked by children. As a result, his co-worker, Randall gives him a gun. In the presence of kids during one of his clown performances, the gun falls to the ground. This in turn leads him to losing his job, a job he loved very much. One could even say that the job was one of the last few things that kept him sane and stable.
This is when we watch a torrent of bad things happen to him. He kills Randall, the social service program’s funding is cut, and he loses his treatment and counselling, with Murray’s Joke, which mocks Arthur directly, serving as the final nudge in his path to becoming Joker.
Todd Phillips crafted a cinematic masterpiece that divided audiences and critics. It didn’t just become a story about an aspiring stand up comedian who suffers from a horrible mental condition that causes him to laugh uncontrollably, but about an ordinary man who knows how ill he is and is desperate to find help.
"All I Have Are Negative Thoughts."
Arthur suffered a succession of humiliations that accelerated his descent into a violent and bitter insanity directed at the very system that broke him down. He is shown to be a kind person who did not become bad overnight. He put in long hours, took care of his mother and obeyed the law.
While his actions were his own fault, society was the driving force behind them. He was a man who was screaming and pleading for help. But he was thrashed and knocked down.
"Is It Just Me Or Is It Getting Crazier Out There?"
Thank you for reading.
