What a spectacular range of emotions—mild shock, groaning exasperation, shame, depression, grim amusement, shame at one’s own amusement—Joker can inspire just by dropping the needle on Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2.”
By the time that jaunty tune arrives, late in Todd Phillips’s galactically bleak new Batman-free character study of a Batman villain, the disturbed man-child played by your boy Joaquin Phoenix and about to make his public debut as the Joker has already brutally murdered several people and cry-laughed at discomfiting length, like, 200 times. (A central tension in the movie is whether Phoenix will cough up blood and/or spray snot everywhere, and, gentle reader, I think you already know that he does both.) Joker’s primary aim, of course, is to inspire nausea, revulsion, and tremulous awe at its own button-pushing audacity. The geysers of blood (and snot), along with the pure Tool-video body horror of Phoenix’s writhing-skeleton frame, certainly get the bile flowing. But it ain’t a party until the ’70s jock-jam anthem performed by a convicted pedophile kicks in.
There is a word for this, and that word is trolled. “Rock and Roll Part 2”—known informally as the duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, HEY! song—came out in 1972 and has boomed from sports arenas worldwide for decades despite Glitter’s long-documented legal woes, which culminated, in 2015, with the English glam rocker’s 16-year prison sentence for attempted rape, indecent assault, and sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of 13. The tune, devilishly catchy and maddeningly ubiquitous, is a prime example of horrifying perversion embedded bone-deep into the fabric of (deep sigh) society, a joyous and uncancelable cultural artifact that made an irredeemably evil man very rich, and now richer still.
That’s richer still because, ah, yes, very good, here comes the Joker, resplendent at long last in full costume and iconically alluring fright makeup, traipsing down a giant staircase that depending on your brain chemistry will evoke either The Exorcist or Big Little Lies, that inescapable goddamn duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, HEY! reverberating through the theater as you bury your head in your hands. Boom. Trolled. Joker made a record-breaking $93.5 million domestic its opening weekend, and very much by design inspired disgusted tweets and stern blog posts about the very notion of Glitter raking in the royalties. The movie’s entire exhausting prerelease hype cycle—from its absurdly rapturous reception at the Venice Film Festival to the media-stoked (and unfounded) fears of theater violence—has relied on this mixture of lurid anticipation and righteous indignation. There is something here to gross out everyone; there is almost nothing else.
Joker, while light-years from any sort of masterpiece, is not a terrible movie: The arresting sight of Phoenix dancing eerily in a cruddy public bathroom, having brutally murdered his first three people, forgives an awful lot, including the fact that the whole movie is shot like all the world is a cruddy public bathroom. But its comically debased intentions, and its endless self-referentiality, and its furious insistence on upsetting everyone at all times guarantee that you’ll walk out of the theater feeling terrible. (The merry cheers in my theater as we watched a terrified little person reach in vain for the locked chain on an apartment door brought me right back to the crowd-pleasing queasiness of the climax of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.) Empty provocation is one thing. But this is 50 pounds of provocation in a 10-pound bag. Now that it’s finally here, and now that it’s a huge hit, what Joker really ought to make you fear is the All Outrage All the Time cinematic universe it will undoubtedly inspire.
The conventional wisdom in 2019 Hollywood is that only superhero movies make money, and thus all movies must now at least pretend to be superhero movies, and Joker is indeed at its weakest, or at least its thirstiest, when it behaves like a dutiful piece of the wobbly D.C. Comics cinematic empire. Yes, right, the dilapidated city is Gotham City; yes, right, the grimy mental institution is Arkham Asylum; yes, right, the terrified little rich kid’s name is Bruce Wayne. (The revelation that a grown-up Batman’s greatest villain is, like, 60 years old is itself quite a shock.) Maybe 10 percent of that opening-weekend crowd would’ve turned out for this movie if it didn’t have the Batman imprimatur. The 90 percent that would have stayed home would’ve definitely been better off.
Superhero movies, in turn, must now cosplay as classic cinema (shout-out the 1974 paranoid-thriller classic Captain America: The Winter Soldier), which helpfully enrages superhero-averse cineastes. Among everyone else Phillips has offended—top critics, certainly, and also, with his laughable press-tour lament about abandoning comedy due to “woke culture,” at least one actor who actually appeared in Joker—his greatest coup might’ve been the Martin Scorsese–based riot this movie not-so-accidentally touched off.
Joker, which costars Robert De Niro as a smug talk-show host, is you might say offensively indebted to 1976’s Taxi Driver (starring De Niro as a troubled loner radicalized by the city he describes as “an open sewer of filth and scum”) and 1982’s The King of Comedy (starring De Niro as a troubled aspiring comedian obsessed with a talk-show host played by Jerry Lewis). As you watch Phoenix navigate a heartless urban wasteland and cry-laugh his way through a disastrous attempt at stand-up comedy, you can nod knowingly at Joker’s good taste while wincing at its craven refractions of past glories. There is no solace in the fact that you’ve definitely seen this movie before.
Meanwhile, last week, Scorsese dismissed Marvel movies as mere “theme parks,” and boom, the comic-book-movie stans are pissed at the Marty stans, and those averse to the oft-ultraviolent spectacle endemic to both the Marvel and Marty camps are pissed at everybody. And suddenly Film Twitter as a whole resembles the unruly and metropolis-leveling mob that our hero eventually inspires in Joker, even as the Joker himself, in yet another provocation, admits that he doesn’t believe in anything, just before his most frightful and public burst of ultraviolence yet. Like the awkward Occupy Wall Street overtones of 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, Phillips’s movie nods at modern political unease but reduces that energy to its crudest, dumbest form: The Joker quite inadvertently inspires a revolution, and the revolution’s rallying cry quickly morphs from “Fuck the Rich” to “You Get What You Fuckin’ Deserve.” You said it, pal.
There are further meta high jinks in Joker, if you can stand them, including the myriad stage winks to Phoenix’s tiresome history of punking America on late-night talk shows, from David Letterman in 2009 to Jimmy Kimmel last week. But this is all the movie has to offer: Wry and vacuous and morally dubious references to Batman canon, and Scorsese canon, and Joaquin canon, and Trump-era canon, and Superhero-Infestation Hollywood canon. It’s a feature-length trolling campaign with a vaguely movie-like shape, its various beloved costars (from Brian Tyree Henry to Shea Whigham to Marc Maron) crushed under the weight of its cynicism. (The romantic subplot involving Zazie Beetz as a sympathetic neighbor, which gets a pompous, Fight Club–style unbelievable twist, is undercut by the fact that it was never remotely believable in the first place.) Every callback to some other depraved piece of pop culture, from the umpeteenth depiction of the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents to Taxi Driver to “Rock and Roll Part 2,” is designed to trigger your recognition and, exactly one second later, your disgust.
This movie is, emphatically, not a failure, neither in the financial sense nor the artistic sense, if “sickly neon apocalypse” is your preferred artistic mode. But what it succeeds at is painstakingly constructing a safe space in which to celebrate its own total, yawning emptiness. Joker turns nihilism into an Olympic sport, and given that aspiration, if that’s even the right word, there was only one song worthy of the soundtrack.
