Joker: The Myth of Arthur Fleck

Joker: The Myth of Arthur Fleck

The final shot of Joker (2019)

The final shot of Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

The final shot of Modern Times (1936)

By MrGeckoBiHu(壁虎先生)

(This review was originally published in Traditional Chinese on November 10, 2019 in a printed Taiwanese Newspaper The Affairs(The Affairs 週刊編集) Issue No. 29, and later published on their official websites)(You may find the full original texts here)

(This English version of the article you’re now reading is translated by myself, on February 2, 2025)

The inclusion of "Smile", sung by Jimmy Durante, during the dating scene between Arthur Fleck and his neighbor Sophie is particularly cruel. This song is adapted from a score that Charlie Chaplin personally composed for Modern Times (1936). In the film, when Chaplin's Tramp and Paulette Goddard's character dream about escaping their miserable fate and living a middle-class life during the Great Depression, the score evokes their innocence while gently reminding the audience that they still have each other. In this scene, Sophie refers to the Joker from the subway murder as a “hero,” while Fleck happily tries to squeeze out his own grin, seeing his reflection in a speeding taxi. Smile becomes an obvious omen, and we later discover that this seemingly too-good relationship is just a bubble occurring in Fleck's mind.

However, while the presence of the Tramp in Joker is self-evident, the even more significant presence of Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) has been completely forgotten by American critics, to the point that, over seventy years later, they almost unconsciously repeat the same hysteria that surrounded the film at the time. Yet, as André Bazin brilliantly tells us in “The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux,”[1] it is through the image of this former bank clerk who continuously murders wealthy women for profit that the myth of the Tramp reaches its logical conclusion by presenting his opposite. Therefore, if you are surprised that Todd Phillips merges Chaplin's Tramp with a socially provocative murderer, it's worth noting that Chaplin himself had already done so. Is not Monsieur Verdoux's Raskolnikov-like cynicism precisely what society “deserves?”[2]

Joker is not cynicism, but an accusation against cynicism

Of course, we can understand how critics might be misled by Martin Scorsese's presence; after all, Joker could almost be considered a surprising sequel to the 1983 film King of Comedy, in which Robert De Niro plays a lonely, narcissistic maniac who kidnaps his lifelong talk show host idol in order to appear on the show. If the depiction of Travis in Taxi Driver still possesses a brush of legendary romanticism, Rupert Pupkin's character and the media's reaction to him have become so banal and horrifying that it is suffocating.

However, to say that Phillips is merely a cheap imitator of Scorsese, and to claim that Arthur embodies “cynicism”, is just a superficial view. “Cynicism” is different from “kynicism,”[3] the latter being pure rebellion, while the former colludes with the system, encapsulating the sentiment of "I'm bad, and it doesn't matter because the world is bad too." Through De Niro's presence, Murray becomes the logical result of Pupkin in King of Comedy, exemplifying the most “cynical” manifestation. Pupkin is merely a reflection of society; in contrast, Arthur is a needle stuck in society's throat because he still has hopes for authenticity, to the point of radically merging with it. His mother even called him "Happy." Arthur's sin, therefore, is being “not cynical enough” to maintain a safe, cynical distance from the signifier. In this sense, Arthur is closer to Pvt. Pyle, who shouts "The rifle is my friend" in Full Metal Jacket.

I believe this is the greatest strength of the film: what we see on the talk show is not any Socratic-like, demonic eloquence from any past iterations of the Joker, but rather the trembling of a fragile soul, along with his mediocre, almost childlike hate. "You are an awful person." In fact, this hate is so mundane that merely gazing at Arthur seems like a form of torture for him. Ultimately, a far more brutal "King of Comedy" will ruthlessly replace the old one. Arthur forces Murray to confront the self-interest and violence behind his solemnity through mediocrity and mockery, culminating in Arthur shooting Murray, and the message could not be clearer: this is an accusation against "cynicism."

An attempt to rearticulate and the Tragic Misrecognition

Joker is, therefore, primarily about a nonexistent language, a place wherein the signifier falls away. Arthur's uncontrollable laughter represents this foreign language; it is the alien within Arthur’s body that appears at his most vulnerable moments, tearing apart his precarious world and demanding interpretation from him, regardless of his reluctance.

For Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, there is nothing humorous about his suffering. However, the audience laughs. The dialectical insight of Joker lies in the question: what would happen if the Tramp could hear the laughter coming from the audience on the other side of the screen? When this foreign laughter, like an unexplainable message from the divine, like an uncontrollable seizure seizes the Tramp, how would his fate change?

When Arthur sneaks into the grand Wayne Hall, trying to find his possible father,[4] it is hard not to recognize that Arthur seems to have intruded upon a ritual of peering into the divine. There, blindfolded, Chaplin miraculously glides along the edge of a "Danger" sign like a cartoon character.

Thus, the first tragedy of the film is that Arthur interprets his laughter as "bringing joy to the world," an interpretation derived from his mother, which ultimately leads him to kill her. The second tragedy is that Arthur eventually interprets it as himself. Arthur is like Pvt. Pyle or the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, its body disappears, leaving only a smile in the void.

However, the true tragedy is that when the world finally responds to Arthur, it is still a misrecognition. As he is lifted onto a crashed police car, with a blood-stained smile drawn on his face, the crowd misidentifies Arthur as their piper[5], just as Chaplin's Tramp was repeatedly misidentified by the world (as a millionaire in City Lights and as a leader of a strike in Modern Times). Isn’t this scene in Joker the exact mirror moment of the scene in which the Tramp picks up a flag and is mistakenly seen as a revolutionary or instigator by the strikers and the police?

Therefore, rather than saying Arthur became a mythic figure in Gotham City that night, it is more accurate to say that Arthur finally fell into a symbolic position that is called "Joker." In other words, the fool who slipped into Wayne Hall to watch a film ultimately fell “into” the screen. Yet, as the crowd celebrates the burning down of Gotham in an apocalyptic scene, only Hildur Guðnadóttir's score, like a Greek chorus, expresses immense sorrow. We know the truth: Arthur is ultimately just Arthur, and it is exactly his naive joy here that is heartbreaking. Perhaps the character Cecilia from The Purple Rose of Cairo would be the person who understands Arthur the most, however she ultimately maintains her distance from the screen, while Arthur is thrown into its abyss.

Thus, Phillips provides us with the film’s only cartoonish shot, which can be described as a stroke of genius: we see Arthur’s steps forming a trail of bloodstained footprints toward the end of an all-white hospital corridor, engaging in a Tom and Jerry-like chase with the staff.

This shot signifies the death of the frail figure who climbed the stairs, through a transformation of the film's very form itself(into a cartoon). However, the dialectical significance of this shot also lies in that it retroactively elevates the entire film into a myth. In other words, at the moment Arthur is declared dead, he is retroactively sanctified.

And it is precisely at this moment that we seem to recognise the silhouette of Monsieur Verdoux walking toward the guillotine, which Bazin describes as the final destination of the Tramp's wandering path. In this way, the struggling figure climbing the stairs, the one leading the wandering girl toward the unknown horizon, the one walking toward the guillotine, and the one becoming Gotham's piper are all layered together in this shot.

So what is that inexpressible thing? This year, we have seen more than one film like Joker, M. Night Shyamalan's Glass is another such film. Their appeal, of course, lies not only in their rebellion against superhero movies, but also in their estrangement from the world. Perhaps this is why they are both about a villain, or perhaps should be put like this: about struggling to remember a villain (a hero, a myth), and we must transform into something we are not to identify what we cannot articulate. If Glass represents a positive expectation for rearticulation, then Joker can be seen as an attempt to rearticulate that, in a tragic misrecognition, devolves into desperate anxiety. It is this capturing of collective anxiety that transforms it into a myth embodying the zeitgeist.

[1] André Bazin, "The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux," in Bazin on Chaplin, 2008, Shanghai People’s Publishing House.

[2] Monsieur Verdoux states after his arrest that compared to the world’s wars and killings, he is merely an amateur, their nature is the same: "it’s just a career." Arthur, when he kills Murray, claims this is what Murray "deserves."

[3] See Slavoj Žižek's reference to Peter Sloterdijk in The Sublime Object of Ideology. 2008, Verso. pp. 25-26.

[4] A brief and insightful article by Na Magning titled "Joker: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Look at the Disillusionment of Three Fathers and the Exclusion of Social Relations" on Taiwanese  online news outlet The News Lens is well worth reading.

[5] In one segment of a news report on Gotham City's rat infestation, we hear the commentator ironically reference the piper, alluding to the folktale of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin."