Q

And from the ashes I rise … a pheonix.

Let’s get it out of the way first. I adored Joker. Each moment had me hooked, some (many) sucker punched me right in the guts.

A great movie has a certain stickiness to it – otherwise known as haunting. And haunt me it did, in the best way possible. The night and day after, the best of scenes replayed in my head, and I was obsessed with the signs and symbols that I’d missed while savouring the film as it played out.

The scores, with a special mention to Defeated Clown and Bathroom Dance

Joker wastes no time establishing how life football-tackles Arthur hard, spits on it, and sinks a boot heel into his ego for good measure. This also means the accompanying score that comes at Arthur’s lowest, Defeated Clown, is introduced in the first 10 minutes of the film.

And man does it set the tone for the movie right.

Music is the unseen dialogue of every film. It tells a story, shapes your perception, influences your emotion at each frame. But we seldom notice them, letting their effect take a direct hit to the primordial brain.

Hildur Guðnadóttir’s scores is a dialogue so beautifully written that I cannot overlook its poetics.

What is it that makes music sad? Is it that it’s slow? Each notes drawn out in a tragic cry? Does sadness have a quality, pitch and tone? Whatever it is, Guðnadóttir nails it.

I put Defeated Clown on double speed and it was still sad as hell. Two things that made this particular score outstanding:

First, that constant drum beat in the background as a perfect allegory to a slow march to hell. His life is not just tragic, but doomed to a certain fate, a spiral he is graduating towards. You know it’s going to be disastrous, and there is no way to stop it. 

Second, the way the notes are played in isolated groups. Each an island, strung to form a broken chain where silence speaks just as loud as sound.

A shout out also to Bathroom Dance, which has the same shade of tragic as Defeated Clown, but also an odd lightness to it. Like a piece of art that is meant to be sad, but also recognised to be beautiful in its sadness. Perhaps appropriately so, as it comes in the moment Arthur soothes himself through dance, at the precipice of Arthur to Joker, the transformation at once grotesque and artistic.

Shaky camera: two scenes for comparison

Todd Phillips said in this breakdown video that the shaky cam at some scenes was intentional, giving the scenes an authentic, homemade feel. The example he cited was of this iconic frame –

Arthur forcing a smile on himself. The other, also iconic (how many iconic scenes does this movie have anyway???), is that of Arthur climbing into the fridge.

This brings us to the only complaint* I have throughout the 2 and a half hours film. In this scene, an obviously shaky cam shows Arthur climbing into the fridge. The door closes, and the camera walks further into the scene, implying that this camera has an eye and a life.

*Not exactly, but maybe the only moment that I questioned

I wasn’t keen on this implication, because part of Arthur’s tragedy is that he isn’t seen. He is invisible, not given the attention he so craved.

It could be that I’ve been watching The Office so much as of late, and it reminded me of breaking that fourth wall, of a crew who found even the every day hijinks in a paper company interesting enough to follow with a camera. In Joker, it was also vaguely horror-movie-esque, where the camera takes the angle of a stalker or spooky creature following the protagonist.

And so this scene was pretty jarring for me. It would have worked better if a neutral camera panned out of the scene. A simple, straightforward “yep he’s alone in the fridge and no one gives a shit” moment. Or a still, even. Nothing happens, not an atom in the world reacts even as Arthur Fleck is so deeply disturbed he had to enclose himself in subzero to hold it together.

Now to what made the movie: Joaquin Pheonix’s genius

Joaquin is the Joker movie.

He manipulated me like a master, I slipped into every emotional trap the movie laid out for us suckers:

I sympathised with him, wanted to bring him home like an injured bird so I could tend to him and make it all okay.

I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed: his body distended and other-worldly; painful just to look at. Again, a grotesque injured bird.

I rooted for him, but could never understand him. His life was sad but did not justify what he did. He was crazy – and I could get why he did what he did without thinking it was the right thing to do.

All. The. Emotional. Notes: Hit.

The most heart wrenching of moments are when he has his laughing fits. As he shook and choked with laughter, the shaking and choking went all the way to my core. Joaquin laughs in a way that is so believable, then twists in his Herculean efforts to stop the laughter, the self-consciousness, hatred and frustration of not being able to.

It resonated because this is more common an occurrence than we’d like to think. For those with autism, Tourette’s syndrome, OCD, and a range of other mental disorders that makes them completely out of control of their actions even as others stare and point.

I (and you) could easily be one of the public in Joker. A man, a boy laughing uncontrollably in the bus, and my first instinct would be to stare with confusion and, on bad days, judgement.

My favourite scene is its opening.

Arthur is cornered by young punks. He doesn’t fight back, doesn’t even try. His first instinct was to crouch in a fetal position, hands on his crotch and neck. Here, the smallest of details made this genuine: it tells me that this happens so often that Arthur is familiar with the routine. Broke my heart, this one.

His prop flower and the leaking water was a nice touch – I didn’t know this until the director breakdown video, but Arthur himself triggers it.

Yet there is something inexplicably attractive and intriguing about Arthur. Not his disconcerting acts of violence as Joker, but something inside Arthur Fleck from the very beginning.

He is a performer. And without life beating the crap out of him, he may have discovered that. In his freedom, he finds what was always there, but in the context of revenge, chaos.

Yet he could just as easily have been Happy, as Penny envisioned for him.

“There is music in his soul,” instructed Todd Phillips in his notes to Joaquin Pheonix. I was most drawn to Joker as he dances: down the steps, in the subway, out into the camera at the Murray show. But it is all Arthur. Becoming the Joker didn’t make him light on the foot: he always was.

Joaquin Phoenix portrays Arthur’s music: from the slow, sad dance in the bathroom to that care-not swag as Joker, brilliantly.

Plot?

The few contentions I’ve heard about Joker was of its plot. (Although no one outlined what exactly about the plot they didn’t like, just that they didn’t like it.)

Fair enough, although I don’t see Joker taking on a blockbuster plot the likes of his nemesis the Dark Knight, nor should we expect it to.

Because his story is one of a slow descent into insanity, of delusion and dreams of grandeur set in a life of isolation, humiliation, and mistreatment.

In other words, Arthur’s life is remarkably close to yours and mine and anyone else’s. His unraveling, and the movie, is propelled not by a plot but the cruel reality of life.

To peg it against Dark Knight or any other superhero movie, and expect him to have been dropped into a vat of toxic waste; find himself caught up in an intergalactic battle, or otherwise, is unfair.

Joker is a story of that man in the subway with severe B.O., that co-worker who eats lunch alone every day. There is no plot, there is only life itself.

And I love it.