Joker was too political in its moment to be evaluated on its own merits. The PR around Joker’s release turned into an arm of Trump-era pre-pandemic culture war. Joker, both the movie and central figure, were claimed as icons of right-wing reactionaries. Being part of the left-leaning internet, I mostly saw analyses talking about how much incels loved it. It didn’t feel at the time like anyone was actually watching the movie.

But basically, if you wanted to be a libertarian neckbeard pissing off SJWs for the lols, you associated with Joker (often seen alongside memes like Pepe); if you were mostly trying to survive these guys, then you were following Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn redemption journey instead.

Now that we’re five years out from the mess of its Discourse, it’s easier to see that Joker is just a character piece akin to Taxi Driver wearing Batman clothes. Fleck’s journey is one of a man let down by society and his mother, the only two possible support systems he has, and gets real revengey about it. The revenge element, and knowing what power the Joker gains as a crime boss after the end of the movie, certainly makes this an appealing fantasy for a certain kind of person.

Does Joker intend to appeal to right-wing reactionaries? I don’t think so. Does Joker do anything to dissuade bad behavior from such reactionaries? Also no, but Joker’s bad behaviors and public shootings are not narratively approved. They are only *Joker* approved, and the movie can’t say anything Joker doesn’t think by virtue of its close POV.

This falls into the trap of any character piece about a villain: when you take a sympathetic and aesthetic look at bad guys, you give irl bad guys someone to misinterpret.

My biggest issue with the movie is that I personally don’t like incarnations of Batman’s Joker which give him a back story. I have never liked Red Hood. I wouldn’t even acknowledge The Killing Joke if Babs hadn’t spent so much time as Oracle thereafter. My preferred Jokers play into his role more like a chaos-entity, like the mischievous Coyote of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, emblematic of themes and serving as a mirror to Batman/Bruce Wayne’s character issues. Turning Joker into an actual person takes away the arcane magic of the Batman mythos.

I don’t mind this Joker backstory too much. It doesn’t feel like a real Batman-universe movie, really. It’s an adoring homage to cinema that appealed to a trend of comic book movie dominance in order to get funded.

Enormous narrative tension surrounds both literal and metaphoric loaded guns, which you know must fire, but not when or how or who will catch the bullet. The close POV with an unreliable narrator means having no clue which parts of the movie are real until you get the perspective of a conclusion. You can sense that Arthur’s making things up, but the seamless slip through his version of reality and actual reality makes it difficult to grasp the difference. Truth doesn’t seem all that important after a while.

The editing and score have a gorgeous confluence, evoking some of Nolan Batman’s rhythms and grit but without any of the action. The style is beautiful to look at, in a horror movie way; Gotham’s 80s NYC wear-and-tear has been rendered in stark shadows and shocks of virulent neon.

The performances are outstanding. If you’ve never understood when someone says “the actor disappears into this role,” Joaquin Phoenix manages to do it with Arthur Fleck here. His development of Arthur Fleck is really such great work, hand-in-hand with director and writers who take great care to show us that Joker is actually a really bad guy and his barely sufficient healthcare really was keeping him from turning into a monster. It’s a fun approach to the king of the Batman Rogue’s Gallery. Batman’s rogues are so traditionally representations of mental illness and trauma that they literally go to an asylum instead of jail when caught. But Joker’s really, really just a Very Bad Man.

I agree it’s easily read with bad motives, too. It felt more irresponsible to release a movie so easily appropriated by right-wing reactionaries in 2019 when Americans were suffering under a chaotic orange clown in the White House. But within itself, on its own rules, Joker doesn’t have to say anything about that — it just has a terrible sense of humor and legendarily bad timing for its political moment. Arthur Fleck couldn’t have done it worse himself.

~

What I personally find irresistible about Joker is how I relate to Arthur Fleck’s early movie struggle with his “mental illness.” I saw the movie not too long after my stay in a mental hospital. The healthcare system in my state was like participating in my own degradation for the betterment of my health. It meant spending a lot of time in very old buildings with peeling walls. It meant fighting side effects for medication that were sometimes worse than the illness itself.

My outcome was ultimately positive, but it felt bleak to trudge through. Fantasies constructed for self-preservation in such an environment can easily skew toward seeking a horrible catharsis. I don’t have the angry character of someone like Fleck, but I can *feel* it sometimes. The dangerous allure of leaning into the worst fantasies. This is a lot of the reason I also can’t resist Donnie Darko.

If the arc where Joker goes from being an infantilized fool into a serial killing kingpin mostly by stopping his medication doesn’t convince you to keep taking those meds, then maybe nothing will. (I’m kidding.) (Is it a joke? Would Arthur Fleck laugh?)

(image credit: Warner Bros)

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” -Lizzy from Pride & Prejudice

“Somehow, I’m mad and horny.” -Noah from Fire Island

~

If I’m in a TV mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I watch the BBC version starring Jennifer Ehle.

If I’m in a movie mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I grab the 2005 one with Kiera Knightley–then fling the DVD straight out the window! Sorry, Tom from Succession, you’re a great Mr. Darcy but I just don’t dig the adaptation.

I’m watching Fire Island, baby!

What I love about Jane Austen books – surely what everyone through the ages has loved about Jane Austen books – is the timelessness of gossip, relationship fuss, class arrogance, and how amazing femmes are. It’s only right to transpose the courtship drama of Pride & Prejudice on a bunch of modern queens as they spend their summer vacation on Fire Island.

Rather than sisters, we have a bunch of bff gay guys who spend every year visiting their fag hag, who is like Mrs. Bennet with all the good parts and none of the bad parts. The sisters’ personalities are flawlessly transposed on each of the friends: a lovely sensitive older sister (Bowen Yang!!!!), the two completely inappropriate little sisters, and the brainy one who thinks you’re all fools for subjecting yourself to toxic beauty standards.

Everything works perfectly compressed into a week. The nation’s gays have converged on Fire Island, a real vacation destination favored by mostly East Coast homos, and everyone’s around for a good dance and snort and suck. By everyone, we mean anyone who can afford it. Fire Island is real fancy and our girls are…not as much. Lesbian Mrs. Bennet is about to lose her house on the island. This is their last summer together. It’s easy to project the precarity of the Bennet economic situation upon our gays teetering on the brink of rich enough for the ultimate gay vacay.

This is their last chance for a big blowout. So Noah and Howie (Lizzy and Jane) seek to get laid, of course. Noah has sworn he shall not hook up until they find someone for Howie. They trip into the companionship of an especially wealthy group of friends. That’s where we meet Jane’s Mr. Bingley (really adorable and clueless in this adaptation) and Lizzy’s Mr. Darcy (the hunkiest robot-man-lawyer who makes dorkiness look cool). Everything you think will happen, happens – this is a great adaptation. It’s just that this version is if Jane Austen took poppers and wrote her book at a sauna.

Look, I don’t know how to tell you that our culture *needed* Queer as Folk mashed up with Pride & Prejudice. But it did. It really did. This is a celebration of femme gays with the textured writing of Joel Kim Booster, who plays Noah, and obviously knows exactly what he’s talking about. The Mr. Wickham scandal is handled with an especially deft modern hand.

There’s a season for all movies. In much the way there are different horror movies for Halloween season versus Valentine’s Day, there are also different romcoms for Valentine’s Day versus summertime. Fire Island belongs on a list of summer rewatches. You can put it on any time you want to recall the smell of sunblock, lube, and salt water, or when you want to feel like you’re watching your gorgeous best friends get up to bitchy nonsense wearing virtually nothing, the way God intended it.

In How Do You Know, Reese Witherspoon ages out of a softball career at the wizened age of 31 and finds herself reeling. A practical, determined person with affirmations taped all over her mirrors, she approaches her post-sports period with a conscious kind of soul-searching. Her compassion and vigor catches the eye of Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, two extremely different suitors, and then a lot of adorable introspective stuff happens and I loved it.

With a star average of 3.2, Letterboxd does not agree, to say the least. At this point, I’ve decided Letterboxd just doesn’t like earnest romance the way I do. How Do You Know is about a character on a sincere journey, and God forbid she does it by having heartfelt conversations with a couple of guys in good lighting.

Reese Witherspoon’s performance as a well-written heroine was just a delight. It’s easy to see why she attracts both of the guys–although Paul Rudd’s uniquely smitten performance does a lot of heavy lifting. I like to talk about actors who have good Pining Face (they’re usually in the regency movies/shows), but Paul Rudd’s Adoration Face is something else entirely. No matter how much terrible life stuff he’s dealing with (his dad is business shark Jack Nicholson, so it’s a lot), it seems like gravity completely vanishes whenever Rudd is in the same space as Witherspoon. He grows *devoted*.

Paul Rudd’s character is generally delightful to watch. He never reacts quite the way I’d expect. He’s much too nice, extremely neurotic, and up to his neck in a federal indictment for businessy-bribing-idk-stuff that he did not personally do. He effervesces pathetically through the situation. More than anything, this guy just wants to help out, even if that means taking the fall for Dad Jack Nicholson’s crimes (maybe??) (he’s thinking about it). He would fully be a sad sack in another actor’s hands. Rudd somehow makes it fun to watch. And Jack Nicholson somehow softens himself into the role, matching Rudd’s energy, turning the grimmest dad moments into something…heartfelt? How did they do that?

Choosing Owen Wilson to play the heel was casting brilliance, mostly because I find it hard to decide if I should even describe him that way. This is another one where casting changed the character’s writing entirely! Jealous and sometimes obsessive behavior would look like an entire stadium of red flags played by most actors. Wilson makes smashing a lamp seem like a golden retriever just got the zoomies rather than a jilted boyfriend angry his girlfriend left. It takes a deft hand to play someone so persistently clueless without the faintest sense of malice. Instead, you walk away feeling like they’re the wrong fit: so many women would be happy with Wilson, and Witherspoon just needs something else.

This unexpectedly charming romcom reminded me of Four Christmases, another Reese Witherspoon romcom that won me over last year. It’s funny how all the romcoms I’ve been watching have made me totally reevaluate my mental rankings of actresses who tend to appear in this genre. Meg Ryan remains my absolute favorite, but Reese Witherspoon has bumped Julia Roberts out of the rankings for me. I still love Roberts! But where Roberts seems drawn to cynical darker-edged stories, Witherspoon seems drawn to warmly textured character pieces, and I prefer the latter when I’m watching romcoms.

Speaking of actresses who tend to appear in this genre, Katherine Hahn really made a living off of best friend roles in romcoms for a while. Here, she’s not bff to Goldie Hawn’s daughter, but to Paul Rudd. Not only do we get a very lovely close friendship between the two, but Hahn’s character is also the platform for one of the sweetest scenes in the movie. It also just occurred to me that the extremely close platonic relationship between Hahn and Rudd is a great contrast with Wilson’s immediate suspicion at finding Witherspoon with a male friend. (In defense of the toxic golden retriever, though, was he wrong? Maybe his “I’m the third wheel in a romcom” sense was tingling.)

In general this is a very well-constructed movie. Creative spotlighting create a dreamy atmosphere vignetting our lovers at the important moments. Much of the story is actually about the characters’ respective journeys, and meeting up to parse everything that’s happening is where love forms. The ultimate expressions of love are so sincere that it’s hard not to imagine the screenwriter thinking about their spouse as they write it out. It’s that sweet!

Rare is the movie that gets me happy-teary, but this is the second Reese Witherspoon movie to do it now. I really loved this one and it’s fine that Letterboxd doesn’t like it because, idk, more for me. That’s definitely how movies work.

(source: Sony Pictures)