Unlike the more Jungian equations of Marvel, DC has always been more of a surface player ala professional wrestling. Their mythic arcs offer a fusion between totemistic mythology, civics lessons, and those old Mexican wrestling movies, the kind where cultural and financial differences are worked out in masks, tights, and fights. But
And dead in the middle? David Ayer's underrated Suicide Squad.
That movie isn't fondly remembered but Ayer, paragon of macho (he made Fury with Brad Pitt for god's sakes) is the reason we have Joker getting edgy acclaim, as well as the new Birds of Prey: The Emancipation of Harley Quinn opening this weekend, so it must be acknowledged that some special magic in SS made it a cultural touchstone despite the reviews. Maybe those fight club mornings helped make everyone seem tougher but Robbie was so alluring in the way only hot messes can be in Ayer's film (and isn't in Prey, falling instead to Tank Girl over-quirk) it's clear he brought something. Or maybe I'm loyal to SS since I relapsed to it back in Xmas 2016 and my feeling of insane 'emancipation' was perfectly matched in the theme, style and plot. Alkohol macht frei!
That movie isn't fondly remembered but Ayer, paragon of macho (he made Fury with Brad Pitt for god's sakes) is the reason we have Joker getting edgy acclaim, as well as the new Birds of Prey: The Emancipation of Harley Quinn opening this weekend, so it must be acknowledged that some special magic in SS made it a cultural touchstone despite the reviews. Maybe those fight club mornings helped make everyone seem tougher but Robbie was so alluring in the way only hot messes can be in Ayer's film (and isn't in Prey, falling instead to Tank Girl over-quirk) it's clear he brought something. Or maybe I'm loyal to SS since I relapsed to it back in Xmas 2016 and my feeling of insane 'emancipation' was perfectly matched in the theme, style and plot. Alkohol macht frei!
You may shake your head in disgust at that last--admittedly personal/posional--connection. If you haven't been incarcerated by sobriety by for 20 years you don't know what it means to go from utterly miserable for days on end in a tiny one room cabin at Xmas, as everyone around you shouts drunkenly at Alexa every five minutes, throws darts over your head, laughing and swilling, unable to escape the sounds of their bawdy good time loudness-- even with headphones on in the other room--to laughing and swilling along with them, brain suddenly alive and liberated. To haver a movie beginning right at the moment the booze kicks in for the first time after 20 years, and to have that movie be Suicide Squad. Perfect - in plot and in style, it mirrored my fall and brief liberation to a 'T"! I owe David Ayers everything. What could have been a depressing surrender became a triumph; that movie was right there with me, every step of the way.
It's almost worth being miserable and winding up in the hospital for that hour of total freedom and a sense that your horizons have just widened by a significant "Kansas-switched-to-Technicolor-Oz" level. for however long your biological parole counsellor Viola Davis decrees. Her jugular vein bombs were my own addictive biochemistry. Now I'm back in the joint, but I got TCM.
No wonder I too feel the draw of the madness of Joker, a 70s NYC-ish Gotham-set saga of mental illness and delusion... and white male rage! Todd Phillips' film proves a fine echo-drenched tribute to the golden (70s-early-80s) era of Scorsese (if Travis was fired from a temp clown agency), and King of Comedy (if Rupert Pupkin took over the Jerry Lewis role and finally met someone twice as crazy as him) and hence perfect in the same year Scorsese slanders comic book movies and delivers his own (early-90s) Goodfellas-"tribute," The Irishman. It all happens in the order it does for a reason. Some day you'll understand that (1).
No wonder I too feel the draw of the madness of Joker, a 70s NYC-ish Gotham-set saga of mental illness and delusion... and white male rage! Todd Phillips' film proves a fine echo-drenched tribute to the golden (70s-early-80s) era of Scorsese (if Travis was fired from a temp clown agency), and King of Comedy (if Rupert Pupkin took over the Jerry Lewis role and finally met someone twice as crazy as him) and hence perfect in the same year Scorsese slanders comic book movies and delivers his own (early-90s) Goodfellas-"tribute," The Irishman. It all happens in the order it does for a reason. Some day you'll understand that (1).
So we learn the truth about mental illness and it's sad. Joker loses his mom, his grip on reality, and his illusory girlfriend and then he finds his true self when a Goetz-y self-defense killing of three rich a-holes on a late-night subway triggers all sorts of fun insane civil unrest as people reason killing the rich is pretty cool if they can't see your face because you're wearing a clown mask. And Fleck, I mean the Joker, I mean "Joker," doesn't disappoint his fans.
To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote about "the mystic swims where the psychotic drowns," Joker sinks to the bottom and realizes he's got gills. When you've lost everything, as Tyler Durden says, you can do anything. Of course you can argue it's a symptom of our trigger happy white male rage mass shooter age that we mustn't laugh at such things, and that's what makes it funny (and irritating that the genius of Joker is acknowledged but the genius of the far funnier and darker Observe and Report is slighted due to unfair Paul Blart associations). And thanks to a great color and lighting scheme (his red, orange and green suit contrasts iconically against the dingy gray of the city) and the way---during his celebrated stairs dance---the low-end roll of convicted felon Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll (part 2)" pumps perfectly through the channels opened by the mind-meltingly deep and true cello chords of Icelandic genius Hildur Ingveldar Guðnadóttir, we do get one of the defining moments of the cinematic year.
Pauline Kael would have loved it.
But first, before the psychotic can swim, he or she must find their animal or elemental or archetypal talisman:a penguin, a cat, an egg, ice, earth, a playing card, ice, a coin, or even just riddles, then their psychosis and amoral love of crime and villainy can take to the air like a kite. And Bruce Wayne can have an excuse to cut out of whatever gala he's slumming through, glad to have--once more--someone to chase around.
But Wayne's just a kid in Joker. It's all just Phoenix looking in the mirror and abusing his smile. But that stairs dance to Glitter's anthem works so indelibly as a moment because it takes the time to work, to breathe into it, and because the music is perfect, the stairs are perfect and the sight of this clown, literally, in this super clean clown suit is so perfectly etched against the filthy melange of urban decay/gray that it makes you stop and catch your breath. We can't help but love him because there is nothing this clown wants from us. He's broken through to the other side. He no longer whines for our love or attention (the way, say, Jerry Langford used to do back in his bellboy days), and that's why we must give it. Usually there's something terrifically desperate about a clown, the human equivalent of a needy puppy that starts to whine the moment you cease petting it. No this clown! He has moved beyond us. The only person he needs to make laugh is himself. And he can't stop.
but very last WTF coda scene after that kind of annoyed me. No, it really did annoy me. But I sure am fascinated nonetheless about why it seemed so imperative to add this little coda.
My guess: everyone worried the ending--the triumph of the loon--might incite the juggalos to rise the way they way gang violence used to erupt at inner city Warriors screenings, or the old Aurora Dark Knight Rises incident. They even worried Kids would promote teen vagrancy, and then Fight Club would motivate the trolls (back before they were called that) from out mom's basements and teach them the ways of men.
But no worries, the time for fight clubs has passed; the time to don thy juggalo paint and raise a mighty ruckus is also passed. The popularity of Joker (and its cop-out "Scarface on the gallows" ending-ending) assassinated the present and there's no sense fighting if the opponent is but a dream. Safe in anonymity behind the goofball mask, we avoid the sting of teargas and truncheons by living outside the flow of time - clickclickclackclick. The NYC of the 70s, the one of pay phones and rampant street crime, seems long gone today. But Joker reminds us that should our 5G network go out, the 70s won't be far away. Joker is with us when we walk home on NYC streets deserted of brick and mortars. So why worry about the present with its Disney and Warner Bros. flagships that we once bemoaned for cleaning up the dirty streets of Gotham? Their copyright-protected clowns bounce with big bulbous heads, and if the Joker was just more cartoony, he'd be one of them. But let's face it. He's gone dark. He's joined the past, hanging out in front of the stores that were once crumbling movie theaters showing kung fu movies and pornography and posing for invisible tourist pictures.
My guess: everyone worried the ending--the triumph of the loon--might incite the juggalos to rise the way they way gang violence used to erupt at inner city Warriors screenings, or the old Aurora Dark Knight Rises incident. They even worried Kids would promote teen vagrancy, and then Fight Club would motivate the trolls (back before they were called that) from out mom's basements and teach them the ways of men.
But no worries, the time for fight clubs has passed; the time to don thy juggalo paint and raise a mighty ruckus is also passed. The popularity of Joker (and its cop-out "Scarface on the gallows" ending-ending) assassinated the present and there's no sense fighting if the opponent is but a dream. Safe in anonymity behind the goofball mask, we avoid the sting of teargas and truncheons by living outside the flow of time - clickclickclackclick. The NYC of the 70s, the one of pay phones and rampant street crime, seems long gone today. But Joker reminds us that should our 5G network go out, the 70s won't be far away. Joker is with us when we walk home on NYC streets deserted of brick and mortars. So why worry about the present with its Disney and Warner Bros. flagships that we once bemoaned for cleaning up the dirty streets of Gotham? Their copyright-protected clowns bounce with big bulbous heads, and if the Joker was just more cartoony, he'd be one of them. But let's face it. He's gone dark. He's joined the past, hanging out in front of the stores that were once crumbling movie theaters showing kung fu movies and pornography and posing for invisible tourist pictures.
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Welcome the overalls
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Of course Anna Biller set the bar really high in Love Witch (2016) as far as able to bring a truly feminine eye towards lady sexy craziness. It looks from the outside like Yan and Hodson aren't even going to try, delivering instead what looks like another 'freshly broken up girl throws Ewan McGregor a beatin'' plot. Now, I'm all for beating up Ewan McGregor. No actor in the last two centuries has seemed to so fully warrant it (3) but the kind of crazy that's psychotic and sexy-gutsy, rather than just a mopey crying-jag downer, in films is all too rare, it's like striking gold when we stumble on it, hence the preciousness this year with Joker, the Beach Bum, the Parasite birthday picnic, the crazy subterranean's weird smiles in Us, the second half of Climax. But so much else in modern movies seems mired in a by-the-numbers sanity that unfortunately dogs even Frank Miller's DC adaptations like a plague.
When money is more than just paper, signifiers connect, and noir cliches about shadows in crumbling alleys rule over all, then we never really lost anything to begin with, did we, doctor?
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FURTHER BAT READING:
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party: DARK KNIGHT RISES, TARGETS (8/6/2012)
"Gunman turns movie into surreal horror: 'This is real'" - News headline (Aurora Shooting)"
Rolling her eyes and carrying on about the plants of Mother Nature having their day, luxuriating over her plans to rid Freeze and herself of the feathered and furry caped crusaders, Thurman is at least in on the joke and exhibiting some signs--lacking in all the other cast members--that she's actually seen some of the films Schumacher is referencing. Bane, too, is ten times more fun in this issue as a hulking, mute, seemingly-inflatable Mexican wrestler under her control instead of Chris Nolan's musclebound Marxist professor.
Burn the Money: DARK KNIGHT and The Joker's Post-Fascist Used Topia (8/5/2008)
Chris Nolan seems to underline the hyper-commodity fetishism of Wayne's world, offering a sly socialist critique even as he fulfills his conspicuous consumption fantasy obligations to the producers and advertisers (Alfred is always interested in knowing what of Wayne's many cars will be taken out for drives. "The Lamborghini, sir?" he says, all a quiver)
All Clawed up and Nowhere to Go: CATWOMAN (8/10/2004)
Showgirls was camp feminism as imagined by bearded men with coke habits and million dollar tabs with Heidi Fleiss, but at least they weren’t afraid to portray the kind of feminism they wanted to see: Sharon Stone sticking that ice pick; a Joe Esterhaz stand-in getting the tar kicked out of him by a stripper in high heels --that’s real feminism as only the heirs to the Russ Meyer throne can portray it! But leave it to a Frenchman to get camp so very wrong. Here the feminist icon can’t crack a convincing smile let alone a whip.
Kitty Kali: (4/4/2011)
a sexy supervillainess makes the Batman mythos operate at a far more evolved level than with male baddies, for instead of an all-boy group of kids pretend fighting in the backyard, there's the female element of the hottie next door who makes all the boys stammer; the yin-yang dichotomy is in place. She becomes the chthonic enemy of normal patriarchal civilization, its inescapable shadow. How easily she gets our dynamic duo in tied-up situations, yet always leaves them room to escape; she likes the chase and the drama and the last minute rescues and, like the other villains, there's a clear idea that without the dynamic duo to wrestle with and subject to various colorful slow torments, a life of crime would be a drab, dull affair--no one to play with..
NOTES
1. as Bogie once said to Ingrid in Casablanca, a line that smacks of patriarchal condescension (she's been trying to get him to understand it all through the movie; then she realizes the easiest way to get those visas is to play along and let him think it's his idea)
4. Simpsons quote (S1: "Krusty gets Busted"), because we shouldn't let the last 20 seasons sway us from remembering the brilliance of the first 10
6. See: Mother (2016)
9. The kind of gross 'dead-horse-dragging' belabored hipster triteness that makes you turn your back on hipsters and never want to watch the movie again for no other reason than the memory of it makes you want to retch and it's such a waste of Raquel Welch as a whip-wielding galley master. Who was the idiot editor who said "less Welch in leather please, and more posh shit-wading
19. In the flashbacks we see how cuckoo he is over her, and how for her it's just sex at first but also amused at his naivete and goo-goo eyes. This is now Americans fall for Europeans (or girls from Buenos Aires), our inability to realize a relationship can be just sex because when we find a girl for whom it's just sex we fall in love since we've longed for such a thing. It's the ultimate irony that then our innocence and adoration wins them over, as if that kind of naive swooning was as precious to them, moored in old world cool as they are, as their slutty self-assertion is to us (whose sex is mired in neo-Puritan 'Rules') But it's not really love, not the way Thelma and Louise, or the Joker and Harley, or John Dahl and Peggy Cummins, do it. The problem with the Lazlos of the world is they force everyone to either kill them or join the fight. It takes a Switzerland to know how to stay neutral even when the Lazlos are grabbing at your lapels like old Ugharti begging for a place to hide.
1. as Bogie once said to Ingrid in Casablanca, a line that smacks of patriarchal condescension (she's been trying to get him to understand it all through the movie; then she realizes the easiest way to get those visas is to play along and let him think it's his idea)
2. To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote (? was it Jung?) "A mystic swims where a psychotic drowns"
3. Though to be fair, I'm basing that off of three movies he was in where he played a reprehensible swine, his smirky wally in The Men Who Stare at Goats; his entitled abusive/possessive poet in Moulin Rouge; and his bad haircut-sporting traitor ex-boyfriend to Gina Carano in the oft-seen-by-me Haywire.4. Simpsons quote (S1: "Krusty gets Busted"), because we shouldn't let the last 20 seasons sway us from remembering the brilliance of the first 10
6. See: Mother (2016)
9. The kind of gross 'dead-horse-dragging' belabored hipster triteness that makes you turn your back on hipsters and never want to watch the movie again for no other reason than the memory of it makes you want to retch and it's such a waste of Raquel Welch as a whip-wielding galley master. Who was the idiot editor who said "less Welch in leather please, and more posh shit-wading
19. In the flashbacks we see how cuckoo he is over her, and how for her it's just sex at first but also amused at his naivete and goo-goo eyes. This is now Americans fall for Europeans (or girls from Buenos Aires), our inability to realize a relationship can be just sex because when we find a girl for whom it's just sex we fall in love since we've longed for such a thing. It's the ultimate irony that then our innocence and adoration wins them over, as if that kind of naive swooning was as precious to them, moored in old world cool as they are, as their slutty self-assertion is to us (whose sex is mired in neo-Puritan 'Rules') But it's not really love, not the way Thelma and Louise, or the Joker and Harley, or John Dahl and Peggy Cummins, do it. The problem with the Lazlos of the world is they force everyone to either kill them or join the fight. It takes a Switzerland to know how to stay neutral even when the Lazlos are grabbing at your lapels like old Ugharti begging for a place to hide.
Hey Erich, another great post. Absolutely love the blog, have been reading for years, and always love sending my browser to the site in the hope of getting the good luck and seeing there's a new post and it will be at least that long of a good day. I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for books?
ReplyDeleteThanks DavidJames! as for books, it depends on where you want to go. For perceptive film criticism, start with the collections of Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Molly Haskell, James Agee, Michael Atkinson - for deeper analytics, Zizek, Jean Baudry, Todd McGowan, Steven Shaviro and for crazy raconteur entertainment from the B-side of Hollywood (cocktails and poppers with the horror stars of yesteryear), David Del Valle's LOST HORIZONS BENEATH THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN.
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