Of the many discussions that Todd Phillips' "Joker" has triggered, it may be the one that helps to understand the film that has inspired Martin Scorsese. Recently, Scorsese said that Marvel films (as pars pro toto for all superhero films) are not cinema for him.
What he meant by that can now be seen in "Joker" - the film,
- which is supposed to provide proof of the quality of the genre,
- who made it the first superhero / villain movie to compete in one of the great European festivals,
- who won the Golden Lion in Venice,
- whose main actor is regarded as a safe Oscar candidate.
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This extraordinary response is due not least to Warner's marketing. Cleverly, the studio has positioned "Joker" as a departure from its other comic book adaptations, as a "one-off" from the DC Cinema Universe. No cartoon logo adorns the posters, but character actor Joaquin Phoenix can be seen in a classic character actor closeup.
Unhindered and unbound?
This nonchalance is made possible by a failure: If Warner had had a happier hand with his superhero films and created Superman, Wonder Woman and the "Suicide Squad" a similarly successful film family as Marvel with his Avengers, there would be no "Joker". However, because there is no brand core to defend, Phoenix can now dance freely and unhampered through Gotham City.
However, the film is not free from the narrative editions of the superhero cinema. He is a classic Origin story, and his suspense depends largely on their predetermined dramatic escalation, namely the birth of a top villain. In doing so, Phillips takes advantage of the canon twice: his joker spreads small-scale terror, he kills in his vicinity. He does not seem to have the intellectual capacity to ruin a whole city in chaos. But the kind of horror already spreads in collective cinema awareness anyway Heath Ledger, which is why the reverberation of "Joker" not least the echo of "The Dark Knight" is. One fears what comes because others have already told it.
Similarly, "Joker" (screenplay: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver) uses events of contemporary history. Although he is ostentatiously settled in 1981, as a panning on a cinema advertising with the films "Blow Out" and "Zorro: The Gay Blade", which started in just this year, illustrates. But the crisis symptoms that Joker equips his pre-revolutionary Gotham are drawn from various decades in New York's city history: the 1968 garbage collection strike, the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients in the 1970s, and the white assassin Bernhard Goetz, who in 1984 shot four black teenagers in the subway.
Still militant
The racist background of the latter crime is reversed by "Joker", the victims of Phoenix's character are white. For this he is initially humiliated and beaten by four non-white kids. In the end, insurgents who misunderstand the Joker as anti-establishment fighters riot in the streets with clown masks - as if Occupy Wall Street had found militancy over a green-haired idol.
Phillips's crude symbolism mashup resembles Donald Trump's dictum of "Some Very Fine People on Both Sides" when he spoke of a demo of right-wing extremists in which a counter-demonstrator was killed by a racist. "Some very bad people on both sides", white and black, right and left, now signals "Joker" - and at the same time withdraws to the certainty that he plays in 1981, so he said nothing about the present.
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Joaquin Phoenix as "Joker": The agony came with the clownPhillips also secures aesthetically when he extensively quotes classics such as "Taxi Driver", "French Connection" and "The King of Comedy": There is hardly a greater cinematic comfort zone than New Hollywood - the era is as it were a synonym for a cinema, that is popular and political at the same time. Cleverly continuing the vintage grasp of this movie theater (camera: Lawrence Sher) and backed by song classics by Frank Sinatra, Cream and Etta James, "Joker" exudes intimacy - so much so that his greatest inspiration is almost completely masked: Lynne Ramsays " A Beautiful Day "of 2017.
Really miserable joke
As with "Joker" Phoenix already played a variation of "Taxi Driver" Travis Bickle, even then with a traumatization from childhood, even then with often bare upper body, on that Phoenix 'spasmodically twisted right shoulder, the internal injuries of his figure worn outside, and even then his pathological loner still lived with his mother in need of care.
Unlike Phillips, Ramsay not only relied on her film-historical references, but played with them light-handed: In one scene, her phoenix figure began to stab her mother pantomime - and imitated the screeching strings from "Psycho". A really miserable and a really good joke.
In the video: The trailer for "Joker"
Warner Bros.
"Joker" on the other hand has no humor. That does not have to be a problem, Christopher Nolan's films are also completely humorless. But Todd Phillips has made it one thing : woke culture , the new sensitivity to discrimination, has made comedy impossible, according to the director of the "Hangover" trilogy, so his turn into the serious subject.
Marc Maron, one of the leading comedians in the US at the moment and "Joker" actor, has already contradicted Phillips. "The only thing that is culturally off the table right now - and even that is not even complete - is to shamelessly step down, simply for the pleasure of hurting others," said Maron in his million-paged podcast WTF. "If you want to risk something, you can still risk something." The prospect of possibly exaggerated criticism makes Maron as an excuse to let it be with comedy, do not apply: This challenge you have to face.
"Joker" is not a challenge - and certainly not the currently largest in the cinema: namely the overdominance of comic film adaptations with original fabrics and aesthetics to resist. Instead, Phillips works in the slipstream of the genre, citing its alleged cinematic relevance and making the rest of his lead actor.
Is this still cinema? Together with Martin Scorsese you can seriously doubt it.
