Reviews

Joker Movie Sparks Controversy, Outrage, and Worry

By Editor Austin Kent

Todd Phillip 2019 Joker film starring Joaquin Phoenix is striking up incredible amounts of controversy, despite the film not even being released in cinemas yet.

The $55 million film about the rise of Batman's clown-faced arch rival is forcing Landmark Theatres, the country's largest independent cinema chain, to extending its ban on face masks and toy weapons to include movie-goers wearing any costumes during the film's theatrical run.

Since the 2012 shooting at a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in Aurora, Colorado, most movie theaters across the country have not allowed customers or employees to wear face masks and face paint or to carry toy weapons. Body costumes, however, have generally been allowed.

For those who do not know, a man came in dressed as the Joker on July 20, 2012, to the Aurora Cinema Theater with tear gas and multiple firearms, killing a total of 12 people during screening of “The Dark Knight Rising”, so people being worried is pretty understandable.

The backlash over Joker is not unfamiliar. The character has always been a ghoulish figure capable of immense horrors, and his existence in comic books has been met with questions of whether writers and artists sometimes go too far in depicting his villainy (i.e. his sadism, his violence, his abusive relationship with Harley Quinn), even straying into glamorization.

The peculiar part is the backlash and debate are based merely on the premise of the movie and the film’s two major trailers released so far. The general public hasn’t yet seen the movie but people have already written it off or written off the people who have written it off. The major flashpoint occurred late last month when Warner Bros. released the movie’s final pre-release trailer.

The trailer is edited to convey a digestible, linear origin story for the Joker. Troubled guy Arthur Fleck just wants to make people laugh; people don’t understand him; one final straw turns him into the ghoulish villain known as the Joker.

Fleck’s social awkwardness is emphasized throughout the trailer. He is so unlikable, we’re meant to think, that even his own social worker doesn’t want to deal with him anymore. Fleck’s reaction is caustic, with him saying “you just don't listen, do you? You ask the same questions every week.”

Because of how he’s been treated, Fleck goes from a mostly harmless nobody into a villainous somebody. If society had treated him better, the trailer seems to assert, the Joker would have never existed.

Joker’s most vocal critics thus far are concerned that in the United States’ current climate, giving the spotlight to the character emboldens and galvanizes a type of thinking that can inspire mass shooters.

With the film just around the corner people are, respectfully, getting more antsy about if the aurora incident may be repeated. With that being said, the film is not in theaters yet, so the people who are criticizing it and calling for a boycott should at least watch it before making a full opinion.