The Joker Isn't Violent

Despite mounting controversy and security concerns, Joker laughed its way to the bank on opening weekend, grossing $93.5 million in domestic tickets. Critics claim that Joker is dangerous and irresponsible for painting a nihilistic, overly sympathetic picture of a white man whose descent into brutal villainy echoes the backstories of real mass shooters in America. 

This seems to stem mainly from the 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which occurred during a midnight showing of the Warner Bros. superhero movie The Dark Knight Rises, which starred Heath Ledger as the Joker and renewed the character’s status as a cultural icon. The Aurora shooter never actually confessed to police that he was “the Joker,” contrary to a false public memory that emerged from miscommunicated reports that he had dressed up as the character. 

Still, Joker has an IMDB score of 9.0, a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 90%, and a Metacritic user score of 9.3. Critics take the impact of this movie far too seriously, implying that in its effort to address societal issues, the film actually glorifies a killer and has the potential to encourage copycat attacks, particularly from incels who might feel they have a kinship with the movie’s main character. 

 Joker features one of the worst possible scenarios that could happen when someone with a mental illness has 100% provocative circumstances and zero support systems. It is a wildly uncomfortable, dread-inducing and brutal depiction of the story of Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix), a mentally deranged man who unintentionally sets off the last spark of a battle between the politically corrupt and disenfranchised members of society. 

But nothing in Joker’s violence is attractive or gratuitous. It is not the intention of the movie to hold him up as a hero or automatically link mental illness with villains, but rather to serve as a commentary on society’s treatment of vulnerable people and its volatile consequences. The film doesn’t apologize for anything and it shouldn’t be asked to. 

Understanding why someone felt justified to do villainous things does not equal glorifying their actions, and certainly does not condone it. While Joker treads the line between accepting consequence and condoning violence, and does subvert these lines occasionally, our real response should be how much more society needs to do to help those who suffer from mental health issues and why we continue to act as if society is unable to provide assistance and guidance to those who truly need it. Unfortunately, the root cause of these issues is much deeper than the content of our entertainment and too complex to be swayed one way or the other by any one film. 

There are no dangerous movies, only dangerous people who don’t know the difference between reality and entertainment. Movies should be able to touch on difficult subjects and provoke complicated conversations. The audience is mature enough to be able to differentiate facts from fiction and we shouldn’t need to police art by speculating whether someone is going to be negatively influenced by it. Phoenix mentioned in an interview regarding the controversy, “If you have somebody that has that level of emotional disturbance, they can find fuel anywhere.” The Joker itself cannot inspire someone to participate in horrific criminal behavior that they weren’t already planning to or thinking of doing in the first place. It’s easy to blame a movie about violence because of how analogous it may seem to the violence of reality, but it’s also a very biased argument.  

And is the medium of film more impactful than the written word? If we are going to start censoring media out of fear that it might inspire certain people among us to perform acts of copy-cat violence, then we can’t limit it to movies. And then where do we draw the line from there?

It’s a lot easier to avoid acknowledging the societal failings that have given rise to America’s mass-shooter crisis. A violent movie grounded in no semblance of reality is apparently so problematic that discussions to ban its distribution arose. Yet, very real, frequent, violent murders with automatic weapons at schools, churches, concerts, malls and theaters are somehow not problematic enough to induce a change in U.S. gun policies. This controversy has proven, yet again, how difficult it is for Americans to accept responsibility for the fact that we have no one and nothing to blame but ourselves for the epidemic of mass shooters. Problems with mental illness and gun violence are societal challenges that can not be adequately addressed by censorship. 

This is not a superhero comic book movie, this is an origin story of a villain, one that we all know well. Unless you thought Ledger’s Joker was warm and fuzzy, there should be no surprise here. Anyone who is questioning whether Joker should have been produced, because of what Aurora and the multiple other mass shootings have taught us, is attacking the wrong amendment. Don’t curtail the First because of the current legislative paralysis over the Second. How many non-US countries are worried about its release? Oh right—none. Joker has just become mired in America’s gun control problem.