Joker, Iran, and Noah’s Flood

Two days ago, the box-office revenue of Joker passed one billion dollars. The film tells the story of the emergence of a destructive antihero from within a harmless clown in Gotham City, a city where corruption, poverty and unemployment have not only torn apart the social bonds among its people but have brought the entire fabric of social life to the threshold of complete collapse and disintegration.

After Joker, in one of its first major achievements, won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice Film Festival, many critics wrote against it, generally emphasising that it was saturated with violence, that it somehow sanitised violence, and that it justified its antihero and his destructive behaviour. In my view, however, the film does not justify the Joker’s behaviour or character. It offers a deep, honest and thought-provoking analysis of the social conditions capable of transforming an ordinary, wounded person such as Arthur Fleck into the psychologically disturbed and destructive Joker.

Contrary to what may initially appear, the film’s narrative does not cleanse or excuse its antihero. It offers a precise and deeply psychological portrayal of a society that is itself orphaned and victimised by political rulers who have become authoritarian and indifferent fathers to their society. It is this orphaned society, in its own collapse, that gives birth to orphaned and victimised people for whom the only place where they can experience even a small sense of personhood and individual power is by becoming an angry and destructive shadow of themselves.

Nearly one hundred hours have passed since internet access was cut off in Iran. Given the immense social and economic cost of this impossible severance from the world, it will probably be restored gradually in the coming hours. Perhaps none of us will ever know every detail of the painful tragedy that has unfolded across our country in these days, but all of us know in our hearts that there are cries that can be heard even from closed mouths. If those cries are not heard today and this pain is not treated, tomorrow it will move beneath the skin of society and become a greater resentment and anger, like an unseen cancer.

Dozens of banks, buses, administrative buildings and items of public property across Iran were damaged and burned during the events of recent days, on a scale perhaps without precedent, while protesters and politicians point accusing fingers at one another. Can anything be more painful for a society? Understanding this public hurt and anger matters because hurt and suffering that remain unrecognised become blind anger, producing a destructive fire that ultimately burns the individual’s ideals and dreams before it burns their social manifestations.

In Joker, Arthur is an orphaned clown who has never known his father, but who lovingly cares for his mother, Penny, and dreams of advancing in his profession and one day becoming a famous stand-up comedian. His simple and underdeveloped personality carries deep wounds from a painful childhood and from life in a ruthless city drowned in corruption. The city’s indifference to the individual value of its people has brought them to a point where they no longer recognise any genuine value in their fellow citizens and compatriots; power and money have become the only value and the only measure of value.

From the beginning of the film, Arthur stands upon a fragile boundary. Maintaining his balance upon that boundary in order to remain a good human being is the only dream that, if it appears even by accident for a moment, is shattered seconds later by the unimaginable cruelty of society and of wounded people who are both products and perpetuators of that society.

The film begins with Arthur being beaten by teenagers who know no better entertainment than mocking and tormenting a defenceless clown. All of this happens before the eyes of people who, half asleep and transformed into automata, continue along their ordinary daily paths. In the next stage, and throughout the film, we see the relentless continuation of cruelty and falsehood in Arthur’s workplace. Everyone is cruel toward everyone else and indifferent to one another’s fate. Arthur admires a famous comedian with his whole heart, but that man too is empty of heart and regards everything and everyone simply as an opportunity for his own continued advancement.