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. Continued (Part Two): throughout the film Arthur is pushed further and further to the margins and subjected to humiliation. He is told that even the mother to whom he has devoted his entire life is not his biological mother, and he seeks refuge in the father his mother has told him is his real father: Thomas Wayne, father of Bruce Wayne—the legendary Batman, superhero of Gotham City. In this story, Thomas Wayne is also a symbol of a powerful man within Gotham’s political structure. Hero and antihero are both children and products of one father—society/the state—and the ultimate fate of both is orphanhood. Somewhere in the Daredevil superhero series, a nurse who rescues the hero and tends his wounds tells him: you are trying to save this city, but that is only half the truth, because it is this same city that created you. This truth finds a powerful but inverted reflection in Joker, because a society in chaos gives birth both to its hero and to its antihero: the birth of the antihero is a consequence of society’s collapse, while the birth of the hero becomes necessary for society’s survival. When funding for mental-health services is cut and Arthur’s counsellor tells him that he will no longer be able to see a therapist because the government has withdrawn the programme’s funding, one might say that the final link in Arthur’s complete orphaning and exclusion is closed. He no longer knows either a father or a mother, and now society too has rejected him. He is not merely rejected; he is subjected to ruthless abuse. In this way, at the height of his anger and sense of abandonment, Arthur finally kills his mother. This killing symbolises the destruction, with his own hands, of the highest ideals and meaning of life in order to give birth, through violence, to a destructive self that experiences for the first time what it means to be somebody and to possess an independent identity. At the end of the story Arthur, in a symbolic event, dies and is reborn as the Joker amid social chaos and widespread street protests. We thus encounter the archetypal story of death and rebirth in a reversed yet powerful image of how an antihero is made and born. The birth of the Joker from Arthur is a bitter reminder of all societies, governments and statesmen whose indifference to the value of human beings has driven their societies and peoples toward orphanhood. When people feel deeply unseen, abandoned and humiliated, this eventually creates a profound sense of helplessness and orphanhood. It soon becomes resentment and then suppressed anger, directed first toward the self and others, and finally toward society and its social structures. An orphaned society may be afraid and may feel deeply weak and humiliated, but this sense of weakness and fear does nothing to diminish the resentment flowing beneath the skin of society and its continual potential to become anger and destruction. How could blossoms grow from the fingertips of such a society when suffering and anger have created a hell in the heart of that society and in the people who represent its fundamental values? Within the archetypal structure of social renewal, government and political authority occupy the archetype of the father. The father symbolises order and protection, but also power joined with care and affection. John Stuart Mill once wrote: “A government which dwarfs its people in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands ... will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.” Such a society will be neither dynamic nor self-confident, and the bonds between child and father will continually weaken. If corruption, authoritarianism, indifference and violence become the father’s customary behaviour, the household too will fill with corruption, decay, indifference and violence; sooner or later, as the warning goes, Noah’s flood will come. Social events can be considered at several different levels. At the first level is civil disobedience, in which a group of people, while avoiding violence, decide not to obey particular laws. Much of the history of admired social movements and struggles to reform laws that were inherently unjust has proceeded through this path. At the second level is social unrest, in which groups of people engage in broader forms of social non-compliance such as strikes. The third form is civil disorder, in which groups resort to violence and destruction. What was new in the recent social events in Iran was the extensive occurrence of this third form, something that may be a serious warning about the depth of expanding public dissatisfaction.