You're All Awful . . . but Joker is Not . . .

Well, he kind of is, becoming quite terrible . . .

The infamous city of Gotham is a hell pit. It's plagued by apathy, crime, garbage, Super rats and class warfare. It's a boiling, hellish cesspool ready to explode. It's inhumane. It's almost indescribably terrible, downright awful.

"That's LIfe!"

And this is the life of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix).

Meet Arthur. He's a sad clown trying really hard to be happy. He's a comedian wannabe who's not at all funny. He's painfully awkward, chronically unlucky, and tragically misunderstood. He's creepy. He's clearly mentally ill. Arthur is a chain-smoking Charlie Brown on 7 different medications. His life is a horrible nightmare. A poster child for the downtrodden, he displays frequent, disturbing laughing fits at the most inopportune moments. It's an odd neurological condition apparently resulting from some heinous episode of physical abuse he suffered as a young boy (to be disclosed later.) The poor guy continues to endure a seemingly endless barrage of abuse at the hands of his fellow humans as a deeply troubled grown-up.

Arthur meets with his drab, unsympathetic social worker in a dingy, over-sized storage closet brimming with old files, over-cluttered with a miasma of other miscellaneous detritus. She asks him the same idiotic meaningless questions week after week but never listens to him. She slightly downplays the egregious state of the city as a little "tense out there." He confesses he actually felt better when he was institutionalized previously, for undisclosed reasons. It's interesting to note the time on the clock appears to be 11:11 (gateway number) just as it is in the rubber room flashback. There's also a painfully obvious sign denoting Drugs blatantly hovering over Arthur's head in the sad social worker's makeshift office. It's obvious Arthur suffers these pointless court-mandated sessions solely to get his badly needed meds.

Every scene in "Joker" is a rich panoply of urban blight and dark, dreary, apocalyptic, suicidal hopelessness. Even the odd colored lighting is disturbing. The soundtrack is ironically light-hearted yet aptly sinister. This is a city, a world that is imploding into chaos and savagery, seemingly without redemption. The people are transformed into violent animals or reduced to tragic ghosts.

Everything Must Go, reads the sign he twirls, advertising the closing of another defunct small business, Kenny's Music Shop, as Arthur dutifully performs his shitty street clown job. Even the music in Gotham is dying. His sign is stolen by a gang of young hoodlums and after he gives chase, Arthur is waylaid by the juveniles in a dirty alley, kicked and beaten unmercifully. Later, his asshole boss blames him for going AWOL from the job and for losing the sign and subsequently takes it out of his paycheck. Everyday having barely survived the merciless Gotham rat race, Arthur must ascend a lofty set of concrete stairs to get home. Our anti-hero's psychic drudgery is palpable. What is he ascending to? The shitty high rise rat hole where Arthur still resides with his cuckoo home-bound mother.

Despite his unfortunate flaws, it's obvious Arthur has a good heart. And he is a pretty good dancer. Thanks in large part to his mom, the equally sad, delusional whisp of a woman with whom he still lives, Arthur Fleck believes he was put on this earth to make people smile and laugh. He harbors the unlikely pipe dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. But even demure, soft-spoken Penny Fleck doubts he has it in him. "Don't you have to be funny to do that?" she scathingly comments whilst her loyal, kind-hearted only son bathes her.

Poor Arthur and mom are such losers, they don't even get any mail, day after day. Penny is obsessed with her letters soliciting financial assistance from mega-rich Thomas Wayne, the promising mayoral candidate for whom she worked as a house maid three decades ago. She alleges they were lovers back in the day and that filthy rich Wayne is Arthur's father. "He owes it to us," poor Penny insists compulsively. Bigwig Wayne never writes back. Shocker. Initially, Arthur is unaware of the true nature of the letters and the extent of his mother's delusions. Arthur and Penny spend their dreary evenings watching "Live with Murray Franklin," a local variety show a la Johnny Carson (Robert DeNiro.) Arthur engages in a rich fantasy life. He imagines being summoned out of the crowd by the affable TV host, whom he regards as the warm and kindly father figure he never had in real life. He becomes enamored of an attractive neighbor down the hall, a young single mom. Following a brief, innocent encounter in the shitty elevator, he commences to stalk her. Can we even imagine Arthur having ever had a real girlfriend?

Shortly after Arthur's beat-down by "a bunch of kids," one of his shady clown colleagues gives him a gun to protect himself "from all those animals." This is where Arthur's real troubles begin. (Also, equally troubling, he is sadly informed by his ambivalent counselor that the city has cut social services funding. Their program is kaput. He can no longer get his meds. Sorry, Charlie. Those people don't give a shit about people like you or me.)

And why is the dude so anxious to get rid of that gun?

"That's Life! . . ."

Late one evening inept Arthur accidentally shoots a hole in the living room wall dancing around with his new gun. He soon gets fired for clumsily dropping the gun while performing his "If You're Happy and You Know it" act in a hospital children's ward. Whoa, that could have been really bad . . . He finds out from his asshole boss that his so-called clown buddy at work lied and said Arthur insisted on buying the gun from the dude.

That night on the subway in a pivotal scene in the film, Arthur suffers another unfortunate laughing fit as he draws the attention of a trio of young Wall Street pricks harassing a young woman commuting alone. The three white-collar bullies turn to mock the laughing clown but their assault turns predictably violent. Beat down again down on the ground, Arthur draws his revolver and shoots two of his attackers dead on the spot. He chases the cowardly third, a fairly easy prey wounded in the leg, off the train and viciously guns down the last jerk on the subway platform. A little shocked but strangely invigorated by what he's just done, and gotten away with, Arthur races on foot through the dark, grungy streets of Gotham. Experiencing some sort of ascendant epiphany, he escapes to an eerily lit public bathroom,wherein he performs a joyful and strangely elegant, private Tai Chi/dance solo.

And thus, the monster, the legend is born, kind of . . .

As the second half of the movie unfolds, along with Arthur we discover via newspapers and the TV news that his Killer Clown Murders have not only divided the city even more viscerally but that the incident has in fact unexpectedly incited a vigorous and bloodthirsty Kill the Rich movement. Mayoral hopeful Thomas Wayne becomes even more despised by the poor, whom he refers to as "clowns" and "people who never made anything out of themselves."

Meanwhile, Arthur is injected with a fresh dose of confidence he has never experienced before. He is spurred on to pursue his stand-up career. In one of the most painful scenes in the film, he fails quite miserably. But he is not dissuaded, escaping even further into his rich private fantasy world. Arthur is emboldened to visit the Wayne estate to confront his "real father." He encounters young Bruce Wayne at the gate and briefly enchants the boy with some lame clown tricks. Instead of Wayne, Arthur meets Alfred the butler who informs the creepy trespasser of the sad truth about his mother, her mental illness, the abuse and neglect inflicted upon Arthur as a boy, etc. Also, the fact that Arthur is, in fact, adopted! In a subsequent scene (which I'm unsure if it is another Arthur fantasy or not) Arthur slips away from a protest outside a fancy theater and sneaks into the place, wherein Gotham's well-dressed elite are feverishly enjoying Charlie Chaplain's classic "The Tramp." Next, Arthur does finally confront Thomas Wayne (dear old long-lost dad?) in the fancy men's room and subsequently gets punched in the nose for his trouble.

Also, the cops are on Arthur's trail by now. A pair of detectives track him down briefly at the hospital where his mother was taken, having suffered an apparent stroke while being questioned by these very same police. On the television in his mother's hospital room, Arthur is shocked to see that a copy of his disastrous stand-up comedy routine has made it to the one and only Murray Franklin. The man cruelly mocks Arthur's embarrassing display on live Gotham TV. Nothing good could come of that . . .

Arthur decides to pay a visit to Arkham State Hospital to get to the bottom of this mess. There, a clerk presents him with his mother's thick file. One of the only individuals who is halfway nice to Arthur throughout the entire film, the clerk is taken aback by Arthur and his half-hearted "confession." When the clerk refuses to release the file, Arthur grabs it and takes off and thus discovers the whole ugly story. His mother was and is, in fact, crazy as a loon. She was fired by Wayne for her bizarre, obsessive behavior way back when. She did adopt Arthur and then essentially abandoned him, subsequently allowing her boyfriend to brutally abuse the boy. Arthur ended up suffering his chronic neurological issues as a result of the violent abuse. His mother was briefly imprisoned and/or institutionalized and so on. Obviously, he is incensed that his mother has been lying to him his entire life, of which he has never experienced one moment of effing happiness!

In yet another disturbing yet oddly cathartic scene, Arthur suddenly euthanizes his crazy mother with a pillow in her hospital bed. As the poor thing slowly flatlines in the hospital, not a soul comes rushing to her aid. No dire alarms. No Code Blues. Nothing. Nada.

But it's not all bad news for Arthur. Back at home he receives a very unexpected call from one of Mr. Murray Franklin's assistants. They actually want him on the show. At this point, there is not much left of old Arthur. Of course our ascendant Joker realizes it's all a set-up, another cruel trap to debase and humiliate him. And he's planning something really special for Mr. Murray. And Gotham. Our insurgent anti-hero dyes his hair neon green. He gives himself a fresh coat of clown paint. He does another joyful Tai Chi dance in the bathroom. He stabs his treacherous so-called old clown buddy in the neck with scissors. And briefly terrorizes the little guy, who innocently came by the apartment to pay his respects, show a little sympathy. "You're the only one in this world who was ever nice to me Gary . . ."

Finally, in my personal favorite scene, all decked out in his clownish glory, Joker performs an absolutely glorious dance of joy to Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll" (the old 1990s Chicago Bulls theme, some may recall) gracefully descending that very same steep set of concrete stairs just as the cops catch up to him again . . . Believe it or not, it gets even better from there.

As you can probably tell I got sucked in by the film, one of the best I've seen in ages. Joaquin Phoenix's performance is remarkable and absolutely worthy of the Oscar. The film is dark. It's deep. Okay, not that deep but more absorbing than 99 percent of the Hollywood crap we are forced to endure today. It's packed full of prophetic caveats/predictive programming. Yet there is a notable theme of being stuck in the past, the film frequently displaying really old music and movies from some perceived golden age yet subtly referencing the Great Depression. It's a telling tale for our deeply troubled and transient age. Society is crumbling, devolving into chaos. Most people are in denial. Others are spurring it on, frothing at the mouth for the impending Apocalypse.

All that being said, the film is obviously one big Intel red flag. How could any mainstream movie this heavily marketed and earmarked to win a major Oscar not be? And we already know the infamous Halloween death of the star's famous sibling, River Phoenix a/k/a River Bottom was a fake. It is so right there in our collective clown face. Absolutely kicking the shite out of the poor MK Ultra victim/survivor while he's down. Promoting absolute chaos and violence in our decaying, decrepit society. Your world is crumbling and you're in the thick of it, no way out. Although there is no sex to speak of (once again the anti-hero is a sexless, drugged-out, isolated child abuse victim who's probably never had a girlfriend, which is what They want us all to become or believe ourselves to be) and only one flash of a scene that borders on any kind of love scene, which is more akin to a rape fantasy. Meanwhile, the film is literally screaming, You're all clowns and your so-called savior is a blood thirsty psychopath. How ironic. That's exactly what We are, your fearless leaders.

"That's Life! . . ."

Despite being terribly depressing for the most part, all in all "Joker" is pretty watchable and I give it . . .🤡🤡🤡🤡. . .