Are societies monsters simply born evil or does society create its own monsters? The Joker movie produced and directed by Todd Philips showcases a very different version of the character, this time played by Joaquin Phoenix. Rather than looking at the typical clown prince of crime DC comics and media, Philips instead looks at the joker as a man suffering from severe mental health issues and is pushed to the breaking point and is eventually turned fully into the famous villain by abuse and neglect towards him from others. The movie begins with the joker, Arthur Fleck, putting on his outfit for his job as a clown for businesses and entertaining children. As he is doing his current job of flipping a sign for a business, a group of teenagers steal his sign and lead him to an alleyway where they destroy it and beat him up.
The movie shows off Arthur’s first meeting with his therapist and leads to him riding on a bus where he entertains a kid in front of him but he is told by the boy’s mother to leave him alone. Arthur also begins laughing uncontrollably which the mother thinks is him laughing at her, but is really caused by a mental health issue.
. The movie continues showing more of the joker’s life such as his mother, a female neighbor that acts nice towards him, showing his coworkers. This continues until a scene where Arthur is on a train home and gets attacked by three men and he ends killing them with a gun he reluctantly received from a coworker.
This scene becomes a pivotal moment because it will be his first of many people, he ends up killing and starts showing his dissent increasing due to his actions and circumstances. Events start to become worse for Arthur with him getting fired from his job due to him having a gun, his mother getting sick, the city defunding the therapy and medication he needs, and the police getting closer to him in their investigation. All this leads to the next pivotal scene where he finds out that his mother had been lying about him not being adopted, who his father was, and that she also had severe mental health issues and abused him as a child. On, top of this, Arthur finds out that all the nice interactions he had with his neighbor did not actually happen and instead were in his head.
This culminates with him killing his mother, coworker, and eventually a talk show host. The host invited him on to his show after a video of him giving a bad stand-up routine went viral, and Arthur kills him on-air while saying that people end up like him when those with mental health issues are abused.
This movie fits into the class and our understanding of mental health because it shows how important treatments for those who severely need them are, but also what could happen when mental health people are constantly ostracized. Whether through mental institutions, defunding programs, or treating mental health people like second-class citizens, all this affects those with these issues severally. While most people with mental health issues will not turn into murders or even harm others, when a person does not get the help they need and is constantly manipulated or abused by those around them, they could easily eventually break under the constant pressure.
Bibliography:
“Joker.” Directed by Todd Philips, October 4, 2019. movie. Accessed November 6, 2021.
