The Dark Truth Of The Joker Movie
Joker Misappropriated
One of the most interesting parts of the trailer links to The Dark Knight Returns, rather than The Killing Joke. Everyone is picking up on the link between that seminal comic's talk show sequence and Joker appearing on Murray Franklin's show: he is, by the look of it, not only a reference to The Killing Joke's stand-up humiliation, but also this movie's proxy for David Endocrine. His function - and indeed the function of Joker appearing on his show to a captive audience - is very much the same, no mater how the specifics are shuffled around.
By the look of it, Joker will go on that show to do what he did to Endrocine and his audience in the comic. To kill them. To announce himself in as theatrical and bloody a means as possible. If Joker is looking to make a statement about bringing down the establishment, what better way to strike at it than through the other thing the elite worship above power and wealth - television.
That sequence, which starts with Joker demanding he be called Joker and sees Arthur tossed aside not only by the name-change but by the total change in his demeanour, will end in something difficult to watch. We will see Joker blossom out of horror and Gotham will see it happen too in their very own homes. He will use television to amplify his and the protest clowns' agenda the same way the Internet has been used to amplify the agendas of mass killers and their cultish followers in more recent years.
It will be horrifying not just because of what the Joker does, but because of what WE the audience see reflected in those actions of our own world.
And then there's the question of misappropriation. It seems painfully inevitable that like Fight Club, even if Joker is indeed seeking to make positive strikes for mental health and to criticise the mob that ultimately destroys Gotham - it's surrogate alt-right - there's an element of the audience who are going to take it at face value and proclaim Arthur Fleck and the Joker as their totems.
You don't have to have a vivd imagination to be able to see him being adopted as an alt-right symbol of hope by people in the belief that they're as victimised and abused as he is suggesting a similar stance against "the establishment." Which is as dangerous as the toxic masculinity groups who took Fight Club as a sort of call to arms to them when it was actually a criticism of them. They didn't get the point, and worryingly, even as Joker holds up a mirror to those people as well, they might not get the point of what Joker is hopefully trying to achieve.
Even as we the audience watch the horrors of that mob misappropriating the actions of a mentally ill man cast aside and twisted into something else, and are horrified rightly, there's a very real chance it's going to be happening all over again in our own world.
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