A son's response to Joker

I have watched Todd Phillips's Joker twice, and liked it on various levels, but my first response to it was a visceral one that I was unprepared for (partly because I hadn’t seen trailers of the film going in): the protagonist’s behaviour and appearance made me think of my father in the old days. Both when he was heavily into substance abuse and when he was going through phases of lucidity, in and out of rehab, making small efforts to be “normal”. It also reminded me of the smoke-filled room I spent much of my childhood in, with songs like Pink Floyd's “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” seemingly playing on loop, and of the blood-smears on the hallway floor after one of the times he cut a vein.

Emaciated? Check. Delusional and paranoid? Check. Incredibly isolated? Check. Alternating between being warm/sensitive/childlike and flying into violent fury; feeling persecuted, rallying constantly against an insensitive and uncaring world; lashing out and trying to wound everyone around him; scribbling sentences wildly in journals, using writing as a way of maintaining some sort of grasp on sanity. Check, check, check. There were times when it felt almost like Joaquin Phoenix was doing a straight imitation. (Or, who knows: maybe, like Arthur Fleck, I was looking too hard for a father in someone who wasn’t.)

Anyway, in one of those little coincidences that make you wonder if there really is a joker up there somewhere mocking us all, I just learnt that Phoenix and my father have the same birthday, i.e. October 28. My father would have turned 70 today. These photos are from what seems like a “happy” time, but looking at them it’s easy for me to recall the sadder, scarier (and much skinnier) versions of the man.

P.S. on a related note: much has been made of Joker’s debt to the Scorsese-De Niro films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. But I think it’s also worth looking at the character as a spiritual child of the self-destructive loner Jimmy, played by De Niro in another Scorsese film that is less overtly about madness and isolation: the 1977 New York New York. Watch the full-length version of that film if you can.

P.P.S. On a (hopefully) lighter note, here's a photo of three jokers. This was just before watching the film in a restaurant-cum-hall in the small Swedish town Strömstad earlier this month when I was there for a writing residency. (Have been putting up things about that trip on Facebook, not so much here.)