The Joker: A Review

The Joker. My god, The Joker. How do you even begin to open a conversation on—let alone review—a film that has been so hyped, so endlessly speculated about, so prematurely polarizing. (Yes, reader, I’m procrastinating. And I’m not even being original in my dithering technique. You caught me.)

I suppose I could start with its director or its star; you don’t often see two eminently gifted (and notoriously difficult) auteurs exit retirement to work on the same project—especially when that project is part of a franchise that has suffered under the schizophrenic strain of endless reboots (both soft and hard) and a genre that, while once hugely profitable, has been in clear decline (in terms of quality and, more importantly for the studios who bankroll these things, profitability) for nigh on a decade. In the age of the imported and overdubbed Chinese blockbuster and the weekly deluge of micro-budgeted streaming features, an old-fashioned (well, maybe not that old) big budget American superhero (alright, supervillain) movie sure does feel like a remarkable (and luxurious) novelty.

Yes, the professional resurrection of Daniel Day-Lewis and his unconventional interpretation of the titular character are worthy of an entire article in-and-of themselves. (Certainly the fact that Day-Lewis, 72, is far-and-away the oldest actor ever to portray DC Comics’ most recognizable rogue raises a variety of promising avenues of discourse.) And Quentin Tarantino’s return to the director’s chair after his self-professed retirement (albeit a briefer one than Day-Lewis’s) and his first fruitful attempt at tackling a pre-existing property—what a shame, by the way, that the recently quashed auction for a supposed copy of a preliminary script for his aborted Star Trek turned out to be a hoax—undeniably deserve their share of reflection and attention. 

Of course, the source material is undeniably notable too. The film’s title, which adopts the naming convention first used in The Batman—Matt Reeves retooling of the Ben Affleck reimagining of the Zack Snyder reboot of the film series starring the famed Detective Comics character (more popularly and successfully adapted by Christopher Nolan and, in a different era entirely, by Tim Burton)—seems to posit the movie as both as a direct extension of that film’s universe and a spiritual sequel to the massively successful Todd Philips-helmed Joaquin Phoenix vehicle Joker, though as far as I know no one involved in that project was involved with the creation of this one.

But what I want to talk about (and, if this publication’s data analytics team are as prescient as they claim, you want to read about) is blackface. To be clear, the film’s trailers and promotional materials were not, as some claimed, a stunt or an marketing-by-controversy exercise in selective editing. There’s a lot of blackface in this movie. Day-Lewis probably spends at least three quarters (maybe even more) of his total screen time fully decked out in minstrel rags, his face darkened with burnt cork (or, as his costume evolves in later scenes, greasepaint) and his lips … Well, reader, to call them “big and red” would be an uncharacteristic exercise in understatement on the part of this critic. 

Spike Lee, an interminable detractor of Tarantino’s handling of racial themes, has already called the film’s use of blackface “egregious” and “un-fucking-imaginable in the 21st century.” (Although a less constitutionally charitable commentator could accuse Lee of hypocrisy, given his own use of “blackt-up” actors in his 2000 comedy Bamboozled.) When an interviewer following up on these comments, as any good dog inevitably returns the thrown ball to its owner’s hand, asked Lee directly if he thought the film was racist, he apparently offered a succinct reply: “Yes.” 

And I don’t doubt that many of you reading would be inclined to defer to the judgment the legendary[ish] director of She Hate Me, Inside Man, and the English language remake of Oldboy on this subject (and perhaps you would be right to do so).

Or maybe your response to Day-Lewis’ E. P. Christy getup will be closer to that which Roger Ebert attributes to Rock Hudson in his review of 2001: A Space Odyssey. According to Ebert, by the midpoint of Kubrick’s 142 minute epic—frankly, a pretty paltry running time by both the standards of Hollywood’s only recently departed Lord of the Rings/Avatar/Avengers era and the current age of Frant Gwo speculative spectacles … and, to think, 2001 even had an intermission!—Hudson was pacing in the aisle, waylaying any audience member foolhardy enough to get up to use the facilities, demanding, Sphinx-like, that they answer his question before proceeding to their destination: “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?” (There was no pacing or audience-on-audience Q&As at the screening I attended, but there were, admittedly, a few walk-outs.)

But, for what it’s worth, I didn’t find the film bigoted or inexplicable. Yes, some moments are sure to provide ammunition to those determined to view Tarantino as a racist so deeply closeted that he created a western revenge fantasy about an escaped slave graphically massacring an entire plantation’s worth of garishly caricatured honkeys, crackers, and uncle toms (though perhaps that ammunition will prove to be less live than Django’s).

One scene in particular,—unquestionably a homage to a similar moment in Phillips’ film—which finds Day-Lewis’ Joker (who, unlike Phoenix’s interpretation, never receives any other name) quite violently “jumping Jim Crow” on a mob of meticulously (and maliciously) suited multicultural executive types while giving a mock-exuberant performance (or maybe there’s nothing “mock” about it, no “joke” here) of Stephen Foster’s “Ring, Ring de Banjo,” is sure to be the abrasive grain of sand around which the (black?) pearl of racialized critiques of the movie coalesce. 

(The idiosyncratic choice of “Ring, Ring de Banjo” over a more widely known Foster piece like “Oh! Susanna” or “Camptown Races” or even, obviously, “Old Black Joe” is pure Tarantino and pays off brilliantly, as Day-Lewis carefully exhumes the song’s latent malice—”Massa fall a napping / he’ll nebber wake again.”)

And I get it. Watching a white man with his face artificially (and exaggeratedly) blackened beat the (in one memorable instance literal) piss out of a seemingly unending cascade of fashionably coiffed white-to-yellow-to-brown-to-black faces (with a single albino thrown in for good measure) while enduring (hilariously subtitled) threats and pleas in a truly postdiluvian variety of tongues and dialects—this entire sequence, by the way, evokes the protracted Crazy 88 battle in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 but with a cosmopolitan twist—is enough to make any civically conscious critic (or citizen!) wince, even in our current “post-woke” (as the social media literati have taken to calling it) cultural moment. But to pass judgment on an entire movie exclusively on a (narrow, narrow, narrow) reading of a single scene is, well, to say “myopic” would be generous.

No,The Joker isn’t a fundamentally racist film. The Joker is a fundamentally American film. To understand this, you must understand that blackface itself is uniquely and exclusively American. Yes, Tarantino could have settled for a more traditional costume for his Clown Prince of Crime, but what a missed opportunity that would have been. Imagine if one of the most unabashedly American directors (maybe, if you’re a purist, the only American-at-heart among American directors) were to style his take on one of the most iconic American villains from one of the few art forms to truly originate within these United States (comic books) after an English jester or Italian harlequin. Indeed, the only variety of fool that would not have to be imported from abroad (at extravagant artistic cost) is the minstrel. We may have lost the Joker’s iconic white face and green hair, but we’ve gained insight into his origins; we see the synthesis of the entire history of American popular culture  in Day-Lewis’ counterfeit sooty complexion and the contrast between his hyperbolic, literally-painted-on smile and the carefully restrained emotion in his inscrutable (no, not sad) eyes.

And what better actor than Day-Lewis to embody this ultimate union of yankee mass-market folklore? Who else can claim to have embodied the pinnacle of our national progressive ideals (as Lincoln in Lincoln) and the deepest, darkest violent extremes of our vicious and irrational populism (as Bill Cutting in Gangs of New York)? Yet no trace of Honest Abe or Bill the Butcher can be found here. DDL’s (sorry) Joker is a wholly unique creation, drawing undeniable inspiration from Cesar Romero (no surprise, given the age of everyone involved) and Al Jolson (while much of this movie is open to interpretation, one thing cannot be debated: this Joker is a better dancer than any of the character’s previous incarnations). These dual influences are the sock and buskin (or, perhaps more appropriately, the Tambo and Bones) that serve as the anchoring poles for this bipolar role, with Jolson (ironically) providing the white mask of comedy and Romero the black mask of tragedy. Strung between them is Day-Lewis’ Joker: taut, tense, ready to spring—the perfect setup for both slapstick antics and senseless homicide, the natural resting state of the American subconscious.

And I could go on. But payment in this day and age is a function of clicks, not words, and I’ve already been cautioned by my editors (who answer to our parent company who answer to their investors who answer to [here, Aidan, I’ve redacted this bit for you, since I knew it, like a family’s second child in some parts of this unrelentingly cruel world at a moment in the not-so-distant past that you nevertheless probably are too young to remember, would never make it out of the womb—though I assume this entire sentence, and possibly paragraph, will be aborted]) that my tendency towards verbosity is quote “a bug, not a feature” of my critiques.  

So let me close with a single scene that I think captures the essence of the whole blood-spattered, star-spangled affair: It comes after a long—I timed it at eight and a half minutes—sequence near the beginning of the film, where we watch a nameless man, seen mostly from behind, often in shadow or dim light, scavenging through inner city dumpsters. We observe his shadow in streetlamp profile as he tries on a ragged, moth-devastated long-tailed tuxedo jacket and a top hat that, in clear imitation of the legends of both the silent era and Looney Tunes, appears to have gotten the worst of an altercation with a can opener. (We never get close enough to check the tags and see where these garments were manufactured, but maybe we can hazard a guess.) We then watch, first from behind, then from above, before finally settling on a face-to-face closeup, as the man (now clearly Day-Lewis) applies his burnt cork and smears on his cherry lipstick. He pauses to take in his reflection in the mirror, as all movie characters (and, I suppose, all of us) do in circumstances like this. This is the moment of apotheosis. The transformation is over. An icon has been [re]born. We expect him to laugh maniacally, like every Joker before him. But instead he stands, laces up his comically battered dandy shoes, and, with one heel flapping free, begins to tap.