In the Flesh: Joker (Patreon)

Watching Joker is like sitting next to a profoundly unwell person on the subway as they ramble through a recitation of ‘The Aristocrats’, the infamously sick and revolting anti-joke which is the subject of Paul Provenza’s 2005 documentary of the same name. Here’s the abused and brain-damaged child of a delusional mother, who chained him to a radiator for her boyfriend to prey on at his leisure. Here’s the fascist strongman she falsely claimed was his birth father. The friends at his clowning agency who somehow manage to look down on him. The teens who beat him after stealing his streetside advertising sign. The beloved talk show host who turns him into a city-wide joke. The girlfriend he hallucinates, the children’s hospital he walks into with an unregistered revolver in his pocket, the anecdote he invents from whole cloth about his mother’s belief in his gift for comedy, the crumbling social services that dump him on the curb like the garbage rotting on Gotham’s sidewalks. Trash nobody wants to pick up.

Set aside the memes, the absurd moral panic, and the viewers determined to miss its point and Joker is a surprisingly earnest film, not so much about superheroes or even itself as a Serious Work of Art, but about the idea of a man whose life is so unrelentingly dismal it becomes a joke to everyone, himself included. Joaquin Phoenix is captivating in the title role, radiating need and dysfunction, at once bottomlessly self-pitying and pathetically optimistic. He’s a real-life delusion, a child adopted to realize someone else’s life-ruining mental illness and then discarded to live an empty, unwanted life. Phoenix puts his gift for adopting postures and dialects to good use here, conveying the abuse Arthur has endured in every aspect of his stooped, mumbling affect.

Todd Phillips is playing in the key of Scorsese’s The King of Comedy here, complete with DeNiro himself in the Jerry Lewis role, but where that film ends by plunging into wild fantasy, Joker climaxes with a deranged wake-up call, a shriek of refusal from a man rejected by everyone and everything. Phillips’ use of color is ambitious, particularly in this final act; sallow, waxy skin, ghostly whites, reds in every shade from lip-licking cherry to the deep near-black of hot, fresh blood. As Arthur’s mind frays without care or medication and under the assault of repeated trauma, the world grows more vibrant, not less. Gotham has played a long, ugly joke on itself and the punchline is broadcast live across the city, splattered on the studio wall in living color. Chalk another one up for superhero flicks, boys. This one’s a winner.