We live in a landscape where words like “reboot” and “retcon” are common knowledge. Hollywood executives use the word “multiverse” with complete seriousness. No one can talk about “Batman in the movies” anymore, it must be specified. Nolan-Batman? Snyder Batman? Reeves Batman? Bryan Singer's Magneto, or the First class one? Raimi Spider-Man or The Amazing Run or the MCU version? Superhero movies no longer have to explain comics. they can simply be like comics: places where creative people can visit, play a long-established character, and see what the public thinks about it.
The gift this era has given me, as a comics fan and critic, is a new thought experiment: What would I think of this superhero movie if it had been a comic book? Did the film find anything revealing to say about a decades-old character? Did it work well in the space, relative to all the other stories before it?
I think Matt Reeves the batman Actually, it could have been even better as a 12-issue alternate universe miniseries, giving its characters more time to breathe in a new variation of Gotham. On the other hand, the original Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has so There's a lot to be said about Spider-Man's themes of responsibility and identity, and he's also so inventive with the animated film form that turning it into a comic would definitely take away some of its magic.
But this year, I found my experiment backfired when considering Todd Phillips' Joker duology. My own issues with Phillips' writing and direction aside, did these two films, which reimagine the Joker as the alternately pathetic and dangerous failed comedian turned successful assassin Arthur Fleck, have anything to say about the iconic supervillain? And how does that statement compare to the comics themselves? With Joker: Folie à Deux now broadcasting on Max, it seemed like a good time to reconsider the issue.
And here's my conclusion: Todd Phillips' Joker movies have nothing to say about the Joker comics, because they simply aren't about the Joker character in any recognizable way.
Image: Giuseppe Camuncoli, Stefano Nesi, Tomeu Morey/DC Comics
A character's mutability is a sign of their strength, but characters are not. endlessly mutable. How much Mutation being acceptable before a character becomes unrecognizable is a topic about which gallons of metaphorical blood has been spilled on digital forums and in person. But I think we can agree that that line exists.
Little by little you could make changes to Batman: give him weapons, let him kill criminals, take away his money and his friends, give him a costume with a different theme, and eventually he would simply become the Punisher. We can argue about exactly where the line would be between the two of them, but that line exists.
And as far as the Joker goes, I think that line is about his interiority.
Phillips makes a lot of changes to the Joker. His films give him a name, Arthur Fleck, and an inciting incident: being manhandled by some corporate colleagues and leaving them all speechless. They give him issues with his mother and a longing for a romantic partner, and remove his rivalry with Batman and his context within a world of theatrical supervillains and powerful superheroes. Folie for two Has Arthur pondered aloud the question “Who is Arthur Fleck?” – through a sad and deeply spoken joke recited during the closing argument of a trial in which he has chosen to defend himself, no less.
You can make a lot of changes to the Joker, because good characters are mutable. You can completely remove him from a setting where superheroes and villains are common, or remove Batman, and therefore his rivalry with him, completely. You can turn him into a dumb trickster, a horrible psychopath, or a Lego man. You can give him obsessions like “get Batman to recognize me” or obstacles to overcome like “accidentally commit tax evasion.”
But if you give the Joker an analysable human interiority, I'd say you've stopped interacting with the idea of ”the Joker” in any meaningful way. I believe this is the fundamental core of his character, whittled down, honed, and compressed to the final point by 80 years of Joker stories and hundreds of hard-working creative minds.
Image: Tony S. Daniel/DC Comics
We like to say that the best supervillains are reflections of their heroes, which is fun to apply to Batman and the Joker, because I don't think there's anyone who, when asked “What's the opposite of a bat?” I would respond “A clown.” Dig a little deeper and you can draw out some oppositions to the way they are typically characterized: they are equally theatrically invested in fear, but pointing it in opposite directions.
Batman is taciturn where the Joker is talkative and dark where he is colorful. Batman represents order, while the Joker is chaos. But be careful! Batman is mutable. He's not always scary, grim, and lawful, and the Joker isn't always flamboyant, deadly, and philosophically chaotic either.
What is immutable about Batman is that he does what he does for extraordinarily specific reasons. Their motivations are fully known and are constantly repeated to the public. The trauma of its central character is famous for how often it is recreated in the adaptation. It has been converted into immortality. With Spider-Man in second place, Batman is he origin story superhero. And so, by force of the narrative, Joker is the villain of the anti-origin story.
We don't know why he does what he does. It's not even clear if he knows. His interiority is a black box, open to embody our worst fears about man's inhumanity to man. The titans of the genre have tried to give the Joker a motivating origin story, and none of them have managed to create one that sticks. And while we should never dismiss something as impossible just because no one has done it yet, I also think it's up to us to learn from history.
Even recent history would suffice—it's hard to find a compelling emotional thread if you can't peek into your main character's thoughts—but Matthew Rosenberg and Carmine Di Giandomenico's 2022 series The Joker: the man who stopped laughing solves that problem by introducing a main character who isn't sure if he's really the Joker, or just a guy who the Joker was brainwashed into becoming a Joker decoy. 2019 series by Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino Joker: killer smileMeanwhile, it's actually a series about the Joker's new psychiatrist.
Image: James Tynion IV, Guillem March/DC Comics
James Tynion IV and Guillem March's 2021 Joker The series tells a great story about the Clown Prince of Crime based on the extremely compelling observation that former Police Commissioner James Gordon might be the only person in Gotham City more personally harmed by the Joker than Batman. His book presents Gordon as a character from the point of view of a catch me if you canJoker-style manhunt, debating whether he should just shoot the killer for the good of humanity instead of stopping him.
The Joker said to the thief.
That's why I had a hard time applying the question “Is this a good Joker story?” frame for Todd Phillips Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux. The Joker resists origin stories and clear motivations because they fundamentally oppose the narrative purpose he serves as a summary of everything Batman opposes. At his most immutable, Batman is the guy who says, “Something meaningless happened to me and that's why I have to stop more meaningless things from happening.” And what has made the Joker his perfect foil is that, at his most immutable, the Joker is a machine for making senseless things happen.
If you remove Batman, the character the Joker was molded around, you might still have a Joker story on your hands. And if you change the Joker to be the main character of the story, you might still have a Joker story on your hands. But if you do all that and you examine who the Joker is and why he does what he does; you're just not doing a story about the Joker anymore.
And that's okay! There are plenty of characters who aren't the Joker and I think we can agree that some of them are even pretty compelling. But you're not telling me anything remarkable or new about the Joker, a character honed over 80 years into a highly efficient narrative machine for making nonsensical things happen. You have made him understand. You have invented a new boy for your story and named him Joker.
I think that's what I most want to explain to any creative who, like Phillips, sees the superhero genre as a means to an end. I don't want to simply point out the misstep of dismissing the work of creators who came before us, of picking up someone else's toys without “playing in space.” Not because I don't think that's important, but because I just think that if you're a person who sees superhero movies as a means to an end, you probably don't mind being rude to comic book creators.
What I want to get into the brain of this particular type of superhero filmmaker is that comics have already done the work. What you're throwing out is decades of evidence of what's successful, what's not successful, or only successful if you do it. like this. Phillips saw the Joker's lack of an origin story as freedom to make his own opinion, not a sign that the very absence of his origin story, despite 80 years of opportunities to create one, was significant.
Refusing to learn from decades of stories created by hard-working creatives that develop the same character is rude, of course, of course. But it's also shooting yourself in the damn foot.