by Ashley Strehl, Editor-in-Chief
I was very apprehensive about going to see this new ‘Joker’ movie. I had read many articles about how people couldn’t handle it and were walking out of the theatre.
I just thought to myself, “How can a movie about Batman’s rival be that bad.”
I literally had to see it to believe it.
“Joker” is a film starring Joaquin Phoenix who plays Arthur Fleck, a middle aged man still living with his mom. From the beginning, we see that Arthur is just a lower-classed citizen working as a free-lance party clown from a rundown office in the unusually out-of-control crime-filled city of Gotham.
He doesn’t have much money, nor does he have that great of a life, but he works hard to make ends-meat to support himself and his elderly mother.
There’s one thing that troubles Arthur, and seems to be a daily obstacle for him, his unspecified mental illness that causes him to break into random spurts of high-pitched, hysterical laughter. This plagues him so much so that he is bullied, ridiculed, starred at and all around just misunderstood. At one point in the film a lady on the bus yells at him for interacting with her son and he just laughs at her. This made me, as an audience member, feel extremely awkward and sad for him.
Arthur hands the lady a card reading something along the lines of “I cannot control myself for I have a mental illness, please forgive me” resulting in the lady turning around uncomfortably to ignore his laughter.
So from this point on we begin to see the downward spiral of Arthur. I will tell you this, this movie goes from 0 to 100 REAL QUICK. From the moment that Arthur makes his first kill, everything becomes out of control from there on out.
The violence, emotions and twists intensify, so much so that I was locked in to the screen, not even wanting to blink incase I missed anything.
The trailer for this movie gave it a lot of hype, and I think it did well at meeting all of the expectations for it. However, there is something that most viewers are missing. It is more than just the origin of the Joker. Phoenix does a beautiful job in his transition into the Joker throughout the movie. It was almost artistic in a way, but to me he portrayed the life of a person who suffers from a mental illness even better.
Point blank period – this movie perfectly portrays the way society treats mental illness. Often times people like Arthur are misunderstood and treated poorly, with lack of understanding and resources around them. I think everyone, even those who may not be Joker or Batman fans, should see this movie. Why? Because it is more eye opening about its psychological factors more than anything.
And with all this being said, people should be more understanding and respectful of those with mental illnesses because it could very well end up like the movie, where the whole city is burning to the ground because just a couple people treated Arthur like a monster.
“Gotham is burning” but the fire started in the mind and soul of Arthur Fleck much more beforehand.