Why Do Critics Hate Joker? | Video Essay

To say that Todd Phillips' new Joker movie has divided audiences and

critics

would be an understatement. The Joker currently has a Metacritic score of 58, but an IMDB user rating of 9.0. Just a quick scroll through social media will reveal the heaps of praise the film is receiving. as well as the same amount of negative criticism towards him, however, none of the negative criticism that Joker is receiving has prevented him from grossing an opening weekend of more than two hundred and forty million dollars at the global box office, almost equal to what who got the third installment. The Dark Knight trilogy opened, just to put that in perspective, Dark Knight Rises had an estimated budget of two hundred and fifty million dollars, while Joker had an estimated budget of only about fifty-five million, part of which made it such a big box office hit.

The rapid success is undoubtedly due to the fact that all our social networks have been flooded with media warning us about how dangerous and problematic the Joker is. This is a good time for a spoiler warning for those of you who haven't seen the Joker. Joker, however, the film is about Arthur Fleck, a dreamy comedian who suffers from an undefined mental illness, including a condition that causes him to laugh painfully and uncontrollably out of nowhere. Arthur needs psychological help which he has been deprived of due to cuts. in government funding As the film continues, Arthur suffers a series of setbacks and humiliations that gradually catalyze his descent into a violent, anger-fueled psychosis directed at the system that failed him at the end of the film in the midst of a mass riot in the entire city inspired by Arthur's actions.

Arthur has unwittingly become a hero to Gotham's oppressed population amidst random mob violence and societal collapse. The Joker when we are born. What

critics

seem to object to most of all is that Arthur is not portrayed as pure evil, the film is told in its entirety. Arthur's perspective and we as an audience are positioned to empathize with Arthur beyond the fact that the film has a clear message that while Arthur's actions are his fault, we create an environment where someone like him can be born and this is what the media considered dangerous. The film, when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August and won the prestigious Golden Lion award, Time magazine's Stephenie Zakharik denounced the film for its sympathetic portrayal of the protagonist, who could easily be adopted as the patron saint of in the cells since its premiere.

A cascade of similar comments followed from critics who feared that its morally ambiguous and empathetic depiction of a psychotic killer might incite real-world violence and that alienated youth would like the rampaging mobs in the film's final scene to see. to the Joker as the hero of the film, but Humanizing characters who carry out inhuman acts of violence is not something new in Hollywood. Offering a glimpse into the minds of twisted protagonists is something we've seen many times before. Disturbed characters like Travis Bickle and taxi driver Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and Tyler Durden in Fight Club have garnered critical and commercial acclaim without sparking crime waves among disaffected white teenagers to go further.

Joker is not the story of Arthur's rise, it is the story of his fall. The film clearly begins with Arthur as a genuinely good person for him to work with. He fights hard against his mental illness, he takes care of his elderly mother, no matter what he does, life hits him sometimes, literally, his violent actions afterwards are only cathartic because we have seen how this world has treated Arthur, not because they are really admirable. Either way, the film doesn't even present them as victorious; It shows nothing more than a chaotic and disastrous new world created by Arthur and his followers when he becomes the Joker;

In a sense, a large aspect of the controversy predates Phoenix's portrayal of the character and is actually tied to Heath Ledger's earlier portrayal of the character in 2012's Dark Night, a mass shooting took place. at a movie theater in Colorado during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. The shooter was reported to be a big fan of Batman and the media at the time. He falsely claimed that he referred to himself as the Joker. James Holmes allegedly told police I'm the Joker. He dyed his hair possibly to look like the character in this scene. He also allegedly rigged his apartment with elaborate booby traps, a favorite weapon of the Joker who gleefully carries out elaborate lethal crimes and was once described by actor Heath Ledger as a murderous schizophrenic clown with no empathy, a report that was later deemed false by police. who first told him about the association with the mass shooting and the comic.

The character is something that has not disappeared and is understandable, so the film does not endorse Republican mental illness and some outlets say that it is simply a depiction of something that could play out quite accurately in real life. The Joker has quickly become a media scapegoat—the cultural influence blamed for society's internal problems—think Dungeons & Dragons causing panic in the 80s or the way a musical genre was demonized. After the horror of the column no, but everyone who looks at Alexa sad goes and buys a Lexus no Marilyn Manson found himself right in the middle of a media storm being blamed for that terrible atrocity oh, they needed him as some kind of scapegoat It was something that was so shocking to America and the rest of the world at the time that they needed an explanation. why and I seem like an easy person to blame for it and I'm not surprised by something like that, but I am surprised at the lengths they went to persecute me, while the accusations against Manson seem completely obscene in retrospect. aren't much different from the hysteria currently surrounding the Joker, and while the film will probably benefit from more attention, the willingness to point the finger at fiction seems terribly misplaced, especially when fiction is art that represents something that is prevalent in our everyday politics and has been praised by people like Adrian Rein, a neurocriminologist famous for being the first in his field to study the brain waves of murderers as presented by Vanity Fair.

The revered British researcher dedicated decades of his life to understanding what motivates criminals. The film was a great educational tool to understand the untreated genetic, social and medical conditions that can lead someone to commit acts of atrocity. If the film's goal were empathy, I would call it an official success in an interview with the Washington Post's Professor Kendall Phillips. that all this talk about possible real-world violence surrounding the film distracts from the opportunity to use this film to start a dialogue about issues like alienation and toxic masculinity; Ironically, both topics are quite frequent and debates in the media and social networks do not deny that a crisis exists among the nihilistic and alienated youth that Joker deliberately resembles, but instead of pointing the finger at art, perhaps the media Communication agencies should point out the root causes of people like Arthur and what we can do to integrate them into society instead of catalyzing disaster, but all of that is much more complex and difficult to overcome than a fictional comic book villain.

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