“Joker” Movie
Mental illness and misfortune in 1970s America
By Michael Hoffman
Copyright©2019
(Warning: this column reveals some aspects [spoilers] of the “Joker” movie that viewers who intend to see it may not wish to read)
“Perhaps the bleakest assertion of ‘Joker,’ is the one that’s hardest to disprove: that the ghastly world (the Joker) inhabits, and by extension ours, is the one we deserve.” — John Wenzel
Earlier this year I was asked to write an introduction to a new book examining occult symbolism in America. I declined. In my judgment the author was mistaking mundane phenomena for occult conspiracy. He wasn’t able to see that if everything is occult then nothing is.
The inability to make the distinction is reflected in the reception that the “Joker” movie has received from many researchers who attempt to study the intersection of the arcane and the Deep State in popular media. These researchers, along with certain celebrity movie critics, have decided that Warner Brothers and Village Roadshow had, with their 2019 “Joker” movie, created a sequel to Heath Ledger’s unrelievedly evil Joker character in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film, “The Dark Knight,” and its follow-up, “The Dark Knight Rises” which allegedly contains esoteric references to the Sandy Hook and Aurora mass shootings (which had not yet occurred when the film was released). Without having seen the “Joker” movie, we initially tweeted that it looked like it was another dastardly recruiting vehicle for inspiring more “lone nut” white mass shooters.
Such things do happen. Heath Ledger’s Joker character inspired at least one mass shooting by Jerad and Amanda Miller of LaFayette, Indiana. They killed two policemen at a pizza parlor in Las Vegas (“CiCi’s”), and then continued their shooting at a local Wal-Mart, where they killed an armed good samaritan who had attempted to stop their spree. Jerad was known for dressing like the “Joker.” The Millers’ online persona was that of militia patriots but they behaved more like demon-possessed individuals.
At age 28 actor Ledger died of a drug overdose in the year of the release of “The Dark Knight.” The Joker character he portrayed is utterly merciless and sadistic, someone who kills even his own comrades and partners. There is no rationale to his violence. It is purely demonic, the personification of what William Butler Yeats termed the “blood red tide” which drowns “the ceremony of innocence.”
Many of the actual mass shootings in America, whether inspired by Hollywood or not, have been in line with the Joker’s violence in “The Dark Knight” —that of cold-blooded, anarchistic mega-atrocities against innocent persons including school children, exhibiting a diabolically heinous disregard for human life.
The “Joker” movie of October, 2019 is something else altogether. It is disenchanting and anti-occult (with one possible exception noted below). If it “inspires” violence it would be no more culpable than Alfred Hitchcock for depicting a cross-dressing homicidal maniac in “Psycho.”
The protagonist in “Joker” is Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, a mentally ill man whose every benevolent act is misunderstood. He attempts to overcome his affliction but the circumstances of his life and chosen occupation (clowning and standup comedy) conspire to obstruct his intentions.
There is no depiction of “random mass shooting” in this movie. The only time multiple people are shot is in one scene where Arthur is viciously assaulted by three drunken junior executives in suits on a subway train. The beating they administer is brutal enough to paralyze or kill him, had it continued. It does not continue because Arthur saves his own life by drawing his revolver and shooting all three of his attackers. Only because he is wearing clown makeup (as part of his employment), does the media exploit the incident and sensationalize the shooter as a clown-killer who murdered innocent bystanders.
While some mass shooters pen suspiciously eloquent “manifestos” somehow timed precisely for release online, either shortly before or during the execution of their crimes, Arthur travels with a battered notebook filled with crossed-out, barely legible scrawls and sentence fragments which he reads aloud at a dive that’s hosting an open mike night. It’s as if the film-makers were mocking the media’s cooperation with the Cryptocracy’s surreal accounts of real-life shooters; a situation which leads us to wonder which is the movie and which is the reality.
Without spoiling a core surprise, I cannot relate the details of a pivotal betrayal Arthur discovers. I can say that Arthur learns that in his past he was repeatedly brutalized with the connivance of someone he trusted implicitly. As his condition deteriorates, so does what is left of his composure.
It’s interesting to note that the pistol he possesses was forced on him by a co-worker. In a key scene, he takes revenge on the co-worker while sparing the life of another with the words, “You were the only one who was good to me.” If this were a pathological Batman movie, Arthur would have gone ahead and shot the person who had been good to him. The mercy he dispenses is a significant marker separating him from the gunmen who have made the news in massacres of distressing frequency.
“Murray Franklin,” the Johnny Carson-type evening television host in the film, is played by Robert De Niro. Franklin wears the mask of 1970s pop culture respectability, yet is exploiting Arthur for callous audience amusement, as Hop Frog was exploited in Edgar Allan Poe’s retributive story of that name. And like Hop Frog, Arthur strikes back, and does so on national television. It’s at this juncture that we see director Todd Phillips’ “Joker” movie stepping outside the occult clown-shooter genre and holding a mirror up to our corrupt society, as Oliver Stone did in “Natural Born Killers," a film which depicted the corporate media as complicit in the violence of the feral pair of shooters at the center of the action.
Arthur Fleck and Antonin Artaud
Joaquin Phoenix portrays Arthur— who will morph into “Joker” toward the end of the movie— as an emaciated, chain-smoking mental patient (eerily resembling in appearance the real life French poète maudit and theatre-of-cruelty theorist Antonin Artaud). Arthur, in spite of his illness, is attempting to recover his humanity in the midst of an inhuman mise en scene. There is little that is occult here. Arthur Fleck is someone Artaud would have termed “The man suicided by society.” This is not to negate anyone’s responsibilities for their actions, or to grant a homicidal prerogative to the mentally ill. Life in the American big city “Gotham” in the 1970s, and more so today, was and is a dehumanizing and degrading experience, particularly for the poor and disadvantaged, some of whom do improve their situation and become useful citizens, while others sink deeper into despair and delusion.
By the conclusion of the movie, a mob produced by a sick urban youth culture that Arthur Fleck did not create, has made him an anti-hero, “the Joker.” In these scenes Joaquin Phoenix’s character becomes markedly more youthful underneath now well-tailored, suit-and-tie clown attire and expertly-applied makeup. Much of the agony in his now more youthful face is gone. The blood he has shed and the notoriety he has gained seem to strip away years of age and grief as he dances a choreography that celebrates his transformation from troubled human struggling to do good and be understood, into a figure of almost superhuman agency and potency, having managed to “succeed” by gaining entrance to society’s demented pop culture celebrity circus, whose ruling clowns, like the De Niro character, are more malevolent than the Joker.
The movie ends with a bizarre and vaguely unsettling Charlie Chaplinesque slaptick chase in the halls of a mental hospital— as if to say, it’s all grist for the entertainment mill.
Production values are high. Cinematography, acting, sets and costumes are all accomplished and well staged. The soundtrack by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir jabs the audience with a relentlessly propulsive gloom, impressively melancholic and disturbing; a sonic migraine for dead souls.
Unlike the final two installments in Christopher Nolan’s occult Batman films, “Joker” is not a movie intended to worsen our collective mental health, or immerse us in the shadowy twilight language of the subliminal Cryptocracy. Rather, it is a toxicology report on the effects of fermentation in the pernicious brine that is “life in the American big city.”
It is art and has validity on that basis alone, without possessing a message leading to a remedy. It is a cinematic document about one rejected and oppressed person from our nation’s past, a kind of everyman who could be anyone of us if we were so unlucky, and it necessarily foreshadows our future, should America choose to continue on its grossly materialistic, fantastically cruel, mass abortionist, Christ-less path.
Were it not for the following revelation, we would opine that to mistake this sobering reflection on the decayed state of our nation, with a cryptogram from the Deep State, would be a significant failure of perception, intuition and detection. However...
Gary Glitter and “The Hey Song” on the soundtrack of “Joker”
Gary Glitter and Sir Jimmy Savile
One iconic scene in the film shows Arthur Fleck fully transformed into the Joker as he dances on a set of stairs outdoors, to a tune by British rock musician Paul Gadd, whose stage name is "Gary Glitter.” Gadd/Glitter's “Rock and Roll (Part 2)” was a 1972 hit which was later broadcast in sports stadiums as an anthem (popularly known as “The Hey! Song"). It was also on the soundtrack of at least two Hollywood movies, “The Replacements,” and “Meet the Fockers” (starring Robert De Niro).
In October 2012 evidence emerged in Britain that Glitter had been part of Sir James "Jimmy" Savile's child sex ring. The now 75-year-old Glitter is currently in prison serving a sentence of 16 years after conviction on four counts of indecent assault and one count of having sex with a girl under 13. All the crimes were committed in the 1970s and '80s. He was first jailed in 1999 when he admitted to possessing images of child porn. He has been accused of dozens of acts of molestation in Asian countries. In 2008 Glitter finished serving nearly three years in a Vietnamese prison for molesting two children. (New York Times, Aug. 21, 2008, p. E5).
Sir James Savile met Prince Charles through "mutual charity interests." The Prince reportedly conveyed to Savile gifts on his 80th birthday, along with an enigmatic note reading: “Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country, Jimmy. This is to go some way in thanking you for that.”
Savile was a close friend of "conservative" British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “Correspondence showing the depth of the friendship between Sir Jimmy Savile and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is unveiled today in a secret Downing Street file that has been heavily redacted by civil servants following revelations about sexual abuse by the late entertainer. The 21-page dossier released under the 30-year rule by the National Archives shows Savile’s extraordinary access to the highest echelons of British society.”
Throughout his career as a rapist of some 500 youth (!), beginning as early as 1955, Savile enjoyed total immunity from police arrest, Crown prosecution, and imprisonment. He died a multi-millionaire, respected and honored.
Here's the kicker: is this a case of an indifferent Hollywood filmmaker insensitively using Glitter's song in the “Joker” movie without regard both to Glitter's child-molesting past, as well as the certainty of a scandal that would arise when it was discovered that Glitter was receiving a percentage of the royalties generated by the song? The filmmakers had to know that their use of the song would generate publicity for Glitter, a convicted pederast.
Either this is an arrogant act of defiance of conventional morality, or it's something entirely different: this writer's hunch (and that's all it is at this point), is that—in keeping with our assessment of "Joker" as documenting the evil and corruption of the 1970s, and by extension of our more perverted 21st century—the inclusion of Glitter's 1972 song is yet another mirror—a signpost deliberately placed in the film to point to the existence of extraordinary malice and wickedness in high places. Child molestation rings operating at elite levels of government and entertainment are explosive charges that can (and should) detonate the people’s faith in their leaders.
Is it naive to entertain the possibility that the filmmakers were willing to ignite this dynamite? Perhaps it is. But from alpha to omega, "Joker" demonstrates that "the respectable” are not. Any sustained examination of the life of Gary Glitter turns up the name of Sir James Savile. From there, one overturns one rock after another concealing venomous snakes who our civilization venerates as the worthiest and most respectable people among us: monarchs, prime ministers, pop stars and by implication, Hollywood moguls.
In other cases, it is a fact of our media-bombarded lives that we often suffer from attention deficit, as well as compassion fatigue, and what alarmed us yesterday is, tragically, mostly forgotten today, despite the dreadful consequences of such amnesia.
Did the makers of "Joker" deliberately include child molester Gary Glitter’s 1970s "Rock and Roll (Part 2)” as a trail marker on the road to refreshing our memory of the horrors of the Jimmy Savile-linked Satanic depravity that’s threaded throughout the centers of power in the western world? Or did they do it as part of the Satanic threading process itself?
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