Joker: A Society Without Fathers [SPOILERS]
When a society abandons young men to their own devices; when they develop in depravity and live in hopelessness; when they try to find themselves in a populace that has lost its way—that is when young men turn to violence and perversion. Out of devastation are children born into destruction. Out of Gotham is born Arthur Fleck.
Having never been given a proper origin story, we are finally delivered one of the most magnetic super villains, Joker. The movie is a moving, twisting, contorted story of a helpless man living deep within his own mental illness, and a society that takes no pity on him, as he moves through it anonymously.
Arthur Fleck, or “Happy,” as his shut-in mother calls him, moves from failure to failure while living with a condition that leads to unexpected bouts of laughter at oft inappropriate moments. He struggles with depression and takes a plethora of medications in order that he might “stop feeling so bad all the time.”
However, Fleck is an avid dancer; enjoys music and his job as a party clown. He wants to try his hand at stand-up comedy and loves to make children laugh. His mother always said his purpose “was to bring laughter and joy to the world.” It’s not the expected backdrop for a story of a homicidal psychopath.
One gets caught up in Fleck’s world, following him as he lives like a wad of gum, on the bottom of Gotham’s shoe. He gets imprisoned in a mental institution, beaten, maimed, and fired, and we begin to grant a certain amount of sympathy to this lost man. Without a role-model, Fleck gravitates toward a warm, late-night talk-show host, Murray Franklin, and takes him as his own, adopted, television-father. Fleck fantasizes that one day he’d meet Franklin and have him be proud of his new son, Arthur.
The lack of the connection to a father, or father-figure, is a thread woven throughout the story, through one character and another, as we learn of Fleck’s father in a bomb-dropping revelation, and then have that idea snatched away again. It’s a tale we see unfold in his childhood, where Fleck is abandoned, neglected, and beaten by a revolving door of abusers, including his mother. It’s a theme reinforced by the painfully endearing words of an older co-worker to Fleck, “you’re my boy,” who then proceeds to betray him as well.
The melancholy, but innocent trajectory of Fleck’s life makes a marked shift after he is beaten up by a trio of young punks on the subway. Fleck pulls a gun in self-defense and kills two, hunting and executing the third in vengeance. It is upon Fleck’s reaction to the shooting that we see his character turn, and here that he solidifies his fate. Afterward, through a series of events, it is evident that Fleck has embraced the depravity within him and transitioned completely into the dark personality we know as Joker.
After his failed comedy routine “goes viral,” Fleck has the chance to meet his hero, Franklin, only to find that he is being made a mockery of. In a moment of horrible irony, Fleck is let down and abandoned for the last time by someone he looked up to and kills Franklin, live, on-air.
In a twist of events, the murder of Fleck’s proverbial father, Franklin, is also related in a masterful way to the infamous and iconic murder of Bruce Wayne’s father, Thomas Wayne.
The film is a showcase of how mental illness can combine with the cold realities of life to form an empty, dastardly person with no model figure to help them out of their path towards destruction. The entire tale is a study on fatherlessness and its inevitable ramifications.
There is no small link between the events and circumstances of Arthur Fleck’s life and the lives of those we see grow up to murder their fellow men. It is no question that we have an epidemic of fatherlessness and a surplus of lost young men, who, like many, gravitate to these bold, sinister characters with dire consequences.