The pair of lips curled in righteous anger beneath the Bat cowl may have changed over the years, but Batman’s steady vigilance—a rigid, unyieldingly moral figure protecting Gotham City from its various creeps—has remained an irresistible constant for 80 years. His steadiness, endlessly repeating origin story, is the point. Not so for his most famous rival, the Joker, the Technicolor grin to Batman’s glower, whose whole persona is predicated on an unpredictability that has allowed him to inhabit the form of the many bogeymen that have haunted the American consciousness throughout his 80-year existence. Judging on this metric alone our latest Joker, the Joaquin Phoenix iteration that capered into theaters in his very own movie this week, is a smashing success—the perfect clown prince to haunt the Trump era.
The idea that the Joker is a menace for all seasons is hardly new. Every time a new actor slaps on that familiar suit we have to reconsider how each new shade of purple aligned with the chapter of American history that birthed it. Cesar Romero’s mid-60s TV performance opposite Adam West’s Batman emphasized camp and silliness without the undercurrent of menace that would define so many later iterations. With zany white pancake makeup that barely concealed the actor’s own mustache, he was our jolliest Joker—a product of a Johnson-era of mainstream entertainment barely willing to grapple with the dark realities of an America embroiled in the Vietnam War and a youth movement captivated by a drug-fueled counterculture.
“You can get as hammy as you like and go all out,” Romero said in a 1966 interview adopting, without a trace of irony, a “why so serious?” attitude. “It’s great fun, I enjoy it.”
In 1989, Jack Nicholson’s Joker was born out of the materialistic Reagan era. Rubber-faced, Technicolored, and looks-obsessed, this villain is still more goofy than frightening bopping around a museum or lusting after Batman’s gadgets. Already an Oscar winner, Nicholson’s presence alone lends the part some gravity as the Joker adopts, for the first time, the mythologized role as the man who killed Martha and Thomas Wayne. But we are still firmly in comics-page territory.
Strangely, it was a literal cartoon version of the character from 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series that first truly sent a chill through mass audiences. Mark Hamill—who is as recognizable in some circles for voicing the Joker as he is for wielding a lightsaber—debuted an exasperated, sneering, whining version suitable for this show’s deceptively dark world, and a pop culture just starting to slip into the decades-long grip of superhero supremacy. He had been preceded a few years earlier by the pitch-black Joker of the graphic novel The Killing Joke, an Eisner award-winning stroke of genius in 1988. It was also an early example of the character’s mutability occasionally leading to quick expiration dates. Killing Joke creator Alan Moore eventually disowned his take as melodramatic. The property landed with a critical thud when Warner Bros. recreated the grisly story, with Hamill as the Joker, as an animated film in 2016.
Heath Ledger was so desperately dedicated to embodying what he described as “a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” that he barely got any sleep while making 2008’s The Dark Knight. His work helped elevate comic book movies, or at least some of them, to Oscar-worthy art. Ledger’s Joker wore muted aubergine and hunter green and, as a terrorist who plagued Gotham and its defenders, presents the most obvious reflection of his times—which went heavy on allusions to 9/11, terrorism, and torture. A vicious monster of the George W. Bush–era made flesh and taking very little joy, actually, in the destruction he causes. He is a product of a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, who understood what made a villain in 2008.
“Our Joker—Heath’s interpretation of the Joker—has always been the absolute extreme of anarchy and chaos, effectively,” Nolan said at a 2017 BAFTA event. “He’s pure evil through pure anarchy. And what makes him terrifying is to not humanize him in narrative terms. Heath found all kinds of fantastic ways to humanize him in terms of simply being real and being a real person, but in narrative terms we didn’t want to humanize him, we didn’t want to show his origins, show what made him do the things he’s doing because then he becomes less threatening.”
Between Ledger’s scarred and scary turn and Phoenix’s jittery Arthur Fleck came Jared Leto’s Suicide Squad Joker who may, in the end, wind up best-known as Harley Quinn’s ex. The tattoos, the grill, the neon green hair and the scumbro vibe all smack of style without substance, accessories in search of character. But Leto’s version also reflected the times when he landed in the summer of 2016, on the verge of the Trump era and the chaos to come.
Enter Phoenix’s Arthur, a downtrodden, mentally ill man whose righteous indignation at being the world’s punch line pushes him to snap. Many of the Jokers who came before Arthur lost their grip on reality after being tossed into a toxic vat of goo. In Joker, society is the toxic goo, a provocative narrative choice amid our ongoing cultural reckoning with toxic masculinity and the violence perpetrated by angry, white young men.
This, as plenty of critics have observed, is a Joker for the incel era and the film, its detractors argue, asks us to have too much sympathy for its devil. Both Phoenix and director Todd Phillips have said it was not their intention to make a hero of Arthur or the real-life men who inspired him. But it may have been an impossible task to make Arthur entirely unsympathetic, given Phoenix’s genius for drawing audiences into even the most off-putting creeps and loners.
The most distressingly 2019 thing about Joker is not the figure at the center of it, but the person missing entirely. Ben Affleck’s Batman may have only had a cameo in Suicide Squad, but at least he showed up to try to put Leto’s Joker in check. In Joker, no one is coming to save us at all. This is only the latest onscreen comic book adaptation to question the comfort of the “might equals right” messaging of superhero stories—FX’s Legion, Amazon’s The Boys, and HBO’s upcoming Watchmen all play in that pool. But Joker’s feeling of untethered free fall into moral bankruptcy is truly its most Trump-era quality.
Throughout most of his history, the Joker has robbed, killed, and acted out for attention. Usually he’s catering specifically to a bat-eared audience of one. But Phoenix’s Joker is driven by a bottomless need for a validating spotlight. And like Trump, who was easy enough to ignore when he was just the host of an NBC reality TV show but impossible to brush off once he moved into the White House, Joker—with its glossy Venice Film Festival premiere, Oscar campaign, and veneer of Martin Scorsese–infused respectability—is impossible for even the most superhero-averse film critics to ignore.
Joker has lobbed a bomb into the discourse kicking up anxieties, culture clashes, and tribalistic responses. (Sound familiar?) It’s a film that trucks in an unreliable narrator and a distorted reality that forces its audience to question everything they see. Most chilling of all is Arthur Fleck’s ability to inspire and embolden a legion of copycats—which takes crucial shape in the film’s Wayne-centric climax. What is this Joker if not a clown sent to drive the world as mad as he is? This, without a doubt, is the Joker our era deserves—just maybe not the one it needs right now.
