Synopsis:
The movie takes place in 1981 in Gotham City, a fictive city of Batman universe, struggling with strong inequalities between a wealthy population and a poor and underprivileged mass of people. Arthur Fleck belongs to this second category: he is a grown man leaving with his sick mother in a dirty flat, working in a clown company for a low wage. Furthermore, he suffers from mental illness and a handicap provoking crisis of uncontrolled and frenetic laughs, leading him to be misunderstood by people and excluded of society.
One day, Arthur Fleck is assaulted by a group of young men as he is working as a clown in the street. This event is the start of a dark path that leads Arthur to fall into madness and violence, becoming the dangerous and crazy villain of Batman known as Joker.
Warning: below theses lines, you will read spoilers about the Joker movie.
When it comes to mental illness, especially psychosis, everyone has a bunch of stereotypes in mind: “psychotics are dangerous”, “they will kill you if they get angry”, “they deserve to live in psychiatric asylums”, “they have several personalities”, “they are crazy, insane, mad…”. Indeed, psychotic illness remains misrepresented and misunderstood in our modern society. Therefore, as students of Clinical Psychology, the three of us went to see the Joker movie with great interest: will it be a true illustration of psychopathology? Or will it be a hackneyed picture of craziness pursuing misinformation?
At first sight, in addition to the beautiful realisation of the movie, we all agreed that Joaquin Phoenix’s acting of Arthur Fleck was remarkable. He moved us to the core by the expression of his extreme suffering and his feelings of being excluded, misunderstood, underestimated, despised… We saw it as a sensible demonstration of what a person with a psychotic disorder could experience, living in a word which does not understand them. This experience was embodied with this meaningful sentence written by Arthur on his diary: “The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t.”
Nevertheless, the diagnosis of psychotic disorder remains uncertain and not that accurate. Arthur’s supposed psychosis is depicted by symptoms related to his loss of grip on reality, with hallucinations – of his relationship with his neighbour – and delusions of greatness – thinking that he is a misunderstood comic genius whose mission is to bring laughter to the world. However, he also shows traits of narcissism and symptoms of depression. Is Joaquin Phoenix interpretation of mental illness a mashup of several real disorders? Moreover, Arthur’s crisis of uncontrolled laugh would come from the “pseudobulbar affect” (PBA) or “emotional incontinence”, which is a neurological disorder that could come from a head trauma due to mistreatments during Arthur’s childhood. Thus, the audience may not understand that this specific symptom is not due to his psychosis. This might lead to confusion between psychiatric and neurological (medical) disorders and to more stigmas on psychotic persons, with the classical villain’s mad laugh.
Furthermore, despite the accurate acting of this suffering and isolated man, something was bothering us at the end of the movie. Why do stories of psychotic characters always have to end with violent aggression, murder and blood? After reading some critical articles about the subject (which you will find in the bibliography following this article), we realised that Joker is not exactly trustworthy when it comes to explain subtleties of severe mental illness condition to a public uninitiated to psychopathology. On the contrary, it could increase fear towards people with a psychotic disorder, who are not intrinsically violent. They are even more exposed to violence than the general population, as we can see in the movie in which Arthur is assaulted many times.
To finish on a positive aspect, we were touched by the message delivered by the movie, which was beyond mental condition and its social inconsideration: it was political. Violence leads to violence… and wealth inequalities leads to a risk of social collapse.
Words: 667
Words we have learned:
- Hackneyed: banal, cliché
- Misinformation: une information erronée
- Subtleties: subtilités
- Delusion: délire
- Intrinsically: intrinsèquement, par essence
Bibliography:
Rose, S. (2019). ‘He is a psychopath’: has the 2019 Joker gone too far?. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/28/he-is-a-psychopath-has-the-2019-joker-gone-too-far
Driscoll, A. & Husain, M. (2019). Why Joker’s depiction of mental illness is dangerously misinformed. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/21/joker-mental-illness-joaquin-phoenix-dangerous-misinformed
Marie Dupau, Domitille Front, Julie Pesty