Joker Discussion Thread Spoiler Warning

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Antrax
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04 Oct 2019, 3:09 pm

Interesting film in my opinion. Top notch acting and direction. Story bent reality. I'm still not sure which parts were "real" and which were imagined in Arthur's delusional mind. I think there's a case to be made for an inception style the entire movie was a delusion in which Arthur's paints himself his own twisted kind of hero.


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EzraS
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06 Oct 2019, 9:18 am

A long time ago I got a free admission movie ticket as a gift.
This is the first time since then that I am anxious to use it.
I will wait a little while in hopes of crowds thinning out, but I want to see this soon.
From what little I have seen glancing at moviegoer reviews this is one of those rare really good films.
I have watched the trailers numerous times. Usually I only watch a trailer once. Too often I say "pass" and stop watching a trailer half way through.



Kraichgauer
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07 Oct 2019, 12:51 am

Joker was an exceptional film in my opinion.
The parts where I'm pretty sure were simply delusions were:
When he first thinks he's on Deniro's show, of course.
When he thinks he kills it at the comedy club.
When he thinks he has a relationship with his hot African American neighbor.


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07 Oct 2019, 8:18 pm

I was thinking about the explanation of things like his mental illness stemming from he probably was deluding himself about his childhood. After learning the truth he did not have any more uncontrolled fits of laughter, and I think the whole reason he did what he did in the end was to prove that he was real, after learning so much in his life was fake.


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techstepgenr8tion
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13 Oct 2019, 12:58 am

I had a friend who was back in town call me up to go see it today.

I've heard mixed reviews and it seems like some people hate it and other people love it - my guess on that breakdown is on whether they wanted it to be an action movie or whether they were okay with it being more psychological.

It had some Jodorowsky flavor in the Santa Sangre direction, and from that perspective I can see why people hoping for a traditional action movie hated it - it's not what they would have signed up for. In the Arthur's case it's someone coming from a really broken place trying to make it in the world, getting overwhelmed by outward violence and lies, and a bit like the old story of Oedipus enough bad news about his life, about who society has trained him to be, who his mom was, and what was done to him hits him all at once with enough force that he can't manage his shadow.

In that sense there's a real warning in the movie - ie. that guys (or girls for that matter) who are already stressed to their limits are thrown more punishment and tragic revelation that they can handle are deeply at risk of going dark (compensatory shadow work takes time and knowledge), and they're at risk for going dark for completely understandable reasons. It almost seems like a case of Sam Harris's moral luck idea getting cashed in in that a character who happens to end up as a super-villain starts as an otherwise good person who ends up in truly absurd happenstance and the really scary part of that message - it seems to suggest that it could happen to just about anyone if their lives got absurd enough fast enough to overwhelm their coping mechanisms or programming along the lines of socialization with the law.

The thing that I found exceptionally creepy in the cosmological and religious sense - just how much synchronicity there was in Arthur's life, almost unholy in its degree and quality, and I could almost see that glowing white star that people see in near death experiences elatedly pining over how interesting Joaquin Phoenix's transformation was, very 'lovingly' turning him from person trying to cope to self-accepting killer as a way of solving his otherwise unresolvable problems, and I could see it in his eyes as he saw the city on fire while he was getting carried away in the police car from the show - a bit like this was like Alfred North Whitehead's Solaris-style God indulging itself in hedonistic entertainment, both loving what it destroyed and loving its antihero. It was as playful and flirtatious, with the antihero, as it was grim. The reason that hit me as hard as it did, as someone who works with the esoteric and occult, it hit me as all too accurate.

That said it was interesting to watch both Thinking-Ape and Brittany Pettibone/Sellner's videos, suggesting that this was an attack on single and unwanted men, and really getting a much different takeaway (and I'm starting to wonder if they even saw the movie before commenting). The takeaway, especially with the crowd magnetism to the three subway killings, was that a society gets the antiheroes it deserves and that deep down it knows that it sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.


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30 Nov 2020, 4:48 pm

I saw the film over the weekend and what struck me was how prescient it was. While Black Lives Matter predated 'Joker' their theme of systematic discrimination and abuse was central to the film. Instead of Systematic Racism, it was the mentally ill who is the victim of it. And course the riot scenes and assassination of police.

A lot of the discussion at the time of the release of the movie was fear of incels being motivated to carry out attacks. While the Joker had no sex life he did not spend any time obsessing over it. The fault was not Chad's or Stacy's but the faces of the
bureaucracy he had to deal with.

I thought De Niro was great in this film. A nice comeback after the number of movies beneath his stature as an actor.


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30 Nov 2020, 5:22 pm

The Joker was "inspired" by an earlier Victor Hugo character, "Gwynplaine"...

Image


Source: The Man Who Laughs


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11 Dec 2020, 3:24 pm

I think the media really overblew how controversial the movie actually was. I was expecting a far more controversial movie, than what I got, and it is no more controversial than any other Batman movie, accept some more gore in the violence.

Overall the movie was good I think but it is kind of predictable and you know what's going to happen. But since it's based off a comic book, maybe that's not a weakness?