Trapped with a Joker

The figure of a clown trapped in its body has been flickering through popular imagination since Chaplin swallowed a whistle in the historic scene from City Lights (1931). Not being able to control your own body, that is acting against your wish, is perhaps the most unsettling feeling that humans need to go through. Perhaps, it is not just the body that is acting out in those instances, but something that stands in between the person and the body that takes over. If you haven’t guessed it yet, then this is in response to Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019).

In one of the opening sequences, Arthur Fleck finds himself in the middle of a hysterical bout of laughter after a woman shouts at him for making clown faces for her son. There is nothing funny about that laughter from the very start, the masterful Joaquin phoenix ensures that. The audience feels trapped in that moving bus along with Arthur, who is trying everything he can to reassure the lady that he is not laughing at her, that he has a condition, that he means no harm. He finally hands her a card explaining his condition, which reveals, not just to the lady, but to the audience as well, the nature of the beast that we are trapped with in the darkness of this cinema hall.

The laughter that traps Arthur in his body at that moment is not an isolated symptom, it is one symptom of his overall inability to deal with the society. And the society is not helping him, but that is only a marginal concern, the society is never helping those who need help the most — it is simply not designed to do that. “The worst part about having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t,” Arthur writes in his diary. This expectation comes towards Arthur from the outside, but it is not originating outside him; in the convoluted childhood story given to Arthur, an analyst would have a playday finding the roots of that expectation. But it is not enough to simply explain why Arthur is the way that he is — we all know that story in one form or the other.

Arthur’s laughter is so unsettling not because of his childhood experiences, as excruciating as we are told his past has been. Arthur’s laugh unsettles us because we have all felt that way, being trapped within ourselves in one way or the other. We wished we had a card that we could just hand over to the other person explaining to them that what…

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