How ‘Joker’ Stigmatizes Mental Illness — And Why We Should Be Talking About It
In the new film Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips, the character Arthur Fleck becomes the Joker, a villain made popular in comic books and movies and television shows. Yet this film depicts Gotham City and Fleck’s madness in a gritty, realistic light — and that’s part of the problem. Finding its inspiration in earlier films Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy, the cheap psychology behind this latest incarnation of Batman’s nemesis is pure fantasy, though it’s presented as a plausible character study.
In the opening scene, a radio voice-over describing a sanitation workers’ strike, says that “it’s affecting virtually everyone in the city, regardless of who they are or where they live.” As a metaphor for mental illness, the statistics here are accurate, but the stigma presented is not. It’s true that virtually all of us have been impacted by emotional issues in either ourselves or others, whether it’s depression, anxiety, bi-polar illness or schizophrenia. An estimated 57.7 million adults in the U.S. experience mental illness in a given year (NAMI, https://namica.org/resources/mental-illness/mental-illness-facts-numbers/ )
Perhaps we should take offense at the implied suggestion that the social problem of mental illness is comparable to a trash strike complete with disease-ridden rats. As the trash piles up in Gotham City, Fleck’s madness worsens. Through a series of mishaps heaped upon his already brittle mental state, Fleck snaps and becomes the iconic villain. The thesis of the film seems to be that due to a variety of causes, including a decline in civility, economic crises, and budget cuts to mental health services, as well as a somewhat Freudian subplot that I won’t go into because it’s spoiler territory, Fleck becomes a monster.
There are some valid points here: the mentally ill are indeed often bullied, as is Fleck. Social services for mental health prevention and treatment are indeed critical, and these are lacking in the world of Joker, as they often are in real life. Losing access to medication, as Fleck does, could have serious consequences. And easy access to guns is part of the problem in the film and in life. Yet the way it’s all presented, is dubious, to say the least. The representations of psychiatric environments are poor, including inept therapists, and clichéd hospital settings, used only to prop up the sensationalistic comic book origin story.
I’m reminded of one of the great films about mental illness, and its stark contrast to Joker. A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ron Howard, is a biopic which presents a man’s victory over mental illness — a recovery made possible precisely because the world he inhabits is not presented as meaningless. Indeed, real life is not meaningless. And for that reason alone, a character like Joker has no place in a realistic film.
In addition to its value as entertainment, People are saying that Joker has them thinking — about mental health, about civility, about things that take place in the real, non-comic book world. As flawed as the film is, hopefully it will open a long overdue dialogue that can lead to more realistic understandings about mental illness, and maybe even better support for the mentally ill, in our world, where fewer than a third of adults receive adequate treatment for a diagnosed mental condition. (NAMI, ibid.) That would truly be something to smile about.
