Please Don’t Give The Joker an Oscar

graphic by lucinda strol

The 92nd annual Academy Award nominations are out again and, as per usual, they’re slightly problematic. We all remember Todd Phillips, right? The millionaire filmmaker who said he couldn’t make comedy anymore because people are too woke? Well, while he was feeling all down and out about the struggles of being a rich and famous white man, he channeled his whining into the box office shattering supervillain hit, The Joker. And The Academy gave him eleven Oscar nominations for it. We could go on about the self-indulgent wannabe underdog hubris this film expels, but since this is a magazine article and not a novel, we’ll just focus on the glaringly obvious: The Joker’s socially detrimental portrayal of mental illness.

For many critics of The Joker, the depiction of mental illness is one of the movie’s biggest problems. Sure, as an audience we see Arthur Fleck (his name pre-Joker) endure horrifying trauma through evidence or flashbacks dropped throughout the film which could be argued as incitement for his actions. However, on a structural story level, we are led to believe that Arthur, who is already mentally unstable, becomes fully unhinged when his social worker tells him there is no more funding for the treatment plan he needs. Because of this presentation of information, mental illness stands out as the ultimate reason for Arthur to become the sadistic, murderous Joker. There is undoubtedly much to be said about the state of mental health, including mental health institutions in this country, but it is a very dangerous and poorly informed line to cross when mental illness is portrayed as a direct link to violence. In fact, according to a 2017 report by the American Mental Health Counselors Association, only 3 to 5 percent of all violence, gun violence included, is committed by those with a serious mental illness. 

On one level, it is simply insulting to assert that mental illness, trauma-induced or not, will result in violent actions by the afflicted if ignored. On another, more societally complex level, associating this Joker character specifically with gun violence has very slippery implications. We are members of the mass shooting generation. A generation begging for reform on the policies that allow malintending people to enter public spaces with firearms and shoot down civilians. The political rhetoric that meets the pleas for gun control repeatedly scapegoats mental illness as the culprit, not the guns, boosting the stigma against the mentally ill, while also ignoring the need for policy reform. If we as an audience are supposed to watch The Joker and believe the failed social work system led to Arthur’s violent descent, aren’t we then buying into that same rhetoric?

To give this movie the industry’s most prestigious accolade is to celebrate a poorly-researched and misguided attempt at what could have been a more poignant statement. While there is certainly merit in the film’s performance and production, celebrating Todd Phillips re-write of The Joker narrative epitomizes the white-man-as-underdog climate in pop culture that takes away from the legitimate stories of people struggling as victims of a flawed political system.