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Joker : Parallelism between blood and the clown make up

The very first time I saw Joker, in a cinema in 2019, and even though I was just starting (and being terrible at) movie analysis, something caught my attention : the aspect of blood. Especially when you have several close up shots of Joaquin Phoenix’s face splattered with blood. This very bright red, shiny, opaque blood, that looks like make up. But not like a bad sfx team making a bad fake blood, like something intentional. I had been thinking about it, talking about it ever since, and starting this blog, these images haunted me, like asking me to write about them.

So I watched it again, and noticed another interesting thing. There are 5 scenes in the movie where blood is clearly seen : When Arthur kills the harassers in the subway, when he kills Randall, when he kills Murray, when he is dancing on the car and in the last scene in the asylum. And except for the asylum scene, he is wearing his clown makeup (or at least part of it). Blood represents the violence he needs to be heard, just like his clown make up is what he needs to be a political symbol. Without violence and clown makeup, he is just Arthur, a “fleck” among others, unseen, unheard, unsaved. The elites “don’t care about people like [him]”, his stand up career makes him one more dreamer crashing to the ground, his mother desperately sends letters to Thomas Wayne, her ex employer and alleged lover and father of Arthur, that never get answered.

I also noticed another interesting thing about these violence scenes, which is that each of these scenes represents, in some way, a power dynamic inversion that Arthur has to overcome to become the careless, anarchist, chaotic Joker.

As mentioned earlier, the first scene showing blood is when Arthur murders the harassers in the subway. We can notice that the blood on his face is only his own from being beaten up before the murder, as he doesn’t claim this first violence yet. He is panicked and reacts on full defensive mode. This first power dynamic inversion is against the basic everybody, that judges him, makes fun of him and mistreats him because of his disability, he is now giving that violence back, but it’s not a conscious, reflected and premeditated violence yet, he is discovering his power accidentally.

Then, Randall’s murder, where not only does he wears this blood on his face, but it is also obviously splattered on the white wall, imposing itself to our gaze, sometimes leaving the spectator almost nowhere to look that isn’t bloody. Even though  it doesn’t have blood in it, this scene to me is also linked to the murder of his mother, since Artur is overcoming two types of relatives : his own family, and his coworkers/friends. This time, the violence is premeditated as we can see Arthur take the scissors in his pocket before opening the door. But, it still has something impulsive, he frenetically stabs Randall several times before smashing his head repeatedly into the wall, and the spectator is kind of in the same position as Gary : surprised and shocked by this sudden, brutal violence, as Arthur who looked so calm the second before, almost interrupts mid talking to unleash the beast in himself. Randall’s pain screams echoes with Gary’s fear screams, making the scene confused and chaotic before we can only hear Gary scream as the sound of Arthur banging Randall’s head against the wall seems amplified, it’s almost like Gary is not actually there, just like a voice, maybe our voice, in Arthur’s head. After the murder, Arthur just catches back his breath, then start discussing again casually with Gary, as if the situation was completely normal, even joking and kissing Gary’s head before he leaves. He is appropriating the power violence is giving him.

The 3rd scene is Murray’s murder. He first starts provoking him with a sassy attitude, careless and joking about the subway murders he committed, and gets angry as he starts speaking about how no one would have cared if it had been him who got murdered in the subway and criticizing the lack of care of the elites, such as Murray or Thomas Wayne, for the rest of the people, for him, for those that are not rich and influent and asking them for compliance. He is given to finally express in front of an audience all of the helplessness and injustice he have felt his whole life through, and Murray doesn’t care to empathize and just talk to him like an angry parent to a rebellious teenager, “You’re finished ? There’s so much self pity” and not taking him seriously. In the last 20 seconds before Arthur actually shoots Murray, a metallic, rythmed sound can be heard, gradually louder, that evokes me this feeling when one is extremely angry and start feeling their heart pounding, almost hearing the beating of it in your temples and feel warmer, like an impulsion trying to overcome your control. If the system doesn’t listen to him and belittles him when he complains about injustice, then he has to kill the system. Arthur blames Murray for deciding “what’s right or wrong, the same way that you decide what’s funny or not”, and by killing him, he finally overcomes general social and moral codes. After killing him, he is smiling and satisfied, but also shaking, he seems to fully enjoy the adrenaline rush and the chaos provoked by this live murder.

Then, he is arrested. An upbeat music is playing and we can see Arthur nonchalantly looking through the police car windows and smiling at the enraged protesters in the street with the excitement of a child in a candy store, knowing he is the cause of it all. He laughs and it’s hard to say if he’s actually amused, if it come from his disability, or both. A policeman tells him to stop laughing, that the city is in chaos and that it’s his fault, to which he only answers with a delighted smile “I know, isn’t that beautiful ?”. The police car gets in an accident voluntarily caused by a protester, Arthur is hurt and seems unconscious, but protesters found him and help him. When he wakes up, the crowd cheers him. He starts dancing the way we have seen him do for example after the subway harassers murder, maybe this is some kind of coping mechanism, or a ritual to clear your mind, he seems very peaceful. He then draws a smile on his face with his own blood from the car accident injuries : Reinforcing the red smile of his clown make up, he is also presenting himself as a revolted martyr, and now his pain is literally seen and heard, plastered on his face with no possibility to look away.

And then, the ending scene where Artur is walking in the asylum, that confused a lot of people and is the source of several different theories. The one I will be going with is Arthur killing the psychiatrist and escaping the Asylum. Considering the fact that this movie is a prequel to the Joker’s forthcoming adventures with Batman, this ending scene makes a good opening for this. By killing the psychiatrist, he is attacking the idea of mental health, his “madness” is no longer a disability and it becomes a force. He now has the rebellion and the power that he needs to become the Joker, and we can imagine him starting his life of crime once he will escape from Arkham. We should also notice that during the blood smile scene, we see a protester killing Bruce Wayne’s parents, which is the original trauma that led him to become Batman. Since the Joker and Batman are very related characters, the two sides of a coin, the hero and the antihero, two traumatized men with a thirst for justice who seek it in opposite directions. Batman doesn’t exist without the Joker and the Joker doesn’t exist without Batman. Since the reason for Batman’s existence just happened, it makes sense at this moment to let Arthur go and fully become the Joker.

Woaw, that took me a lot of time to come back to and finish. I hope that you liked it anyway, and don’t expect too much regularity from me.

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Next article

I’m working on my next article here, on a movie that made a lot of noise when it was released, I’m talking about 2019 Todd Phillips Joker !

I have watched the movie again, taken notes and have some good things now to complete the first reflection I had on it.

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Famous Vukmir's victim speech : the cristallization of the whole movie

This is what I will be starting with : Vukmir’s victim speech, analyzed under an angle that I had been thinking about after reading an interview of Srdjan Spasojevic, the director of A Serbian Film. The link to this interview is at the bottom, and I will be quoting it regularly. To me, this scene is the central point of this whole movie’s metaphor, the part where you get the keys to interprete the floods of violence you will be witnessing for the rest of the movie.

For those who have never seen or heard about A Serbian Film, here is a quick, non spoiling recap : Miloš is a retired pornstar in post Yougoslavia wars Serbia, who lives with his wife and son, but they are getting shorter and shorter on money. Leija, a former coworker of his, tells him about a man, Vukmir, who wants to work with him and is ready to pay him insane wages, but refuses to tell him about the kind of film they will be shooting, pleading that he wants Miloš to be as authentic as possible. But what Miloš doesn’t know, is that he signed up to play in a snuff movie.

As the speech and more generally the movie are about this idea of victim, we first have to set the power dynamics between the 2 characters, which is an easy guess : Vukmir represents the power figure. He is the one organizing the whole thing, he is the one who knows what is going to happen, and we learn from Miloš’ police officer brother Marko that he worked as a psychologist, worked for the state and state security. He is also the wealthy one, using his money as a tool of submission, and gaining money back from their exploitation. Above him is an elite, that “now is paying to watch that from the comfort of an armchair”, which is closely related to something Spasojevic calls “compassion porn” : watching the pain of others to make you empathize on these victims, while staying in your comfort zone, and make you feel like this is enough, that you are not in the oppressive ones since you cried with them, without feeling the burn of oppression. A sterile, sanitized empathy.

And from this power situation, Vukmir is proposing Miloš power as well, telling him “you’re the only one in this film who is not a victim”. But this filmic power, just like actual power, can only be obtained by crushing and exploiting other people. If Miloš is not the victim, it means he has to become the tormentor. Miloš here represents a man who is given the choice of being exploited, or exploiting others to settle his family.

And this exploitation, is represented by rape. Spasojevic says “The pornographic issue and the sense of pornography in this film is just used like our everyday life”. And just like in pornography, we will see exaggerated situations. The 1h long erections and the 5 per minute orgasm rate leave their place to systemic violences represented by extreme violence. In this world, exploiters don’t alienate you, humiliate you, destroy you, keep you in a vulnerable position and profit off of you by their usual ways. They don’t rape and kill you in the mind, but in the flesh. And this is what this horrendous newborn rape scene means : from the second you are born, you are fucked, you will be exploited, and there is no way you can defend yourself, to the point it will become your norm. 

And Spasojevic, through the words of Vukmir, shows this to the spectator. This exchange between Vukmir and Miloš is pretty significative of it :

Miloš : Just tell me, how does it all connect to pornography ?

Vukmir : No Miloš no no [...] Not pornography, but life itself !

As a movie about the action of filming, and presenting a character directing it through artistic views, it has to be conscious of it’s media, and Spasojevic is here telling us about his film. In this scene, we stand with Miloš : we are confused about all of this violence, and we don’t know where this is going. And Spasojevic is telling us to look over the first appearances, don’t focus on the primary, literal meaning of what you see and look for the metaphor. This movie is not talking about pornography, or snuff, or whatever : it is talking about life itself, and even though the extreme situations described in this movie are rare, the violence it is denouncing is much more common. This movie is not about violated fictional bodies, but about the “flesh and soul of a victim”. And when Vukmir tells Miloš that “you, me, this whole nation is a victim”, and Miloš answers that “We’re just too retarded, and I won’t be a victim because of that”, we have this same pattern of a person blaming individual responsibility, and placing themselves out of it, when spoken about systemic violences. Because we were taught they are normal, they shouldn’t be questioned, and even in the ones suffering from it, you will find some defending it.

This is what the movie is. It is the burning, screaming testimony of a victim. I have noticed similar patterns in a part of what Vukmir says, and something Spasojevic said in the interview.

Vukmir : Your whole life, you’re compelled to prove that you’re able to take care of yourself. To prove that you can shit, eat, fuck, drink, bleed, earn money… Do whatever it takes to survive, until you die.

Spasojevic :  In order to lead a normal life you have to become a prostitute, and sell your soul – and your ass – to the highest bidder in the name of feeding your family, and be viciously exploited by your boss and by rulers of your destiny.

Both of these speeches have this notion of battle, of being on your own doing what you can to just stay alive. This is what Miloš wanted to do : accepting this sketchy job to save his precarious family, even using the phrase “rent my dick” (very close to “sell your ass”) in a conversation with his wife earlier. And just like Miloš being brought back to perform as he tries to escape, you cannot escape this system and you cannot escape exploitation, as it will come to get you back with or without your consent.

And this testimony of a victim is ruled by an idea of authenticity, of sincerity. Spasojevic says his ambition with this movie was to “honestly express our feelings and problems in the most exact and direct way”. And just like Vukmir says, “the victim feels the most and suffers the best”. In all of it’s intensity, raw, cruel, victims scream and Spasojevic screams visually, metaphorically, with an untamed movie that disturbs. Spasojevic speaks about the issues of exploitation, amplified by this chilling, frightening, violent “power of a victim”.

Sources :

Vukmir’s victim speech (serbian w english subtitles) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-irF-HqZHw

Srdjan Spasojevic’s interview : https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/2010-12-10-srdjan-spasojevic-interview-about-a-serbian-film-feature-story-by-anton-bitel

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Introduction

Hey people !

I’ve had the idea of this blog a few months ago, but it took me time to actually do it because my organization sucks

But my envy for long rents about surprising facts and unsuspected messages in movies I like finally took over my chronic laziness, and here I am.

I wouldn’t recommend reading my chronics, and even less watching the movies I’ll be talking about, to underage people. As stated in the description of this blog, these movies will discuss the subject of violence (may it be physical, psychological or sexual). I will try to think about putting specific trigger warnings for each movie, and from that you do you, evaluate your own sensitivity and chose according to it. It’s okay to avoid a movie if you think it would be too much of an unpleasing experience.

I said too much, because these movies will all be unpleasing at some point, and to some extent. Some will make you sad, some will make you angry, some will schock you. I see cinema as art in the first place, and I like cinema that makes you feel, that punches you in the guts and nails you to your seat without touching you. I like cinema as a sensory and emotional experience.

About me, I am a 21years old cinema passionate and aspiring director, even though I have other interests but they all gravitate around art and psychology.

I’m currently preparing a little something about one of the most famous scenes of A Serbian Film. Yes, I know, it’s been talked and talked again and again, but I feel like some very interesting angles of it are rarely discussed.

Anyway, I hope someone will read these, and find some interest in them