There have been many Jokers in big screen history, and rarely have we needed to glean too much about their background. All we knew of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Napier prior to his transformation into the clown prince of Gotham in 1989’s Batman was that he was a second-rate hood with a weakness for statuesque blondes. Nobody ever asked if Napier’s struggles with depression or psychosis contributed to his descent into cackling, bleachy-skinned madness – we all took it for granted that falling into a vat of acid did the job all by itself.
By the time Heath Ledger’s version shuffled into view in 2008’s The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan had worked out fans wanted a more emotionally complex bad guy, one who teases us in multiple ways about the true horror behind his facial scars. But beyond these minor snippets of backstory, we still know next to nothing about the man behind the mask of makeup, and despite Heath Ledger’s brilliance in the role, it is Bruce Wayne/Batman who remains the key figure for any amateur psychologists.
Perhaps Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance tipped the balance for good, however, for it has been increasingly obvious ever since that the role of the Joker, not the caped crusader, is the really juicy one. Warner Bros signed up Ben Affleck to play the dark knight, but they grabbed Jared Leto to play his nemesis (even if that didn’t work out quite so well as everyone expected). Now Joaquin Phoenix, every discerning cineaste’s favourite glassy-eyed, poker-faced Hollywood star, has stepped into the role in a movie that may not even bother to feature Batman at all.
The first trailer for Joker, which dropped this week, begs many questions. First of all, what exactly is this movie for? Is Phoenix’s version supposed to be the Joker, or just a Joker – or perhaps just Joker-like? In Alan Moore’s 1988 graphic novel one-shot The Killing Joke, from which Todd Phillips’s forthcoming movie clearly takes so much inspiration, we are never quite sure whether the sad sack comedian whose tragic story the comic tells really does end up becoming the Joker we know and love, or whether this is just one possible back story of many.
Something similar seems to be going on in Joker. Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck lives in Gotham City, visits Arkham Asylum and wears clown costumes. He even appears to meet the young Bruce Wayne at one point, through the gates of Wayne Manor. But will he ever battle the adult Batman? For without this most quintessential of superhero-supervillain struggles, is the Joker really the Joker at all?
Warner Bros has made it clear that Phoenix will not be the Joker who appears in its rapidly disintegrating extended universe of DC superhero movies, though it is not yet entirely clear whether Leto’s poorly served version will be back either. Hell, even Batman is likely to have a new face by the time of the studio’s next official visit to Gotham.
Does it really matter if this Joker movie exists only in its own downbeat and left-of-centre continuum? For DC fans it may be enough simply to revel in the potential for a weird-as, uber-arty take on the caped crusader’s greatest nemesis. This could be the superhero movie for people who decided some time back that they do not really like superhero movies, or simply for those who wish that modern-day directors dug more deeply into character and focused less on the whizz-bang-snap of CGI mega-battles.
The suspicion is, however, that somewhere along the line, if Joker ends up diverting so far from the genre that spawned it, it may lose its very reason for existence. In the meantime, it will be fascinating to see if Warner Bros really does serve up this (potentially brilliant) strange-looking movie to audiences in six months’ time. If by the time the final cut is screened, Batman has been added back into the mix and the finale sees the pair battling against the backdrop of a Gotham that has been destroyed by invading aliens (brought there by the Joker!) we’ll know they lost their nerve at the final moment.
