Arthur Fleck, Teen Idol: Joker on Tik Tok
Masterpiece? Muddle? Incitement to violence?
While adults have been debating their polarized reactions to Joker, teenagers have been busy cementing its status on Tik Tok, where Arthur Fleck has suddenly become the definition of manhood. As someone whose life was touched by a young man’s gun violence, I find that troubling.
For those who have not spent two hours in the dark watching the universe pile misfortune onto Arthur, Joker-in-the-making, the story (SPOILERS AHEAD) goes like this: Batman’s future nemesis is a socially-awkward guy who gets beaten up by other men of all races, loses his job, loses his health insurance, can’t find love, fails at stand-up comedy, is lied to by his mentally-ill mother, and (most brutal of all by the film’s calculation) is mocked by his favorite television personality. The movie spends a solid 80% of its time saying, “oh the poor guy,” building reservoirs of sympathy for him before he starts killing off the rest of the cast.
Along the way, Joker casts a beautiful spell, gorgeous in composition and rich with committed performances. (Joaquin Phoenix may nab an Oscar nomination for his deployment of ribs alone.) The result is a deep dive into an aesthetic, as if the creators’ single purpose was to make the moodiest possible comic book movie, the un-Marvel. (They succeeded.) So why care if it means anything?
The film’s producer, Michael Uslan, claimed Joker was meant “to hold a mirror up to society.” He notes, “I believe movies can shake people up and bring issues to attention, whether it’s about guns or the need to treat mental illness or the need for civility and for us to start talking with each other instead of at each other again.” It’s an interesting proposal, since he identifies three solutions — mental health care, civility, and conversation — all of which get people killed by Arthur. If that’s a mirror, its reflection tells us that homicide is inescapable; only guns succeed.
Seemingly, these guns make possible the liberation of the man pulling the trigger, as we see when Arthur dances. The scene currently lighting up teen social media takes place in a public bathroom. Arthur has just killed three bros who attacked him first, not just shooting them, but chasing them down and emptying his gun into the back of one he’s already wounded. Arthur races from the scene into a grimy bathroom, in what at first seems like horror and shock at his triple homicide. Instead, he finds his equipoise. He traces an elegant arc with one foot, beginning a dance as graceful as anything you might see in a Fred Astaire film. It is meant to be both chilling and intoxicating — you can’t take your eyes off him.
From here on out, Arthur is a wronged, mentally-ill man who gets increasingly more comfortable with killing, now targeting people he knows: a fellow employee, a social worker, a family member, and so on. Director Todd Phillips doesn’t hide the violence or make it pretty, so you can’t claim he’s glorifying it exactly; however, because he’s taken such care to show how put-upon Arthur is and how freeing it feels for to shoot a tormentor, the movie suggests that all this killing is not only understandable, but maybe even fair. The quick bursts of graphic violence fly by, while the dance scenes, including the stunning and now-famous stairway descent, are extended. The effect transforms Arthur into an iconic figure, David Bowie meets Michael Jackson meets Taxi Driver.
This has spawned one of the hottest trends on Tik Tok: young men re-enacting the bathroom scene as evidence of manhood versus boyhood. You might say hooray — it’s a new day when dance is definitive of masculinity in American culture. But hold up: it’s the dance of a madman who discovers the joy of killing when life treats him badly. I’m sure most boys aren’t making the link that way; they’re just seeing what all their friends are doing on the app.
But the framing of the meme as “what boys do” versus “what men do” makes a clear value judgement: this unrepentant killer is a man.
Real men are cool enough to dance, to make their own moves, and, by the way, when they’re unhappy, they get to shoot up the room. “Take that, Anyone-who-hurts-me! I’m going to make you pay and then dance, because I’m that cool. I’m a man, not a boy.”
Is this overthinking things? Yes and no. Movies are not responsible for how all viewers interpret them and, at root, have no responsibility beyond entertainment. Comic book movies are typically held to no standard other than thrill. But this film is not set in Asgard and neither humans nor hammers can fly. The movie consciously sets itself in a world reflecting ours. I just hate the idea of boys looking at the face in this mirror — Arthur’s, which occupies a nearly every frame — and seeing themselves.
We already, in too many ways, tell young men (especially white ones) that the world owes them things (a promise rarely made to young women) and when they open fire because this promise has gone unfulfilled, the media always, always tells their backstory. The bad parents, the bad break up, the lost job — we’re routinely provided whatever narrative allows us to say the most violent killers are just ordinary guys who have been pushed too far. As Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse wrote, we’ve created a construct in which “the pain and resentment and anger of young men is so grand and vast and special that they can and will make others pay for it.”
I once spent a terrible night covered in the blood of such a young man. Recently troubled, and told by his dad for years that guns solve our problems, the 20-year-old went on a shooting spree before the police cornered him. By all accounts, he had been a nice guy in most facets of his life, and it eventually became clear that the burdens he carried were real. But his victims didn’t remotely deserve to die as a release for his feelings. And in the aftermath of his killings, nobody raised him up on a pedestal as a role model — not of manhood, not of anything.
Yet that’s essentially what Joker does, whether or not the filmmakers like it. The film ends with him starting a movement, one which has now come to life beyond Tik Tok, in protests around the world, where even people who haven’t seen the movie are saying, “This is us. This is the face of unhappiness.”
Closer to home, it’s unsettling to see my teen daughter’s friends playing at manhood by becoming Arthur Fleck, even if only for thirty seconds at a time on Tik Tok. When this particular fad passes, that image will occupy a tiny piece of real estate in their brains. They’ll always have access to the Joker playbook for being a man: When you’re hurt, lash out. When you lash out, dance it off. Make yourself the star of the show — the whole world is watching.
