I watched joker with my cousin a few weeks after it came out, and he and I both agreed that Deadpool definitely had more gore and violence in its first ten minutes then joker had during the entire film.
I’m not saying that Joker wasn’t violent, but I feel like the violence was rather tame, as the movie focused more on the development, or regression shall I say, of Jokers psyche rather than his actions. I’m fact, I would go so far as to say that Heath Ledger, the man who played joker in the Batman trilogy, was more violent than this one.
Maybe I’m not as sensitive as others, but I believe [unpopular opinion] that joker 2019 wasn’t scary, or gory, and wasn’t that great of a film. Now looking at the article, I feel like it goes against the films narrative if the joker were to have been given hope, as the end of the article suggested. The movie is about a man with a mental illness, navigating through a world that doesn’t care about him and lashing out. If there have been “glimmers of hope” as the article suggests, then we wouldn’t have had a movie, we wouldn’t have a villains backstory. Unless this is the mafia, I don’t think prayer would fit too well in this narrative.
To answer the articles question of “why?”, the author needs to understand that this is not a new phenomenon. People naturally gravitate towards flawed characters because people are inherently flawed beings. When they see Joker, they see someone that is broken, lost, helpless, and they see themselves in that. And when they see him fighting back against a “society that doesn’t care about them”, they feel motivated to fight back-not necessarily through violence-but in their own way. Although the movie doesn’t call for us to empathize, or put ourselves intothe jokers shoes, it definitely wants us to sympathize with him, pity him for all of his hardships, and root for him when he fights back.
I’m not saying that it’s a good movie. i don’t believe that this movie was as ground breaking or as thought provoking as people said it was, and I don’t think the plot twists made any sense. It was, however, a fairly decent villain backstory.