Joker.

Initially I wasn’t hyped to watch the Joker cause I thought it was a typical villain movie with no substance but boy was I wrong.

*Warning: spoilers ahead*

The movie narrated the villain Joker as an ordinary human being, Arthur, who had a neurological medical condition called Pseudobulbar Affect. It is also known as PBA, and it’s characterized by uncontrollable laughing and/or crying outbursts. He also suffered from some form of hallucination as well and some critics have even made remarks that the entire movie might have all been a hallucination in Arthur’s mind due to the same scenes at the start and end of the film where he was in the asylum.

Arthur was introduced as a grown adult who has the intellectual ability of a child with pure intentions. However, the society that he was placed in did not do him any justice and instead the made fun or even attacked him for his neurological condition. The draggy portions of the film might have been justified because we truly saw how much society let people like him down by ostracizing him; be it getting attacked on the streets, trying to do stand-up or even rehearsing for his appearance on TV. He was mocked for his every action.

Even the counselling sessions where Arthur interacted with his counselor was quite a impactful scene because we could see how much torment he was in and the counselling was not helping him at all. The counselor was unable to relate to his feelings and simply acknowledged that he needed more pills and medication to make his negative feelings ‘go away’.

When he wrote in his notebook “I hope my death makes more cents than my life”, it supposed to be a joke but also it kind of had a underlying meaning that his life was worthless and he was questioning why he is alive. I felt that. I think what struck me the most was when he wrote:

The worst part about having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t.

Its true. When you have a mental condition, everyone expects you to behave in certain way and pretend you are normal. Sickening ain’t it? People don’t like to hear such negativity, they only care about themselves.

So when Arthur finally snapped and tried to get back at the people who mocked him, he started killing people with no remorse. Well, he did also kill his adoptive mother who abused him when he was a child. Personally I thought those people got what they deserved. Perhaps death was too harsh a lesson but still a lesson well deserved.

Overall, the message was pretty clear – society was not doing enough to nurture people with mental illness.

This message drew a parallel to the society we live in, just like Arthur, we live in a world where we have zero tolerance for the mentally ill or even the minority for that matter. In fact, the latter has evolved to become so good at ‘pretending to be normal’ that they start to believe that they are.

The sad reality is that we didn’t solve the problem, we only made it worse.

What I really liked about the film is how it depicted the brutal truth of how society treats the mentally ill through the eyes of Arthur. Bonus point, Joaquin Phoenix’s acting was really on point. We could relate with his every emotion throughout the film, every turn he makes in his life, we could see how time and time again, the system let him down.

Critics would say its a bad film because being the naysayers, they’d refuse to face the truth. They’d probably think that this film is portraying a terrible message of how the society works and we shouldn’t embrace this kind of negativity but I enjoyed the film simply because they told the story as it is. No sugar coating or bullshit. Perhaps this film serves as a good wake up call for the world to start listening and including these people who needs help instead of marginalizing them or else one day there will be…consequences.