Pre-Raphaelite Joker

In Charles Dickens' blistering 1850 criticism of Christ in the House of His Parents, the above John Everett Millais painting, he describes the painting thusly:

You behold the interior of a carpenter's shop. In the foreground of that carpenter's shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. Two almost naked carpenters, master and journeyman, worthy companions of this agreeable female, are working at their trade; a boy, with some small flavor of humanity in him, is entering with a vessel of water; and nobody is paying any attention to a snuffy old woman who seems to have mistaken that shop for the tobacconist's next door, and to be hopelessly waiting at the counter to be served with half an ounce of her favourite mixture. Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles's.

As expected from a writer of Dickens' immense talent, the criticism is sharp and funny. Which does nothing to diminish the fact that it is plainly and thoroughly wrong. But that goes to show just how shocking the Pre-Raphaelites were in Victorian England.

It's ironic that Dickens embraced such an ideal of art when the most memorable aspects of his own work are the dirtiest, commonest characters. I found myself thinking of Todd Phillips. I haven't seen Joker: Folie a Deux--it hasn't been released yet in Japan and I won't be able to afford to see it when it is. But, while I've made an effort to avoid spoilers, I've read enough about the audience reactions and the film's surprisingly abysmal box office numbers to know Phillips has done one of those infamous "subversions of expectations". I thought back to how the first film was received by critics. A signifying example is YouTuber Jenny Nicholson's review of the film in which a portion of her critique focused on her dissatisfaction with the way some people liked the movie. There was a moral outrage element to criticisms of Joker and Quentin Tarantino correctly identified the film's climax as its most interesting part for how it made the audience vicariously complicit in Arthur's crime. Over time, critics have smoothed their feathers and fashioned a countenance to be hip to Tarantino's insight. But not the film's director, Todd Phillips.

I knew the Joker was not meant to be seen in any way heroic in that first movie. And it doesn't surprise me that Phillips would seek to sabotage what he may see as an excess of sympathy. As interesting as that moment was in the first film, Joker, at the end of the day, really is a Taxi Driver pastiche and never truly approaches the genius of the Scorsese film because Phillips isn't close to Scorsese's genius.

A lot of talk now is about how much autonomy a director should have when making a movie. I would still say a failure with a more unified artistic voice is more interesting than a failure composed of sterile studio formula and market research. It's unfortunate art is obliged to be a business, particularly when so much great art isn't recognised as such until years after it's already lost everyone truckloads of cash. But I don't think Phillips falls into that category.