Joker has sure given the world a lot to talk about—and that's actually a good thing. It's what's art is really about, after all: creating a space of conversation to challenge accepted norms and question the status quo itself. But is the film itself propagating bad stereotypes which, discussion or not, would be better off forgotten?
Yes and no. For one, Joker seems to deal head on with mental illness, and raising awareness about that issue is always good. In this sense, Joker gets plenty of things right—but it also gets a couple of things wrong, and that's a serious problem. Especially when it comes to the already problematic stereotypes surrounding mental health in the first place.
So, let's start with the bad, so we can better appreciate the good inJoker's depiction of mental illness. Careful: there are spoilers ahead! You've been warned.
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It promotes the false relationship between mental illness and violence
The main problem with the film is, basically, that it seems to propagate the rather controversial idea that there's a significant link between mental illness and violence.
In the movie, Arthur Fleck is seemingly driven to violent behavior after a series of misfortunes and relentless social abuse. Arthur is constantly marginalized, and lives with chronic depression and a seriously disturbed mother. His childhood was traumatizing, and current events certainly don't help with the situation.
However, at the beginning of the film we see an Arthur who's really trying. He has a job, he has dreams, and he is fighting to achieve them. He goes to therapy and takes medication, and actually just wants to get better: to feel better. He takes his mission to bring laughter to the world at heart, and we even see a pretty endearing moment where he just tries to make a child smile—much to the unfair anger of the child's mother.
So, we can all really sympathize with Arthur at this point. Sure, he's mentally ill, but that's not his fault and no one should hold that against him. But soon, things start to go south. He gets assaulted over and over, he gets mocked, he can't seem to relate to people and no one seems to give a heck about him. His medicine gets taken away, as does his therapy. He's broken, everything he tries to do to fix himself fails, and none of it seems to be his fault.
After a while, we get to understand his frustration, and we don't really blame him when we see that frustration escalate to anger. The movie appears to go out of its way to suggest Joker is not to blame for almost any of his actions, which is clearly a problem. Or, if we're a bit more charitable, at least it seems Joker's crimes are fully explained by his mental illness coupled with society's mistreatment of him. And that's also clearly a problem.
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At the heart of the film there appears to be this message for those who're not careful jumping to conclusions: mentally ill people in particular can be driven to terribly violent behavior if society mistreats them. In other words, there's an interesting link, with explanatory power, between violence and mental illness. But that's controversial at best, and outright false at worst.
There are many studies that suggest this link simply does not exist. As Dr. Ziv Cohen, a criminal psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell University, told Insider:
"Research clearly indicates that individuals with mental illness are no more violent than the population as a whole. In fact, persons with mental illness are more likely to be victims of crimes than to commit them."
So, yeah. Joker is not doing so well on this front. But perhaps the problem is not as serious as it might appear: perhaps the issue lies more in our interpretation of the film than in the film itself.
An unlikely combination of issues
So, the relationship between mental illness and violence is weak, at best. But if a mentally ill person did become violent, unlikely as it is, it would happen in a manner similar to what we see in Joker. In this sense, the film does get plenty of things right. If anything, its sin is not so much a misrepresentation as it is carelessness with its message. Let's, then, examine the Joker character more closely.
What we actually see in the film is not someone who's merely mentally ill. As neurocriminology Adrian Raine, from the University of Pennsylvania, said to Vanity Fair:
“Mentally ill people don’t go around serial-killing people—plotting a homicide or a bank robbery or a burglary. No, they react on impulse emotionally. It’s impulsive and emotion-driven.”
Here's the thing: Joker's aggression, though emotionally driven, is ultimately calculated. He plans it. So, it's not just a reaction, and Joker is not just mentally ill. There's something else going on.
This is in fact something that the film, if we're charitable enough, allows us to infer: there's indeed many more things, other than mental illness, beneath the surface. We get emotional trauma, a terrible childhood, a bad mental health system, and a further component that could be taken as implicit: genetics.
What makes Joker so interesting as a character is that his condition is ultimately a combination of mental issues and personality traits that's highly improbable to occur as such in any given individual. It's an extraordinary combination for an extraordinary villain.
In the film, Arthur is a seemingly schizoid character with hints of psychopathy. That entails a deadly mix of genetics, childhood trauma, untreated mental illness, and social abuse—all of which get together perfectly to produce a disturbingly violent individual who's not only getting revenge on the society that mistreated him, but is doing so without regret or qualms. And that's a feature particular to disturbed characters, rather than to mentally ill people. There's an important difference.
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Lack of empathy
Joker is a thoroughly disturbed character, best described as an individual with psychopathic tendencies. This is well expressed in the film when Joker reveals he feels nothing when killing—and does so with a smile.
That's not a mental health issue. That's what in psychology is known as a personality trait. Psychopathy is not recognized as a disease in theDSM-5, but is rather treated as an antisocial feature of a character's disposition towards others. If anything, it falls under the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, according to Dr. Cohen.
But regardless of its classification, psychopathy is not to be confused with any (other) mental illness out there—not even those from which Joker himself might be simultaneously suffering. You could suffer the most terrible mental illness in the world without ever experiencing an authentic lack of empathy like Joker shows.
So, in fact, an individual such as Joker wouldn't arise out of mental illness alone. He would require a distinct disturbance of character to act the way he does. He's not just any mentally ill person—he's a seriously disturbed individual. And that's a whole different ball game.
It's important to keep that in mind when evaluating the film's portrayal of mental illness. We're not seeing the story of a mistreated man pushed to the edge by society, which alone turns him into a violent outcast. We're not seeing the tale of a regular child with a bad childhood turned evil. We're not seeing something that "could happen to all of us." No. We're seeing the story of a man with serious innate issues made worse by childhood trauma and social abuse. In other words, social abuse and childhood trauma alone do not account for what Joker turns into throughout the film.
A final remark
So, there is a problem with the film: even though it does not necessarily state that mental illness is the cause behind Joker's violence, it does seem to suggest it. If nothing else, the movie could have been a little more clear about this issue and give audiences a better understanding of what's truly going on. In other words, don't let your audience be so easily misled by your film as to reach the wrong conclusion. There a responsibility to an artist's voice to ensure no gratuitous damage comes from it, and adding to the stigma against mentally ill people does them no service.
That said, once we get a slightly more sophisticated picture of the complex dynamism surrounding the character, Joker actually comes across as a pretty good representation of a disturbed character. It's not perfect, but it's perhaps one of the better ones out there.
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