Quickly that is, until we see the distraught and frightened look on Sophie’s face upon finding Arthur in her apartment. For such a limited timeline, we might wonder how their relationship escalated so quickly. We see them at the comedy club and a diner and at the hospital after his mother suffers a stroke. We see him barge into her apartment in the middle of the night and kiss her. We see them smile at one another and gesticulate shooting themselves with an imaginary gun. Both of these unreliable narrators are reflected in “Joker”and are relevant to Arthur’s active imagination.įor instance, take his falsely envisioned relationship with neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz), who he first meets on the apartment elevator accompanied by her son. The Clown is unreliable because he toys with the audience and twists the story into something colorful and less serious, while the Madman cannot be trusted because his senses are erratic and reckless. In the novel, Riggan discusses the types of unreliable narrators within fiction, particularly the Clown and the Madman. The character of Arthur Fleck likely takes after the concept of the unreliable narrator chronicled in the William Riggan’s novel “Picaros, Madmen, Naifs and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator,” a novel coincidentally published in 1981 - the same year that “Joker ” takes place. He struggles to dissociate facts from fiction. But what makes “The Joker” so intriguing to the viewer is Arthur’s mental illness that plagues him with severe delusion, especially when his seven medications are cut off. “Joker” is, at its core, a two-hour character study about Arthur Fleck (exquisitely portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix) - a troubled, working class man who transforms from aspiring comedian into the green-haired Clown Prince of Crime. Some of us began clapping, others mouthed a singular “what’” in verbal perplexion.Īs I ambled out of the theater, I pondered over the film. It was as if we were confused about what we just witnessed. For a moment, it seemed like the audience was silent. I’m tucked in the back of theater, wrapped in a fleece jacket, my eyes glued to the screen as Arthur Fleck chases a man down the pristine white halls of Arkham Hospital, leaving a bloody trail of footprints along the immaculate floor.
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