This article contains spoilers about the movie. You have been warned.
By Syeda Sara Imran
Less than two weeks after its release, Todd Phillip’s fresh take on the notorious DC villain is already making big waves. Winning the Golden Lion and getting an eight-minute standing ovation at the 76th Venice International Film Festival, and rated a whopping 9.0 on IMDb, it’s clear that Joker is no joke when it comes to reception. However, with mental health discourse fast gaining traction, and especially with World Mental Health Day having just recently passed, it is an important question to ask: was Joker’s portrayal of mental illness accurate or not?
The film follows Arthur Fleck’s slow descent from a mentally ill social recluse, a self-proclaimed “mentally ill loner”, to a ruthless murderer on a rampage – the poster boy of anarchy.
Admittedly, Joker does an adept job at depicting just how hard it is for people with a mental illness to get help. Arthur is someone who shows up regularly for his appointments. Though he is not very interested in the therapy part of his treatment, he does repeatedly ask his psychiatrist to increase his dosage; he wants to get better. Yet, life still deals him a bad hand, and Gotham’s healthcare funding gets cut anyway – a nod to the fate of healthcare for mental illnesses in our modern world. One of the most poignant scenes in the movie is not in the form of a dialogue, but rather when an introspective Arthur scribbles in his journal: “The worst part about having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t.” My own heart went out to the protagonist in this scene.
And yet, Phillips failed to carry on this level of understanding about mental illness in what was to follow. What Joker does in its depiction of its protagonist spiralling into a well of insanity and escapism, is administer a death blow to a positive public perception of mental illness. This type of error is not without consequences; what is at stake is the stigmatisation of people who have to live and suffer with mental illness. Narratives like Joker lead audiences to think of persons who are mentally ill as ticking time-bombs which will blow up if ignored and/or vilified for long enough. This is the trope all Hollywood films looking to exploit mental illness for a quick buck put forward, and this is what Joker makes full use of.
Extensive research shows that there is no evidence people with mental illness are more prone to commit acts of violence than anyone else. Studies demonstrate that “even if the elevated risk of violence in people with mental illness is reduced to the average risk in those without mental illness, an estimated 96% of the violence that currently occurs in the general population would continue to occur.”
In fact, people with mental health disorders are far more likely to be victims of violence (up to 10 times more likely than the general population) than the perpetrators. “Indeed, the vast majority of those with mental disorders are not violent…” states Carla Marie Manly, PhD, a clinical psychologist in California.
Dr Manly points to the reality of the matter, that is, the majority of mental illness revolves around depression: quiet, simmering. But of course Hollywood wouldn’t make millions writing a quietly suffering character who – surprise, surprise – remains quietly suffering till the end of the film. Thus, we fall into this pit of romanticising and fetishizing mental illness and those who suffer from it.
Let us not forget we live in the same world where an assassination attempt was made on a presidential candidate after the accused was inspired by the political assassination in Taxi Driver (a film Joker itself heavily borrows from), which he watched fifteen times, having become obsessed with the protagonist. Let us not forget that “incel” culture is on the rise, and narratives like these only add fuel to the fire.
Let us hope for more responsible filmmaking in the future, with the intent to unify rather than vilify.