Joker has been criticized as a splatter film likely to encourage copycat gun violence. The movie does—trigger warning— contain some gory scenes, but it is much more complex than an effort to shock or a celebration of violence. Symbolism, social criticism, psychopathology, the human need for affirmation, surrealism and a virtuoso acting performance make a heady mix.

In the superhero universe, the Joker is Batman’s iconic foe. The accounts of their battles are retold in many accounts, in film and in print. This film does include a retelling of eight-yearold Bruce Wayne’s horrified childhood witness of his parents’ murder. However, this story’s protagonist is Arthur Fleck, played by Jaoquin Phoenix in an Oscar worthy performance, and his evolution from a seedy, underpaid entertainment clown into Batman’s bane.

As the film opens Fleck, in a clown outfit, is trying to attract attention to a retail sale by pirouetting with balletic grace, holding a huge wooden sign. It is snatched from him by a street gang. He chases them into an alley to recover the sign and is badly beaten by them, and the sign destroyed, epitomizing Fleck’s status as victim that is the film’s emotional center, and the driving force of his becoming the Joker.

He is a victim in another way. He suffers from involuntary fits of laughter unrelated to any mood appropriate feeling—probably the psychiatric disorder called pseudobulbar affect. Fleck’s aspiration to become famous as a standup comedian is unrealistic, of course, but the remarkable irony of someone unable to control his laughter wanting to make others laugh—a joker—should not be lost. Another cruel irony in the film is Fleck, who wants desperately to be known, must wear a mask in order to make a living and makes an ultimate decision to own the mask, to become Joker.

But while a comedian is a joker, not all jokers are comedians. Jokers are also wild cards that juggle the odds in card games. Like the Tarot card the Fool, like royal jesters, like the Loki of Norse mythology, the joker is a cultural symbol of the urge to upset the order of things, to generate novelty or chaos. Fleck may not succeed in becoming a famous comedian, but he does bring chaos to the streets. His mad career upsets the efforts of mayor candidate, millionaire Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father, who pledges to stamp out crime and disorder on the streets of Gotham.

Gotham is crime ridden, partly because many of its residents are impoverished, as well as disadvantaged. When, after being robbed and beaten, Fleck returns to the entertainment clowns’ locker room at the agency that employs them, one of his colleagues gives him a gun. “There are animals out there. You need to protect yourself,” he says. When Fleck’s gun spills out of his outfit while he is entertaining at a children’s hospital, he loses his job. To make matters worse, the clinic at which Fleck gets his treatment runs into budget problems and he loses his therapist and his access to medication that helps control his symptoms.

Fleck’s thirst for fame is a transmutation of his wish to be recognized, to be seen, in self psychology terms, to have a stabilizing self-object.

What gives the movie its surreal element is a frequent deliberate ambiguity about whether we are sharing one of Fleck’s fantasies of being famous or of being loved, or an objective reality.

Early in the movie we watch Fleck as he talks with the psychotherapist at the free clinic. The therapist is straight-faced, given to repetitive stock questions, clearly un-empathic, if systematic. That session bookends with another session with a different but equally un-empathic psychotherapist as the movie ends. Fleck ragefully confronts her with her inability to see, to really see him. The camera cuts away from the scene and opens on one of Fleck gallivanting down a hallway leaving a track of red footprints. He disappears from view, and we see attendants rushing back and forth in a Keystone Kop pursuit.

It’s ambiguous. You can decide for yourself, but I take it to be a surreal description of the Joker’s leaving this movie to enter Batman’s world.
 

by Alvin G. Burstein

The winner of the 2016 Oscar for best film was Spotlight, an account of the Boston Globe’s 2002 exposé of child abuse by that city’s Catholic clergy and the attendant cover-up. The film is powerful. The power is rooted in its realistic feel and in the psychological phenomena it captures.

The movie meticulously recreates the offices of the Boston Globe, the environment of the Spotlight team, the country’s oldest continuously operating investigative journalism unit. The film begins with the arrival of Marty Baron, a new editor-in-chief for the Globe. In his meeting with his new staff, he directs Spotlight to abandon its current project and begin an investigation of a reported case of child abuse by a parish priest and what appears to be cover-up attempts by the hierarchy. He makes it clear that he is more interested in the systemic issues than the singular case.

The poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, spoke of the importance in literature of the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” Spotlight’s recreation of detail is such that there is no sense of a need to suspend disbelief. We feel like eye-witnesses to the actual events. The danger inherent in a faux documentary is an issue to which I shall return. But the artistic power of this film to sweep the viewer into a sense of being there is remarkable.

We watch the investigators as they pull at the strings of the tangled events, slowly revealing, not just a single case of abuse, but a staggering epidemic of child sexual abuse and clergy whose misdeeds are swept under the carpet, hidden by undisclosed financial settlements and non-disclosure agreements. The sordid manipulations, which include moving errant clergy from place to place and enriching the lawyers involved in “mediating” claims, are traced all the way to the diocese’s archbishop.

As we become privy to the reporters’ encounters with individual victims painfully sharing their scarifying betrayals, we feel the investigators’ mounting frustration at having to continue the painstaking assembly of information. That frustration becomes almost unbearable, when on the verge of being able to break the story, the 9/11 tragedy demands a refocusing of journalistic efforts.

Ultimately the story breaks, revealing, not a Bostonian bad apple or two, but hundreds of errant Catholic priests and over a thousand known abuse victims. The enormity of the crime is emphasized by the listing as the film ends of the cities of the world where, it is now clear, a parallel situation exists.

The emotions portrayed in the film and those stirred up in the viewer testify to the destructive potential of betrayal. A central point in self-psychology is understanding the role of parents as trusted, indeed, idolized figures upon whom the child initially depends. Healthy development involves the gradual de-idealizing of parents while retaining the ability to look up to and admire others whom we strive to emulate. Traumatic betrayals by one’s trustees are excruciating, and especially early in life, can warp and deform subsequent relationships. Thus the special burden of prudence in professions that require trust-clergy, therapists, teachers, physicians, lawyers-and that therefore have the potential to reawaken childhood dependencies and to reopen old scars.

As a faux documentary Spotlight claims, like investigative journalism, to get at the truth. Do documentaries, does investigative journalism have a responsibility to get at the whole truth? Given the compression of events stretching over years into a two-hour film, totality is out of the question. The film reveals but doesn’t explore the ability of basically decent people, a village as a whole, to close their eyes to disquieting truths. It appears that the leader of the Spotlight team had, years earlier while editor of the Metro section, printed but not followed up on a story about several cases of sexual abuse by local priests. It had been sent to the paper by one of the bad guys, a mediation lawyer.

Spotlight is a riveting film, stirring feelings, disturbing assumptions, raising questions.

by Alvin G. Burstein

I have been addicted to oaters ever since Shane and High Noon. Being, in addition, a fan of actor Matt Damon and author Cormac McCarthy, I decided to take a belated look at All The Pretty Horses.

The movie begins with striking scenes of a vanishing West and herds of wild ponies. It takes us quickly to the dilemma of Damon as John Grady Cole, whose grandfather’s money-losing ranch is being sold despite Cole’s life-long wish to continue a cowboy life. He and his pard, Lacey, riding purloined horses, light out for Mexico where they hear there are still huge ranches. En route, they meet up with a young teen-ager who gets them embroiled in legal difficulties when the youngster tries to recover his stolen horse and gun, killing a Mexican officer in the process.

The boy disappears and Lacey and Cole ride off, ultimately finding a large ranchero where Cole and Lacey’s bronco breaking abilities earn them jobs. Cole gets involved with Alejandra, the beautiful daughter of the ranchero’s wealthy patron. The family, outraged by the impropriety and having heard of the earlier difficulties, have the two Americans arrested.

Cole and Lacey find themselves in a Mexican prison reunited with the impulsive teen-ager and in the hands of a sadistic Capitan. Imprisoned, they helplessly look on while the officer has the boy shot. Cole gets badly injured in a knife fight with another prisoner, losing sight of Lacey. After he recovers, Cole learns that he has been bailed out. Alejandra has persuaded her family to do so by promising never to see him again—attesting to her love.

Cole, unable to persuade Alejandra to break her vow and marry him, kidnaps the sadistic officer and uses him as a hostage, enabling Cole to recover the horses that had been taken from him and his two companions. He leaves el Capitan to an uncertain future with a former prisoner, and rides back to Texas to be reunited with Lacey.

Psychologically, the story revolves around three sets of loyalties. The first is the one between the three cowboys. The second is between the two lovers, Cole and Alejandra. The third is between Alejandra and her family, especially her father. Alejandra reinstates the Oedipal link to her father by disowning her sexual tie to Cole. The film contrives closure by Cole’s avenging the death of the teen-ager and rejoining his pard, Lacey. And Cole seems, at the end, satisfied by the bromance.

Maybe all good oaters have that pre-genital quality.

A Review
by Alvin G. Burstein

To say that this film is gripping is an understatement. It confronts us with realities that cry for denial. To what Freud called “the crushingly superior force of nature” the movie adds the human capacity for brutish betrayal and exploitation. And the story unfolds against a backdrop of classic beauty that highlights the gouts of blood and pain it frames.

In a biopic, The Revenant takes us back to the antebellum period, but rather than the plantations of the southeast, we follow a hunting party in the northwest. The protagonist, Hugh Glass, is one of the hunters collecting valuable animal pelts while trying to avoid the danger of engagement with sometimes hostile Indians. Glass, having survived injury in a raid by Indians, is horribly mauled by a grizzly bear. Broken and bleeding, unable to speak, barely breathing, his remains are dragged by his colleagues toward their base. Weather, unforgiving terrain and the dangers of more attacks drive them to abandon his crude litter. To assuage their guilt at abandoning a dying comrade, the group agrees to an eventual supplemental financial reward to a pair who are to stay behind with Glass, at least until his death. The group leaves, but all too soon his guardians follow suit, leaving Glass, still clinging to life in a shallow grave, but bereft of the means of survival.

Abandoned, Glass manages to pull himself out of his grave—a revenant—and maimed and crippled, manages to claw his way back to what might be called civilization. The film describes that harrowing trek, often a crawl, of over a hundred miles through an unforgiving wilderness. Few of the details are left to the imagination.

The psychological question posed is that of the motivation fueling Glass’s incredible achievement. Accounts that precede this biopic, and the film itself, suggest that Glass’s burning rage and thirst for revenge on his betrayers powered him. The film elaborates on that speculation by adding two elements to what is, in fact, known about Glass.

First, the film adds a half-Indian son—one Hugh is not known to have had—to the hunting party. The ignominy of Glass’s betrayers is magnified by their killing of the boy as a prelude to their flight. The elaboration may simply reflect a directorial effort to heighten the potential for rage.

But there is more. The film is studded with hallucinated flash backs to Hugh’s married life to a Pawnee woman, the mother of their slain child, though there are no contemporary accounts of such a marriage. One of the flash backs shows her being killed in a military raid on her village, and Glass, to comfort their son, reassuring him that he will never leave him. When Glass crawls out of his grave and discovers his clearly murdered son, this should serve to bring his thirst for revenge to white heat.

However, marring the narrative thrust of the film, in the biopic as in fact, after the gut-wrenching effort to track down his betrayers, Glass fails to revenge himself. He forgives one of the pair that abandoned him and leaves revenge on the second “to God.”

Perhaps to provide adequate closure, the film ends with another revenant, a hallucinated ghost of Glass’s wife beckons him to follow her.

I think the hokeyness of this ending reflects the movie maker’s feeling troubled by questions about Glass’s motivation.

In reflecting on just those questions, I was reminded of Primo Levi’s, Survival In Auschwitz. In concentration camps, too, survivors were faced with “crushingly superior” forces that only very few were able to survive. Levi described the musselmann, who slumped into helplessly apathetic surrender, and survivors, who held on to agency, who managed to invoke control over some corner of their otherwise hopeless situation. A minor callisthenic, a mental ritual, anything to demonstrate their will, their control of self, their human selfhood, potentiated survival against overwhelming odds.

Psychoanalysis has paid scant attention to this aspect of what might be called positive psychology. Maybe modern amenities cushion us sufficiently to predispose us to that omission. Maybe Hugh Glass reminds us of agency’s importance.