SPOILER ALERT: Joker won the Oscar: BEST PICTURE.
SPOILER ALERT: Todd Phillips won the Oscar: DIRECTING.
SPOILER ALERT: Joaquin Phoenix won the Oscar: ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE.
SPOILER ALERT: Joker won the Oscar: CINEMATOGRAPHY.
SPOILER ALERT…
Joker (2019)
Todd Phillips
Since Ancient Greece (or even before I guess) prequels showed up because of “public” demand. People wanted to know more about their heroes to understand how they became who they are. Literature is riddled with cycles: the Cid’s cycle, the Trojan’s cycle, the Roland’s cycle, the Arthurian cycle… and the entire Greek mythology could be comprehended as a prequel itself. So, let’s accept it: prequels are not something new; they are nothing more than a long flashback that justifies narrative presents.
Nowadays, film industry (re)discovered the “market niche” in which Star Wars stands up as the paradigm, with six (or seven?) movies that bring past events to the “enunciative present”. The Lord of the Rings came back with The Hobbit, but we could blame the Tolkien’s prolific writing for it. X-men: First Class, Monsters University, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Finding Dory, It, just to mention some contemporaneous blockbusters.
Art motivation? Narrative motivation? Poetic motivation? Credit motivation? Business motivation? Maybe all of them and none at the same time. Who knows. But there is something certain: since humanity began (whenever that happened) humans aimed to know the origin of everything: life, universe, existence, nature, language, religions, personality, traumas, diseases. The origin of goodness and meanness. Love and hate.
Joker is a supervillain of a comic book from the 40’s that was meant to die in his debut. But he survived: heroes (the good ones, of course) don’t kill. Later, in 1966, Joker became, for the first time, a character of a movie (supporting role). In 1989, Jack Nicholson portrayed one of the most remembered characters in the Batman version film by Tim Burton (oh! good old days when Tim Burton was a great director!). Joker is just an acceptable mainstream movie with an excellent actor leading role. Publicity makes it seem as a real piece of art. Oscar’s predictions work in the same way (self-awarding is so reassuring!). Hollywood knows how to advertise its products, even almost convinced me. But, one more time (I am sorry Barthes), we corroborate that author’s signature matters: the same director of Hangover (Hangover Part II and Hangover Part III) couldn’t escape from average (sorry Todd). Let’s face it, Hollywood: if we talk about “darkness” or “sordidness”, we have Lars von Trier and Danish movies.
In the middle of chaos (Barcelona seems today as Gotham City), Z. said: “Describe Joker in three words”. The first thing I though was: “what-the-fuck”. The second: “fucking-goofy-prankster”. Rapidly I understood that the root word “fuck” wasn’t working at all. It took me several minutes to find the “three-fucking-words”. Finally, I said: “Redundant. Unsubtle. Predictable”.
Greeks hadn’t got Oscar’s nor Spoilers Alerts. Lucky them.