Class

 Joker (2019)

Whether you find Joker horrifically tone-deaf or frighteningly on-the-nose, there is no denying that it details a sympathetic look at the structural inequalities and the hierarchical manner of American economics today -- a look that culminates in a bleak visage of what might happen if the majority that is the economic base were to take back the structure for themselves. 

Arthur Fleck is a loner, bound to the poverty evident by his mother's apartment and trapped by his own mental illness, which is a primary cause of his inability to connect with others. Despite his best efforts, he always appears to be too far removed from the normal to fit in, and escalating events quickly bring him to the realization that he can never escape his position in life. He may believe he can be a comedian, he may believe he can rise...but failures and setbacks continually seem to suggest otherwise, until he is eventually fired from his job. Crippled by defeat, he snaps when a trio of Wall Street brokers taunt him, and he murders them, sparking a revolution of clown-mask-wearing vigilantes tired of their economic oppression and hellbent on destroying the class of rich, ruling elite. Glenn Kenney, writing for Roger Ebert, did not buy into this idea, but that seems absurd to me, especially in a modern-day America where revolutionary rhetoric is commonplace.

Joker, however, makes an interesting companion piece to Us and Sorry We Missed You in the ways in which it approaches these violent solutions. Sorry We Missed You lays a devastating picture of the groundwork of the issue, while Us commentates on that issue without much judgement on the problems of violence. Oppression, Us seems to suggest, calls for drastic measures, violence included. Joker, for all its dark tones, does the opposite. While it charts an eerily similar path to Us thematically, it diverges at pivotal moments to show us that, although Fleck is a character average people may sympathize with, his actions are not redeemable. 

Joker (Roger Ebert)

Joker (Variety)