Congratulations.
Joker Origin Story Announced
- Thread starter Starbreaker
- Start date
This is the internet. It's the place where you're never alone.
And everybody now:
Sometimes you wanna go
Where everybody knows you na-ame,
And they're always glad you ca-ame.
You wanna be
Where you can see
Our troubles are all the sa-ame,
You wanna be where everybody knows your name.
Nice!
It takes bad writing. The internet may not get a vote, but they do know when something is out of character. They can have a 5 year old child kick Superman's ass too, but that just means they aren't really writing Superman as conceived by the people that actually made him.
Back on topic, it's the same kind of idea. If some want to blindly accept that The Joker is a 75 year old chain smoker who can magically hatch his schemes without coughing up a lung, that's on them. But most of us are not mindless drones that blindly accept a misinterpretation of a classic character.
Here, if one looks at it with any logic, it makes absolutely no sense that Arthur is the actual Joker that became Batman's nemesis. Too old, not smart enough.
A story that you don't like is not automatically a bad story.
A story that upsets your expectations is not a bad story.
A story that breaks with previous continuity is not necessarily a bad story.
Supergirl beating Superman is not bad storytelling. It's a creative choice that you don't like.
The storytelling on the CW shows is often clumsy, arbitrary and superficial, IMO,* which is why I don't follow any of them on a weekly basis nowadays. None of that has anything to do with whether Flash is faster than Superman or Supergirl is more powerful in a given circumstance than Superman.
Berlanti's approach to this stuff is generating a successful programming slate for the CW.** Clearly it works.
*IOW, true to the source material.
**As evidenced by the fact that they keep giving him work.
It doesn't make any sense that the Joker is free to commit crimes over and over, constantly escaping from a high security facility. After the first or second crime, they would've thrown him in a hole so deep he would've never found his way out. It also doesn't make sense that someone so undisciplined would be able to offer any kind of challenge to Batman, physical or mental.
Yet here we are, what seventy or eighty years later, still telling and reading and watching these stories that really don't make any sense. Joker is a take on the mythos, no more right or wrong than any other.
Honestly, with the range of his criminal activity over the decades it's beyond unlikely that he's never committed a serious federal crime and wound up someplace like the ADX. But...comic book law and order, right?
Joker is way too realistic. Batman isn't supposed to be realistic, so it's bad that Joker is so realistic. Also, the character in the movie is way too old and unhealthy to be Batman's nemesis, that's totally unrealistic.
You're desperate to go off topic but while your first three sentences are subjective, Supergirl beating Superman is not. That fight was the result of a weak writers with no confidence in their character needing to make Superman look weak to make Supergirl look strong, and it didn't work. It was just PC garbage that was out of character. The guy who beat Doomsday is not going to lose to Supergirl. Sorry. Any writer can make that happen but it is still quite out of character whether you accept it or not.
This is the same argument Trek apologists made when Brannon Braga and Rick Berman were ruining Star Trek. "It's on the air, so they must be doing something right." But the ratings then, like now, declined rapidly every year. You can't spin Batwoman into a hit. You can't spin the ratings decline of Supergirl into a success. These are hard numbers.
Flash being faster than Superman isn't a big deal. Flash beating Superman in a fight would be. If the writers were secure, they would understand it, and writing a classic character out of character does not improve the character you are writing.
Back to the actual topic, it's not political correctness that makes Arthur someone who cannot be The Joker, it's that anyone that actually has heard of the Joker can see that this character only shares a look and insanity with the Joker.
The Joker is younger, healthier, and MUCH smarter than Arthur.
I give you the first paragraph in that it is unrealistic that he can escape so often. However, my counter to that is that it's a comic book story, not a real one, something that this movie kind of avoids, but no movie about this character should. Also, the Joker is insane, but he absolutely is a genius, which is why he does challenge Batman.
What fails here, is that he is too old and too dumb to be a threat. Not to mention that whole murderer thing would never make him a hero once the true facts came out.
His actions on the subway are not the same as the rest of his actions. That was self defense, at least until he chased the guy out of the subway.
There is nothing wrong with a new, more realistic take, of mythological stories.
That's a fair opinion, however, that's also a different genre. Reality is outside. Comic book characters don't belong in the real world. Arthur could never be a contemporary to Batman.
Batman is probably the most grounded in his origins, fighting crime syndicates and being "the world's greatest detective." Several writers explored more of the detective and mob fighting of Batman character, rather than a full on superhero like Superman or Aquaman with more fantastical abilities.
Similarly, the Joker's reimagining in the 70s involved him being "legally insane" as well as a more "likable" that the readers could identify with, while balancing his criminal nature.
There is not one right way to tell the Joker story, and, honestly, this film is closer to that 70s imagining than most would give it credit for. It is attempting to tell a story about a character, rather than just an avatar of evil pitted against Batman's good.
The point is that Batman is mythology. Mythology often is grounded in reality in some way (identifiable characters, locations, challenges) in order to introduce the more fantastical.
The fact that this Joker is not what was expected is neither problematic nor new to this franchise.
Cesar Romero’s vase-stealing rascal was the Joker. Jack Nicholson’s psychotic gangster was the Joker. Mark Hamill’s cackling clown prince of crime was The Joker. Heath Ledger’s anarchic maniac was The Joker. Jared Leto’s misogynistic criminal was The Joker. And Arthur was ultimately The Joker. They may not have been your or my idea of the character but he’s a made-up and ever-evolving character and each take was perfectly legitimate.
Sums it up nicely, thank you.
Fair, but think about this logically. Who is the Joker and what is his purpose?
The answer to that question is that he is an insane menace, but also someone that will be Batman's greatest enemy. In many ways, he is the other side of the coin for Batman. But intellectually, the Joker is a genius. He has to be to invent all the things he invents. He may not be quite as smart or quite as physical as Batman, but he is a peer. Insanity and genius with a lot of evil mixed in.
There are many ways to tell the story, but there are wrong ways as well.
I think there is some merit up until Arthur. I didn't like Ledger or Leto either. I didn't feel either of them brought The Joker to life as I envision him, but in both cases, they are at least the right age and temperament to be Batman's enemy. Arthur is too old and not smart enough and those are big factors.
They can't butcher the character and still make him the character. That's been done too often and not just here.
The difference here is that Arthur can't possibly fill the Joker's shoes. He certainly is insane, but that's it. He is not someone who can be an intellectual peer to Batman, and he is a few decades too old to be still active when Bruce hits his prime.
This is more than just not being what is expected. It is simply beyond the scope of reality that this man could evolve into Batman's greatest enemy.
BUT if they did a sequel, and establish that Arthur is more the inspiration for the Joker, THEN you have something.
I do have some sympathy with the points you’re making. For me, the least successful parts of the film were those which tied in with the Batman mythos; the age gap also occurred to me. But ultimately, I still think that if the Joker can have a moustache, can be middle-aged and paunchy, can have scars, dyed hair and painted face, can be buff & have tattoos and metal teeth, then he can also be like Arthur.
The Joker was not always that, and therefore, there is no wrong way to tell his story. Comics are a constantly evolving story and recreation, so calling it "wrong" when, as noted, there were times were Joker wasn't even written as a antagonist to Batman, but more sympathetically, it shows that he doesn't always have to be "Batman's greatest enemy."
Middle aged, maybe. A senior citizen? No. Though the Leto version was pretty bad too, but for other reasons. And even without the age issue, and that's HUGE (especially given he's a chain smoker and likely will have lung cancer before Bruce even puts on the cowl), intellectually, he's no match for Bruce on any level.