If geek completists want to trace it back to Cesar Romero’s slightly camper, less ghoulish Joker in the original Batman TV series from the 1960s – or the lower-key, Mark Hamill-voiced Joker of the 1992 animated series – Google Play has you covered on both fronts. I wouldn’t wish a repeat viewing of Suicide Squad and Jared Leto’s garish interpretation (available on all major streaming platforms, if you must) on anyone, but sandwiching Phoenix’s bravura turn between the gleefully shrill comic burlesque of Jack Nicholson’s turn in Tim Burton’s Batman ( free on Now TV) and Heath Ledger’s inspired, Oscar-winning human-monster hybrid in The Dark Knight ( Now TV again) gives a helpful sense of the character’s lineage. You could start, of course, with a return to past versions of the character, often in more fantastical versions of Gotham City. If it’s still gnawing away at you, however, perhaps a Joker-adjacent streaming playlist is in order – not least since the film itself is a composite of numerous past iterations and influences. If you’ve resisted its pull until now, it’s worth deciding for yourself.
It’s a film that careers wildly between a compassionate gaze and a dispassionate one, and is more conflicted than the “incel” culture rallying cry that its detractors claim it is. It’s a hard film to regard with particular warmth, but its unravelling of a damaged male psyche that’s at once overstimulated and underprotected, both privileged by default and neglected on the margins, has stayed with me over the months.
I’m a Joker admirer, I admit – and not just for its exquisitely grimy craft and Joaquin Phoenix’s punky, balletic, can’t-look-away performance. So the pop-cultural litigation of a comic-book movie continues – just in time for its streaming release on Monday. Just as the discussion threatened to die down, the film surprised everyone (and infuriated many) by leading the Oscar and Bafta nominations. The better part of the autumn was spent debating the artistry and politics of an unusually polarising, pessimistic blockbuster as it laughed its way to a billion dollars worldwide. Either way, it’s a film that refuses to go away. T o call Joker “the gift that keeps on giving” runs somewhat counter to the general spirit of Todd Phillips’s nihilistic supervillain spectacle: perhaps it’s the thief that keeps taking instead.
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